Tech sector set to score at World Cup
19-05-2006
by Maxim Kelly

Even without Ireland in the World Cup, Irish mobile operators will relish the tournament.

Ireland will be represented in Germany this summer. But before you close the office, re-ink the tattoos, and break out the green sombreros, note that we will be competing in the 2006 RoboCup soccer competition, which runs parallel to the Fifa World Cup.

But leaving aside footie-playing mechanoids for the moment, the upcoming Fifa World Cup is expected to surpass the technological wizardry of the Winter Olympics in Turin earlier this year, and represent a bumper pay day for all manner of consumer-oriented companies in the technology sector.

The combined revenues the telecommunications, hardware, consumer electronics and broadcast companies expect to make from Germany 2006 will be of stratospheric proportions. Visiongain Intelligence expects the tournament to generate USD6.35 billion for mobile operators alone.

This study suggests that text-based services and downloads such as ringtones and football logos will make serious money, followed by World Cup gambling and gaming. The mobile industry will also look to generate World Cup-related revenue through video messaging and clip downloads, but Visiongain analyst Adam Walkden sounded a note of caution.

"Operators aiming to utilise the tournament's popularity to push 3G at the expense of more traditional services will miss out," he said. "The key revenue generators will be tried-and-tested text services." Walkden added that strategies chosen by mobile operators will depend on whether their core markets are represented in Germany. "However, Visiongain believes that there are still significantly higher than normal revenues to be generated in many nations that have not qualified," he noted.

Although (sadly) the Republic of Ireland soccer team will not be lining out on the no doubt precisely mown pitches of German stadia next month, Irish mobile firms will surely have their eye on the ball.

For example, mobile phone operator Three Ireland has licensed non-exclusive mobile broadcast rights for all 64 matches of the Fifa competition, to be broadcast free to customers. The package includes three mobile TV channels showing extended match highlights, "Today's best of...", and a daily magazine show. Highlights will be available five minutes after the final whistle, and Three promises near-instant text commentary and in-match stats.

O2 will have a World Cup site on its i-mode mobile internet service with news, score alerts and a World Cup game. The company will also offer a new non-soccer i-mode site for "World Cup widows", offering tips on surviving the summer.

In the bowels of the Meteor building, boffins are working on Germany 2006 ringtones, games and wallpapers, while a Vodafone Ireland spokeswoman said the firm has no major plans yet, but would be concentrating on the GAA championships instead.

It's not just legitimate businesses that are aiming to cash in on the World Cup, however. In September, fraudsters launched a phishing campaign to obtain football fans' bank details through an online bogus ticket lottery for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Football fever also captured the imagination of virus writers recently when a version of the deadly Sober-P e-mail worm ensnared fans by posing as a password confirmation communication from a World Cup website.

Perhaps the most contentious application of technology so far has been the insertion of tiny antennae into tickets to combat touts. These Philips RFID (radio frequency identification) devices broadcast a numerical identifier of the purchaser. Privacy advocates in Germany are railing against the creation of an electronic database of personal information about fans. Fifa rules state that legally purchased tickets are only transferable between family members of the buyer, or can be exchanged between individuals in genuine cases of hardship such as due to natural catastrophes or acts of war.

However, disappointed Irish fans praying for Armageddon in order to flog their tickets may also turn to a technological solution reliant on good old free trade from the US of A. The American eBay website is probably the only major auction site permitting touts to sell tickets. Britain outlawed scalped tickets for the event, and a German lawsuit to allow ticket reselling was upheld, although it remains unclear whether it applied to that single case or all tickets within the host nation.

Fifa officials insist every fan entering a stadium will have to swipe their chipped ticket on a reader and show corresponding ID. However, illicit ticket-buyers are banking on the impossibility of checking everyone, so US eBay is seeing bids of USD3,000 for the chipped dockets. Not surprisingly, European organisation Uefa, which regulates soccer for arguably the most "excitable" soccer countries on Earth, has lobbied hard for ticket restrictions based on security fears of violent hooligans getting into the games.

For those of you wondering about Ireland's representation at this year's World Cup, the 2006 RoboCup in Bremen will bear witness to perhaps the most advanced application of technology in football this summer.

Since 1993 the RoboCup Federation has used soccer to promote scientific progress in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. At the junior RoboCup qualifiers in Dublin last week, Dr Ashley Green of the European Space Agency told ENN that since IBM's Deep Blue computer beat Kasparov in 1996, "soccer is the new grand challenge to replace chess".

However, the ultimate aim of these robotics experts is to construct a team of completely autonomous humanoid robots capable of beating the Fifa World Cup champions by 2050. Remote controls are strictly forbidden. Perhaps by then Ireland could be represented by a squad of RoboKeanes, without the need for a McCarthinator coach.