 From the SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering HGST, Sports Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by HGST, now your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome, hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of Sports Data SV. This is a CUBE exclusive here at the Shark Tank, the SAP Center here in San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle theCUBE and Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman with boogiebond.org. And we are here to discuss all the conversations around sports data here in Silicon Valley. Guys, welcome to this special presentation, brought to you by HGST. We restore the data, sports data is a competitive advantage, hat trick of innovation here tonight. The guys who get their HGST, the CUBE, their customers should be a great event. Jeff, Sports Data SV is our third event now at Oracle Open, where we heard them kick off with the Golden State Warriors. And it was like a CUBE interview from two events ago, managing your fan experience, managing your customers and your team. Here we are. What's going on? If only the Mets had hold the league yesterday. We could still say the World Champion San Francisco giants are going to be attending, so they haven't been champions for a day. And unfortunately, the Golden State Warriors could not attend the World Champion Awards because they had a game tonight, but we're excited. We have the Raiders are here from the NFL. First time the Raiders have been on the CUBE. Of course, we're going to have Bill Schlau, CUBE favorite from the Giants. He's always up to something every off season. So his off season has officially begun. And of course, Dave Cobble and the earthquakes will be stopping by. They just finished their first season at their new arena. So we'll get an update from Dave. We've got the guys from CrossFit. CrossFit is kind of sweeping everything. It's a fitness workout. HGST has really embraced it as a way to bring their employees together, have fun competitions, as well as it's a TV show and filling on ESPN. So we've got the CrossFit guys. We're going to talk to them. Got some executives from HGST. So I'm excited. It was a year ago, we were at AT&T Park looking over the field. Now we're here at SAP Center in San Jose looking out over the ice. It's a great venue. It should be a good event. Stu Miniman just flew in from Massachusetts here for the special presentation as well as doing some visits. Stu, we're Patriots fans. Seven and O, I know the Niners and the Raiders are not as strong as the Patriots. The Raiders are making a big comeback day. Beating the Jets yesterday, which is great for the AFC East teams. Great for the Raiders. Not your usual CUBE conversations. They don't want to know about infrastructure or all that. But this is going to be fun. Yeah, I'm excited for it, John. I mean, we've been talking for years that data is the competitive advantage that people get. And sports is a great use case for this. First of all, you talk about the fan experience. I love from an infrastructure standpoint every time a new stadium gets built, there's so much IT that goes into it to make both on the field and the fan experience happen. Great IoT angles talking about all the centers that are everywhere. And the teams themselves are using data a lot. So hopefully they're getting all their data the right way. People making comments about the Patriots and everything. But all in the up and up, excited to be here, John. The big thing that I love about this new world we live in with a connected consumer. You got IoT, you got cloud, you got big data predictive analytics. They said for sports teams it's a whole new ball game. The economics are obviously there with TV and distribution, but it's a fan experience now. It's real critical. They're now involved in the production. You're managing your teams differently in an era of free agency and competitiveness. Having that management, of course managing your employees that work the game. So I'm super excited, Jeff. Talk about the HGST and CrossFit. I want to explain that relationship and HGST sponsors to be here. Really appreciate that. We're going to talk with the execs there. But talk about that relationship and HGST and CrossFit. Yeah, so Mike, the CEO at HGST decided to get involved with CrossFit because he saw a real positive benefit. And I don't know if you've ever seen the TV shows, John, the competitions, but it's kind of a wild scramble of all different types of working out all combined into one thing. They're lifting weights, they're running, they're picking up medicine balls. But it's a really just great way to get in shape and people get super passionate about it. In fact, I know HGST is using it as a way to kind of bring the people together. There's some great videos of Mountain the Park and Lawn, everybody's got their t-shirts on and a way to release some energy and get a good workout. And obviously it's healthy, you get the endorphins moving. It's a very positive thing. But also it's a growing trend. It's an entertainment vehicle. The CrossFit Games back this summer, they shot them down in Southern California. Huge stadium full of people, bright, sunny days, beautiful people running around, throwing weights around. So it's part of this kind of new ESPN2, where these other sports beyond the big four are gaining traction. And the thing about those types of sports, kind of like golf, where you can do it yourself. You can watch the best, you can watch the elite, but then you can also go out and do it yourself. So you can get connected to it. So HGST has gotten really behind this. We'll get an update from Mike Cardano as to how it's really impacting the culture of the company. But get everybody's head up out of their email, get out of the cube for a minute, get outside in the park, I'll get some fresh air. And probably better for your health. I really like how it humanizes the storage role, because the role of storage, we've always say every year, storage is dead, storage is dead. And it's not, the bloggers are saying, but every year there's more and more data, every year, every year, more and more data. And it humanizes it. And Stu, we see the social media aspect. You see CrossFit getting into entertainment, the internet consumers connected. It's a communal experience now. With social media, the consumption of the consumer is not just consumption, they're part of the production. So much of it, John, it's personalization. So the CrossFit, the wearables, it's getting that information to the person so that they can do what makes sense for them. Do it with their friends, they're giving away some Fitbits to some of the audience here with a raffle. That was one of the giveaways they had a year ago when we did the HGST event. So when you can measure it, you can kind of do contests with your friends. I know I was out with the kids for Halloween and I'm tracking against friends. We had a little contest over the weekend as to how many steps you're doing. So it kind of gives you that extra little motivation when your friends are doing it and get the interview done. So your kids know they're being tracked? They know the Fitbits. They're sorry, dad, you get your 10,000 steps in, you know. So it's helpful. But it's interesting because it's also this internet of things, right? Because now those Fitbits, it's more than just how many steps. It's what's your heart rate? What's your calorie burn? What's your consumption? And really, we're right on the edge of the internet of things in the personalization experience because we're wearing them. We talked to Tom Riley from Cloudera. He likes to talk about his big wearable, which is his Tesla, right? That he gets downloaded software, it knows what he wants to do, where he wants to go. And so, you know, this whole internet of things is driven by data and all that data's got to be stored somewhere. So I don't think storage is going anywhere soon. As he said to us, he rolls through the stop sign so his insurance went up because of it, because Tesla was reporting it back. But let's get back to the internet of things because one of the things Stu, you and I talk about all the time and Jeff, you're on social media year all the time with the Cube Gems and whatnot is that there's now a new fan experience that's emerging. Periscope, some of the things we're seeing behind the scenes, social media, Instagram, the Snapchat. So you're seeing a whole nother level of data sources coming in from the fans themselves. So the event itself is an event, but there's an event going on within the event. Right, right, right. And we see it time and time again if people want their own personalized version. What's interesting about sports and big time pro sports is it's still one of the things that draws. It can draw an audience on a Sunday afternoon. It's going to get the ratings. It really brings together a huge audience. But as you said, and a lot of talk about what's going on at Levi's Stadium, then there's all this personalized fan experience happening enabled by the technology, auto on replays, sharing social media, hashtags. The purists will say, we forget about the game, but the reality is people want to set up their own experience and the technology now is enabling them to do it. So will we have a Super Bowl event, Sports State SV? Boy, we're going to try to get over there. We got to talk to the NFL. Is that our backyard? Yeah, it's right down the street. 100 days away till Super Bowl 50. Stu, you think the Patriots will be there? So if you look at 538.com, which they've got the date on it, the Patriots are at the top there. They're in the playoffs, it seems. They should win the division and it's a tough road. I mean, it's always, once you get in the playoffs, anything goes, but I'm feeling good about the Patriots chances. They got a good balance team this year and Tom Brady's going to play for another 10 years. So you know. I doubt that's going to happen, but we'll take bets on that later. I'm going to have it at Green Bay though on the 538 update, I'm wondering. Jeff, what are you hearing about sports and sensors? One of the things we speculate about, we saw some things about basketball, having some devices in there. There's talk about hockey, golf, Callaway talk about having some of the instrumentation. With instrumentation, what are some of the things that you guys are seeing in sports right now because that certainly will change the dimension of the game. Yeah, well, I'm really excited we have Mike King coming on from Zebra Technologies. We got introduced to Zebra Technologies at a kind of an inside GPS show talking about inside sensors, inside mapping. And actually the CIO of the NFL was supposed to speak. She couldn't show Zebra filled in and it's a really great story. Not only because what they can do and they put these sensors, we'll learn more about it on the shoulder pads of the NFL players so they know exactly where they are, how fast they're moving, how's their acceleration change throughout the course. They also have them on their refs. Where are their refs? How are the refs moving? Are the refs what they're supposed to be to make the call? But what else is really great? The ACC could use that, certainly against the Duke game. Yeah, the Duke of Miami, I don't know if they had them there. But what else is interesting about it to me is that it's old technology, Zebra's an old company. It's RFID technology that was used for inventory tracking, sticking these sensors on pallets. And for them to really kind of rethink and find a new application within the sports world. And to be able to show thing, the highlight case they talk about was a JJ Watt interception, and they had his speed going down the field on the network feed with a speedometer before he got to the end zone. So, very, very fast, really interesting information and we'll talk to Mike who's got a long history in the sports data world and things like the pitch tracker and the yellow first down line and how the use of those things has evolved from kind of entertainment because NASCAR it's kind of hard if you're not into it to say who's driving, how fast are they going? But now, is it going to be the official rule? Is the unofficial yellow line more accurate than the guys on the sideline? Is that going to be the first time? Is the pitch counter going to replace the umpire who's behind the plate at some point in time? So, the evolution is moving very, very quickly. We heard from Amazon re-invent that's all about all the camera angles in real time. The World Series last night, you saw the stat track which shows you how far the ball goes. It's going to be a matter of time before that happens. And certainly the clouds too. What technologies are still enabling this? What is the key in your mind as an analyst? We look at the technologies under the hood now. For these sports teams, what are the key successes that you need to see happen in this market to accelerate this massive user experience? Well, we've seen people trying to become data brokers. So, what information can you access from what you have and what can you tap into? So, you're seeing pro teams kind of creating, originally had the money ball creating your own information but how do you keep a differentiation? Because everybody, it's kind of an arms race. You're trying to get the talent, you're going to try to get the data scientist out there. A lot of it is asking good questions, being able to understand what's going in. So, you know, you say from a technology standpoint, John, but a lot of it's going to come down to the people. It's changing like a coach, it's the personalization. We've seen it on the athletes themselves, it changes their diet, it changes how they exercise. There's so many pieces that go into it that it's multifaceted and going to, you know, radically transform this course. Yeah, Jeff, we were just talking at Stanford this morning at a women in data science conference where the word user experience is now in context to big data analytics, where big data analytics is actually fueling. And there's controversy around some of the iterations and agileness of using data to create a better user experience. Some people think it might be a little bit creepy and like we try to change people's behavior by what data may be available. So, there's a double-edged sword here with privacy and personalization. Yeah, if I can match somebody's genome and understand what I have to do for it, you know, how much of it is that a competitive advantage and what's fair and what's not fair? Well, I heard that Facebook example where they were experimenting with Bill's timelines and they said Facebook's controlling the emotions of their user base. Now, that was just kind of the press going crazy on that. But they're just trying to put together a good experience, that's really what they're trying to do. But I think it's important that, you know, there's still room for people, right? There's still judgments. This is not, as we talked earlier today, you don't just throw a bunch of data in a Hadoop cluster and magically all the answers come out, right? You got to have context. You got to know what the moral issues are, the ethical issues which come to play on things like you talked about, changing people's experience. So, there is a room for the expert. There is a room for someone to help manage, wrangle and make sense of the data. That said, there's a lot more of it to play with. It's coming at you a lot quicker. So, the opportunities for disruption, which also give opportunities for innovation, creativity, new value creation are tremendous. So, I got to bring up a couple of topics to kind of end the segment before we kick off the interviews is really the notion of eSports, virtual reality is changing the game on experiences and also the notion of real time. Let's take real time first. Are we in a position now where you guys think we're in a real time technology where that will accelerate and what does that mean vis-a-vis the new experiences, eGaming, eSports. I could participate with Oculus Rift down the road. Those are cutting edge trends. I mean, I might not have to go to a Giants or Sharks game. I can just watch out of my Oculus Rift and turn and see who's in the stadium next to me. And nobody will spill beer on you though, John. No, I think there's still, you know, it's an interesting place and it's, you just look no further than technology innovations in your favorite sport and how quickly you adopt them. I remember the first time Fox started putting all the stat tracker in the upper left with the time, the score, the timeouts. You're like, oh, it's crazy. It's taking up all this space. Before you know it, you love it and you're watching it all the time. The one that I love watching now is the Skycam in the NFL games that's flying all over the place. Two years ago, they introduced that. And you're like, I can't stand that shot. I'm not used to that shot. Get rid of that thing. Now you watch the creativity, how much more they're using it. Now they've got the guys in the black shirts running out onto the field right after the touchdown in the middle of the cheering to give you that up close and personal. So I think it's going to continue to evolve. I don't know how the athletes feel about it. I guess they make a lot of money, so they got to kind of go with whatever's dictated. But the technology changes and it's kind of abrupt and a little weird at first, but it's amazing how fast as humans we adapt. And John, you talk about real time. I mean, we're getting real time, not just the regular replays, but there's segments available so quick. You can rewatch it. I know you'll watch the NFL games and kind of the compressed 30 minutes afterwards. So many ways that we get that either second screen or time shifting to be able to consume more content, find it different ways, interact with our peers. A lot of seconds. We'll leave by stadium. They have literally six seconds from every camera angle to your phone in six seconds after a touchdown. So that's, but it can't leave the stadium because a Comcast has licensing rights. So that's always up. Another thing, we'll get to that later. The rights of, you're watching Sports Data SV special presentation of the cube here at the Shark Tank and we will be back more with coverage here and right after the short break.