News of the week

Sportsbiztech is back with the latest sites and gadgets to hit the cybersphere, saving you trips to the bar, trips to the library, trips to school and trips to your head:

This takes the “couch potato” tag to new levels: The first virtual world for sports fans, Sports Blox, features online bars among other social networking goodies. Who needs to watch sports in a real bar where Yankees and Red Sox fans can’t co-exist in harmony anyway? [www.sportsblox.com]

Sports Illustrated launches “SI Vault,” an incredible online resource spanning the history of sports dating back to magazine’s founding in 1954. Videos, blogs, shared content with other sites like Wikipedia and eBay, 150,000 articles, 2,800 cover images and half a million photos await, although just how comprehensive it really is remains to be seen. For example, a search for “Michael Chang” somehow resulted in zero (!) photos which is a bit difficult to believe given the length of his career. However, his name brings up more than 100 videos pulled from MSN, YouTube and other sources, ranging from his recent Tennis Hall of Fame announcement to his incredible 1989 French Open victory. [vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com]

My dad has a knack for pitching ideas that come to fruition years after the fact. When I was a kid, he said that teachers should find engaging, tangible ways to educate kids about math through the use of sports statistics. But I don’t think he would have guessed that mobile devices would serve as the messenger. The University of Central Florida has developed My Sports Pulse, a service to help K-12 students become engaged math, science and technology through sports-related questions delivered through interactive voice response, text and video messages. The university worked with a number of partners, including professional teams in Orlando and Kansas City, to get the product off the ground, and the Florida Virtual School was just announced as one of the first clients. [www.mysportspulse.com]

The Arena Football League has incorporated a number of interesting changes this season, the most intriguing being the “Shockometer” device developed by Schutt Sports. Attached to a player’s helmet, the device switches from green to red if a player receives a particularly hard hit, signaling doctors to take a look for particularly worrying head injuries like concussions. [San Jose Mercury News]