SEARCH CLINIC

With the first Barclays Premier League matches taking place during the weekend of August 14 and 15th, the football season is now truly underway.

As you would expect, UK Internet visits to key football related websites increased significantly during the week ending 15/08/2010: the Official Fantasy Premier League site by 186%, Sky Sports by 15%. There was also a 12% increase in traffic to BBC Sport, but it has yet to reach the same level of traffic it experienced during the World Cup.
All of the three sites mentioned above ranked amongst the top 100 most visited in the UK for the w/e 15/08/2010, with BBC Sport in 13th position and Sky Sports at number 15.

Joining them in the top 100, in 70th position, was the Sky Digital TV Shop, the place where people go to either purchase Sky TV or upgrade their packages.

The site is most popular in the North East, although Walsall is the individual postal area that currently most over-indexes in terms of traffic.

This perhaps reflects the fact that there are four teams from West Midlands (Aston Villa, West Brom, Birmingham City, Wolves) competing in the top flight of English football this season – the first time this has happened for 27 years.

The main driver for all this traffic was clearly the demand for the Sky Sports channels, and searches for the terms ‘sky sports’ and ‘sky sports football’ increased by 38% and 22% respectively over the same period. These were the two most popular of 3,700 different ways in which people searched for the channels during the week ending 15/08/2010.

Aggregating all of these together using Hitwise‘s new broad matching tool, shows that all of these variations accounted for 1% of all UK searches during this period – i.e. 1 in every 100 searches in the UK was related to Sky Sports.

From: http://images.hitwise.com/newsletter_images/uk201008-news-master.gif

A football which generates enough electricity to charge a mobile phone or power a light from a brief kick about is undergoing trials in World Cup host country South Africa.
The sOccket power generating football has been designed by four female undergraduate students in their twenties from Harvard University.

The sOccket works on the same principal as the “shake to charge” torch, where a magnetic ball rolls through a coil to create an electric charge.

In just 15 minutes of being kicked around, it can generate enough electricity to power an LED light for three hours and charge virtually any type of mobile telephone.

The undergraduate students wanted to find a solution to the developing world’s chronic power shortages.

“Soccer is something you will find in every African country,” Jessica Lin, one of sOccket’s inventors, said. “People play for hours a day, so we thought, ‘Why not try to get a little more out of that energy?’”

She said the aim was to harness the passion for football particularly among children in Africa’s poorest communities to provide them with reading torches for when the light fades – at present around 5.30pm in South Africa.

Julia Silverman, 21, who also worked on the project has brought the ball to South Africa’s townships for trials to coincide with the World Cup.

“The kids call it ‘the magic ball’,” she said. “Whenever you see a child plug in their ball for the first time and see the torch light up from the energy they’ve created, their eyes light up too – it’s a wonderful feeling.”

“If you think that the energy generated by a 15-minute kick around provides three hours of light, you can read a lot of pages from a textbook in that time.”

The sOccket team hope to have their product available for sale online by the end of the year. They intend to sell them to people in developed countries in a buy-one-give-one scheme that will see the second ball sent to charities working in African townships.

“Obviously, this won’t be a regulation ball,” Miss Lin said. “But it’s a big improvement over some of the makeshift balls the kids create from things like old plastic bags.”