Monday, May 24, 2004

Community

Tech Overtones: InContext founders' foray has a good sporting chance

By Jim Malone

From an unlikely circumstance sometimes are born good ideas.

That may be the case with Concord-based mSports, a company that sprung out of a web design firm's desire to do something different after the tragedy of Sept. 11.

Karen and Lew Holtzblatt, along with co-founder Hugh Beyer, have run their web design firm InContext for more than a dozen years. Now the Holtzblatts, still involved with InContext, find themselves at the helm of a new company - mSports - that brings instant sports updates to wireless handheld devices.

"The idea for mSports came from 9-11," said Karen Holtzblatt. It wasn't a specific response so much as the result of the somber soul-searching that many Americans turned to in the days after 9-11. The tragedy plunged the folks at InContext, along with millions of us, into a reflective mood.

"We made a commitment to start a new venture," Karen said. "It was part of my commitment to promote growth and invest in the community," she said.

Their work in contextual design had produced some advances in usability and design she wanted to put to use. Mix in the boom in wireless use, the advent of Java-enabled handheld devices and the sports fan's need to know right now, and voila! That new enterprise is born.

So far, mSports is up and running supplying Major League Baseball information on Nextel phones. Subscribers pay a monthly fee - about $5 a month - and receive play-by-play action in a manner not unlike following a game on an Internet sports site. In the pipeline are AT&T, due to launch later this month, with Sprint penciled in for a possible July 1 release.

Holtzblatt said mSports differs from the pager or update sports offerings out there in that the Java interface allows users to access past scores, logs of past games and updated stats for all MLB players.

Along with the wireless providers, the Holtzblatts have teamed with heavyweight Sports Illustrated's SI.com. MSports provides the platform for SI.com's Baseball Scorecast service.

And behind the platform is another local company, Trigent Enterprises of Natick. Trigent did all the back-end technical work, including development of the application server that takes information from providers such as SportsTicker and pumps it through an XML interface on any mobile device running the mSports application, said a company spokesperson.

"MSports needed a product delivered to Nextel for testing in three and a half months," said Trigent CEO Bharat Khatau in an e-mail interview. "We employed a fairly small team of programmers that programmed in pairs using an extreme programming methodology. That is not a methodology we commonly use, but for this project it was the best approach."

Extreme programming meets the not-so-extreme sport of baseball. But other sports are in the offing, Holtzblatt said. Football, basketball, golf, tennis and NASCAR could be next.

In sports-crazy Boston, I suppose this means we can suffer with our Red Sox in real time.