Game on...

This is a short post - I couldn't hold it back any longer.

Anyone you come across today - from the office elevator (I guess the old water-cooler analogy is dead) to the weekend party - that is remotely connected to technology or business, talks "big-data". I heard someone recently say 'yeah, we are into big-data analytics too', and these guys were running a small IT staffing shop.

I won't bore you with the text book definitions or tell you in detail what it is (though personally I like the quick snippet that comes up in Google search, source Wikipedia). What I want to tell you is this ... use that jargon only if you want to look like a complete dork if anyone remotely aware of the field is around.

Data & analytics has been around forever. Internet and more recently social graphs are producing vast amounts of data (a lot of which is useless, IMO), which lead to the term "big-data" - and it simply refers to data of size & model that tradition…

Over the last several years, the buzz word in business and IT circles has been "big-data" and analytics. Many many articles and write-ups talk about them so I won't go into the details. You could get enough to last a lifetime with just the first few results of a Google search of these terms. But do you really know how it applies, specifically to a sports company?

For long, sports franchises have been one of the biggest users of analytics. Before this was a buzz word, coaches and managers have relied up numbers and finding patterns in them to drive on-field performance. Indeed, the major leagues of the world have relied on performance analytics for everything from scouting for talent to calling the action on the field of play.

But that never transcended to the off-field, more mundane but equally important task of managing the sports business. As more and more options come up vying for the fan's attention - live events, travel, other sports, TV, the Internet - the war…