Mobile technology in ultimate

My housemate has an iPhone and he won't bloody shutup about it. I can usually shut him up by sending him an MMS from the pub with the text "hey check out this hot chick i'm talking to that has a fetish for short guys." But there's no denying that the iPhone is a handy little contraption (I am pretty jealous of the iDaft app), as is my Nokia N95 - cracked screen and all - now that I've bothered learning how to fully use the mobile side of Twitter. Couple all this with the link I read about a UPA Rules iPhone app (link is now dead so won't bother posting it) and it got me thinking about how we can use mobile devices for ultimate.


Stats tracking
At the juniors vs allstars game at last year's EUGs I spent some time on the sideline with Timill who had a PDA with a stats application. This little bad boy kept track of everything - passes, completions, points played, whatever you can think of. Only troubles were keeping up with the play (it's a two person job - one calling, one entering) and the poor light making the thing difficult to read. I don't imagine it being too difficult to make an iPhone application to keep track of simple stats (goals, assists, blocks, turnovers).


SMS scoretracking
2008 Worlds had a great system where the volunteers on the sidelines SMS each score and the website would update with a timestamp, the thrower and the receiver. All well and good, but requires a lot of people to make it happen effectively so not much good for local weekend tourneys. Andrew Olennick's system in Australia is a great little setup, where the captains SMS the scores of the game to a number, and the website updates. It also sends out each team's draw every morning and whenever pools get redone. We tried to use it at AUG last year but it was very last minute and some people struggled to get the hang of it. The interface could be a little more user friendly but I suppose if we set it up earlier it would have been much more effective.


Mobile videos
I have messed about with some video conversion software and managed to find a way to download Youtube videos and store them as video clips on my mobile. I had a couple of highlight clips for when I'd be talking to people about ultimate, and instead of yapping on about hucks, force, picks and skies, I'd simply show them a video. My favourite one is the trailer for Ultivillage's Disc 4: Year Of The Monkey. I struggled to find a really good video for women's and for mixed, so if anyone out there knows of some great clips from these divisions I'll certainly add them to my collection.


Twittering
I love Twitter. Actually scrap that. I like Twitter as a friend. It's a fun little tool that I have found no real use for apart from following sites that link to funny stuff on the internet. For those who are not sure what Twitter is, it's basically Facebook with only the status updates. I twittered updates from Nationals this year and 'covered' the finals on the last day. This got followed by a few folk on the eastern seaboard so it got me thinking about how we could further use it.

My thinking right now is to round a few folk up from various unis and teach them how to set up a Twitter account with mobile support. Essentially that means they SMS a certain number and it posts an update to Twitter. If you add a 'hashtag' it makes it easier to search for a certain term. So if everyone who is posting an update from Southern Uni Games or Eastern Uni Games adds the term #unigamesulty to their post, people from home can just run a search for #unigamesulty and shebangabang - everyone's posts will come up in a sort of newsfeed.

The posts can be anything, really - score updates, great plays, funny stories, party rumours - as long as they are contained to 140 characters (just shy of a normal SMS) and it will provide some great coverage for the folks at home. If we replicate this for Australian Uni Games as well, it would be fantastic for not only people at home, but people there as well. The more Twitter-savvy can set up a permanent search term on their phone so they get the tagged posts as they happen to keep up with results in other pools. And while I'm getting nerdily excited about it, there's even a capability of adding photos to the said newsfeed via Twitpic.


Anyone have any other uses for mobile technology?