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Tech sector set to score at World Cup
Friday, May 19 2006
by Matthew Clark


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.