Spongebob has nothing on the Water Cube

The 16th FINA World Cup – a tune-up to the Summer Olympics in August – concluded Sunday with diving powerhouse China, fittingly, taking gold in seven of the eight events held in Beijing.

The star of the event, though, was the venue. Nicknamed the “Water Cube,” the Olympic swimming venue was designed by Australian architecture firm PTW and resembles a slice of bubbles.

Just one part of an environmentally-friendly building, these bubbles are actually air cushions made out of a material called ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene). EFTE has been used in a variety of buildings across Europe, including London’s Heathrow Airport and the Allianz Arena (home to Bayern Munich), and its resilience is staggering: it resists heat, collects rainwater (which drains to tanks and is subsequently recycled), and repels dust and hailstones. The roof allows hot air to escape, which is especially important when the humidity of the polluted Beijing air mixes with the indoor humidity of an aquatic venue. The ETFE bubbles also have a direct effect indoors. They’re able to deflect bright sunlight so spectators aren’t blinded when they try to watch Michael Phelps race.

The bubbles don’t even begin to tell the story. The building has an air-conditioning system that uses recycled hot water, recycles outdoor and indoor air, and is solar-powered. It’s even “for the birds;” the spongy façade is specifically wired so that winged creatures can lounge without messing with the water collection system (although you can’t call it the “Bird’s Nest” – that is the nickname for the National Stadium, where the track and field events will take place).

If you will sadly be watching the Olympics from home as I will, you can get a sense for what the “Water Cube” is like by watching this CCTV report:

I own a soccer team in England

I became a fan of soccer/football/footie/futbol when I lived in Manchester, England, for a year. That explains how I became a fan of Manchester United, a.k.a. the “Evil Empire” on the other side of the pond. But since then, Becks has gone from Mad-chester to Madrid to simply mad (Hollywood), and the days of Man U’s European treble are long gone.

Therefore, I needed a new English football team to follow, and I think I’ve found it in Ebbsfleet United.

Who?

The club isn’t part of the elite Premier League, in which Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea play. It’s also not part of the first-tier division, or the Football League Championship, which itself contains three divisions. Ebbsfleet United, in turns out, competes below those two divisions in what is called “non-League football” (if you’re just as confused as I am, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system for a tutorial). In other words, they’re at the top of the bottom.

So why support Ebbsfleet United? Because I now co-own the team.

Bosh TV

The NBA All-Star Game took place this past weekend – the East beat the West, 134-128, in New Orleans – but, to hear The London Free Press tell it, the highlight of the weekend for Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors was the NBA Technology Summit.

Bosh, the only active player on the list of speakers at the Summit, is an Internet geek who prefers to take marketing matters into his own hands. His YouTube video asking for All-Star votes prior to the game depicts Bosh as a car salesman with a twang. The hilarious video, shown below, also played at the Summit:

“I think I’ve found a way for me to show people how I like to have fun,” Bosh wrote on his Web site. “And I want everyone to know that everything is filmed, written and played out by amateurs (including me) so I’ll be writing everything myself, with the help of some of my friends.”

You can watch more of Bosh’s self-made videos on the channel that he has set up on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/cboshtv.

Burn, BBQ, Burn

Last month, at one of the dozens of corporate hospitality lounges dotting Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival, a PUMA representative showed me the company’s DIY sneaker Web site. Titled Mongolian BBQ – the term used at Mongolian noodle bars where the diner chooses a number of ingredients, then waits for the chef to mix and cook everything together into a tasty noodle dish – PUMA set up a number of computer terminals for celebrities to custom-construct sneakers to auction off for charity at mongolianshoebbq.puma.com.

Instead of being excited about whether Brittany Murphy or Sandra Oh would turn up at the computer next to me, I was actually excited about the Web site itself. 30 different precut materials to choose from? This was as close as I could get to being a fashion designer without having to purchase the goods and make the shoes myself.

Perhaps the single-digit temperatures had been wreaking havoc with my Web surfing abilities that day because the site wasn’t entirely intuitive. Today, I decided to return to the site, which appears to be built entirely in Flash. Once I chose the style, type and size of shoe, it wasn’t clear how I should proceed. If I went back more than one step in those same areas to make a change, my previous choices were all wiped out. Surfing through the site in a Firefox 2.0.0.12 browser, I opted for the “Dine In – Full Experience” shopping method over the “Take Out – Express Experience” in order to learn about all the customizations. Instead, I got to a color swatch page that scrolled both horizontally and vertically, independent of the browser, and didn’t even show the color swatches in the seemingly empty bowls. A screenshot follows:

Does the “Thunder Waxy Leather” swatch that my tongs have picked up come even close in color to the bowls on the page?

The experience left me wanting the real Mongolian BBQ and opting for an equally sporty-looking pair of Onitsuka Tigers instead. But I’m curious: What do you think of the PUMA Mongolian BBQ site?

Interview with Athletic Scholarship Corporation CEO A.J. Hodel

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published an article about the role that the World Wide Web has played in high school student athlete recruitment. The Reggie Bushes of the world tend to be outliers rather than the norm, and traditionally student athletes have had to rely on word of mouth, the marketing skills of their coaches and resourceful parents to find suitable college sports programs outside their home states.

One of the sites mentioned in the Plain Dealer article, Athletic Scholarship Corporation (ASC, http://athleticscholarshipcorp.com/), has a number of universities on its registered colleges roster, ranging from large programs like USC and the University of Texas to smaller ones like Biola University and Hardin-Simmons University. The article cited the example of Nick DiPalma, whose profile and video on the ASC site “resulted in about 40 calls from coaches within the first two weeks.” The Ohioan now plays Div. II football on scholarship at Saginaw State University in Michigan.

DiPalma is just one of more than 500 students that have been successfully recruited through the ASC site, which offers three different options for students (a free profile page, a $199 program that includes video hosting, or $499 for the works, including a highlight film that is professionally edited for the athlete). ASC founder and CEO, A.J. Hodel, spoke with Sportsbiztech in an e-mail interview about his site.