Phew! The NFL kicks off tonight, on schedule, on NBC, when the Saints play the Packers. Which means that some of you, for various reasons, are going to watch it on the Web.

And you can! Even better, you can do it legally, for free: Comcast’s broadcast unit is offering a complete stream of the game, via NBCSports.com, along with additional camera angles and other digital goodies. From the press release:

Sunday Night Football Extra employs a full HD-quality player, which includes a draggable picture-in-picture feature for any of the online-only cameras, plus full DVR functionality allowing the user to pause and scroll back-and-forth – even review plays in “slo-mo.”

After tonight’s game, NBC will offer the free streams for every game it broadcasts this season, every Sunday night.

It’s the fourth season in a row that NBC has done this, and I’m always surprised that more people don’t make a big deal out of it. NFL TV rights are the most valuable thing in video, and they only get more expensive each year — Disney just agreed to pay nearly $2 billion a season for Monday Night Football rights.

So the notion that a broadcaster would put this stuff up for free on the Web at the same time seems counterintuitive. (Note that Monday Night Football, for instance, is one of the only things you can’t watch via ESPN’s excellent new iPad/iPhone app.)

The only conclusion I can draw is that there just aren’t that many people watching the live streams — because really, if you have the option, you want to watch this on your big HD set, right?

OK. So what about the rest of the season? Well, you can watch that on the Web, legally, too. But it will cost you: Head over to DirecTV to see how much they’re charging for access to their “Sunday Ticket” package, which now includes unlimited access on your laptop, as well as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

(FYI: If you’re willing to shell out for Sunday Ticket but don’t want a two-year DirecTV commitment, and you have a Sony PS3, try out the game device’s new service, which will let you order a season’s worth of football for $340. Pricey, but it will give you more flexibility and you don’t have to worry about installing a dish. Hint: When it asks you if you are able to receive DirecTV where you live, say “no.”)

I don’t condone stealing this stuff off the Web, of course, and those of you who want to do that don’t need my advice, anyway.

I will note, however, that readers who live outside the U.S. and want to stream the games can buy what appears to be a very reasonably priced package directly from the NFL. It looks like $150 for a basic package with all the games, though that may change depending on what country you live in.

*I’m not supposed to do this, because it violates some serious ethical rules, but here goes: Go Pack Go! Except when you’re playing the Vikings. And if you think I’m the only Minnesotan with conflicted Wisconsin loyalties, well — you’re wrong.

You have dysentery.

If you continue to hunt in this area, game will become scarce.

You may attempt to ford the river or caulk the wagon and float it across.

You aren’t alone if those frontier warnings elicit a little nostalgia. After all, odds are, if you were born sometime between 1980 and 2000, you’ve crossed The Oregon Trail, in the classic computer game of the same name.

Now, in an era where the most popular game on Facebook involves building and tending to a cartoony city and the top seller on Apple’s iPhone involves shooting cartoony birds at cartoony pigs, the historical westward journey has actually found cartoony success of its own on both platforms.

What’s interesting is that the game turns 40 later this year and has been played on almost every generation of PCs. Selling well over 65 million copies, it taken immeasurably more players along the road from Independence, Missouri to destinations in the American West than in real life.

For a bit of context: according to the 1850 census, two years after the game takes place, the U.S. had a population of around 23 million.

It’s been a long, strange trip for The Oregon Trail, and Don Rawitsch has been there for all of it.

He was a 21-year old teaching student at Minnesota’s Carleton College in 1971, experimenting with novel ways to engage students in learning about history.

“I was creating little board games to represent things like the effect of British taxes on the colonies, and dressing up as historical characters and engaging with the class,” Rawitsch recounted in a recent phone interview.

Creating games for class was nothing new, Rawitsch said, but the idea of using a computer to educate was.

Up to that point, most computers occupied whole rooms and fed on countless stacks of punch cards. But by the early 1970s, they were starting to shrink in cost and size to the point that a school or school district could afford one.

Along with fellow student-teachers Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann (both of whom taught math), Rawitsch began planning out and programming a computer program that would simulate the 19th-century migration to the American West.

At the time, the idea of playing games on a computer was still very new–even Pong would not be released until 1972. But Rawitsch said had no problem conceptualizing the project.

“If you think about what every game is, it has a set of fundamental elements to it,” said Rawitsch. “Players trying to reach an objective, challenges on the way to meeting that objective, some of them unexpected, and you have resources that you can use, but they are limited.”

Originally text-based–you had to correctly type out the word “BANG” to successfully kill game or fend off an attack from wild animals)–it had graphics by 1980 and began to resemble the version that most players remember so fondly.

But why has the game remained so popular, especially in a gaming industry that now issues new products as quickly as most companies update apps?

And how has The Oregon Trail continued to compete with games of ever increasing gore and visual complexity, just rambling along like a well-maintained prairie schooner.

Rawitsch has a few simple answers.

“Perhaps it endures because there’s not a lot like it,” he said. “Maybe we were just lucky in choosing the one historical event in U.S. history that most lends itself to a game.”

He also added: “It has a challenge, and the game never plays the same way twice. That makes it a high-interest activity, and when you add that it was a real-life scenario, all of those come together.”

However, as the game has evolved over the decades, Rawitsch, who currently plays his creation on the iPad, has had some concerns.

“Certainly the enhanced versions of the game were beautifully done,” he said. “However, do extra complexities make it better as a game?

He also wonders about whether the historical veracity has been maintained: In the recent Gameloft version for the iPhone, Congressman Abraham Lincoln challenges you to a race to Independence Rock.

“The models have changed,” he said. “They still maintain the cause-and-effect aspect of the activity, and hopefully they happen in a logical way, but whether they happen in a historical way, I don’t know.”

At the end of the day, though, Rawitsch knows he was part of something that made a big difference.

Recently, for example, his barber discovered that the long-time customer was the co-inventor of “her favorite game in school.”

And Rawitsch said he receives messages regularly from people who say things like “playing The Oregon Trail was the most I ever learned in a history class,” or “of all the programs we used in our computer at school, The Oregon Trail was the best example of something that taught us and was fun at the same time.”

“I get emails from people I haven’t heard from in a long time, saying that their grandchildren are looking forward to the Facebook game,” he said. “And, that is cool.”

Cool, indeed.

Since The Oregon Trail has seen more than its fair share of facelifts over the past four decades, as it moved from mainframe to Facebook, here’s a slideshow of nearly every version, from paper to iPhone.

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Here’s a trailer for the next movie that Jesse Eisenberg–the actor who played Mark Zuckerberg in the Oscar-nominated film “The Social Network”–stars in.

It’s actually animated and about a Minnesota macaw who heads for Rio. In fact, it’s called “Rio.”

There is apparently no drunken coding into the night or stock cramdowns or lifting of really good ideas from the muscled elite.

Still, try to enjoy:

The idea of being rewarded for being a consumer is getting a lot of heat of late, as retailers seek to take advantage of the fast-moving social phenom among consumers, especially young ones.

Thus, a wide range of efforts to combine location-based mobile apps with purchasing, both online and offline.

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted on a funding for one such start-up, Topguest, which links check-ins with airline and hotel loyalty programs.

Today, another company in the space, shopkick, announced it had added another store–Minneapolis-based Target–to its list of retailers deploying its platform and mobile app.

As with customers of Macy’s, Best Buy and others, users of the shopkick app will receive points and other rewards, as well as instant mobile coupons, just for walking in the store.

The point being: Retailers need to reward foot traffic and not just purchases.

The Target partnership is limited now to 242 stores in the Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and the San Francisco area.

Target will also offer scannable mobile coupons to customers for redemption at checkout.

It will be interesting to see how effective apps such as shopkick are as they roll out, as consumers test them.

Unlike others that offer quick deals–from Foursquare to Facebook to, now, Yahoo–shopkick uses its “kickbucks” as an enticement simply for being present in a store or scanning certain barcodes.

It’s certainly easy enough–my son, Louie, did it with ease and definite enjoyment–although a user does need to remember to fire up the app when entering a participating store.

There is also a small device retailers need to install need to make the shopkick ecosystem work.

CEO Cyriac Roeding, a former EVP for CBS’ mobile unit, created the concept for the Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up while an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins.

The company has raised $20 million in venture funding from Kleiner’s iFund, longtime Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, as well as Hoffman’s home at Greylock Partners.

Here is a video interview I did with Roeding about where shopkick is going next:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/shopkick-checks-in-with-target-ceo-cyriac-roeding-talks-about-social-shopping/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101025/new-library-technologies-dispense-with-librarians/ http://allthingsd.com/20101025/new-library-technologies-dispense-with-librarians/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:45:14 +0000 Conor Dougherty http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31496 Hugo MN–In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read.

Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It’s a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.

Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.

Later this year Mesa, Ariz., plans to open a new “express” library in a strip-mall, open three days a week, with outdoor kiosks to dispense books and DVDs at all hours of the day. Palm Harbor, Fla., meanwhile, has offset the impact of reduced hours by installing glass-front vending machines that dispense DVDs and popular books.

The wave of innovation is aided by companies that have created new machines designed to help libraries save on labor. For instance, Evanced Solutions, an Indianapolis company that makes library software, this month is starting test trials of a new vending machine it plans to start selling early next year.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101025/new-library-technologies-dispense-with-librarians/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100817/exclusive-yahoo-eyes-cafemom-for-100-million-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20100817/exclusive-yahoo-eyes-cafemom-for-100-million-acquisition/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:14:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32289

According to numerous sources, Yahoo is eager to close a deal to acquire CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, in a move aimed at turbocharging its often-meandering strategy in the important women’s space.

The price being offered, said sources, is hovering at $100 million, about the same amount Yahoo (YHOO) recently forked over for Associated Content.

The deal might not happen, of course, but several sources said the pair have been deep in negotiations in recent weeks.

CafeMom, sources said, has wanted to hold out for a higher price of closer to $200 million or more. Other interested buyers include Disney (DIS), sources added.

The New York-based CafeMom has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was founded by Andrew Shue and Michael Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $17 million, both from Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Sanchez is CEO, but Shue–known for his BoomTown-approved role as the endearingly whiny Billy (But, Alllllliiiisoooonnnn…) on the original “Melrose Place”–is also deeply involved.

On its Web site, the company claims it has 6.7 million unique visitors on its main site and 18.7 million more on its network of affiliated sites, with 100 million page views.

CafeMom said on its Web site that it was profitable, and sources said its revenues were about $25 million to $30 million annually.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir”–no, really, it is called that.

A recent article on the sassy blog was titled “Parents Who Smuggle Babies Into R-Rated Movies: Ballsy or Crazy?”

(Ballsy, IMHO! You could go crazy enduring only “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” as I can testify. You need some “Salt” in your diet.)

This kind of content offering is all in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, of course, as it seeks to reinvigorate itself by bringing in new talent and brands.

In the women’s space, Yahoo has its Shine site, which is very pretty but in desperate need of a social boost that CafeMom can presumably provide.

Yahoo’s head of M&A Andrew Siegel–Andrew, don’t be scared of me! Call, I don’t bite! Only rarely, that is!–also reportedly took a strong look at Sugar, an innovative San Francisco women’s site. But the start-up declined to sell.

The women’s market is a big one for advertisers, with many competitors–from iVillage to AOL (AOL) to a recent effort by Demand Media to reach women using a site created with supermodel Tyra Banks.

Yahoo declined to comment, but a PR spokeswoman said in an email that “women are an important audience and our Shine site is very successful.”

Calling from Minneapolis, where he and Sanchez were visiting General Mills (GIS) and Target (TGT) about advertising deals, Shue declined to comment, though very charmingly (and very unlike the mumble-mouthed Billy).

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