sport

Adidas' miCoach service, which is essentially its answer to Nike+, will be playing a major role in the Major League Soccer All-Star Game in July.

According to the company, the MLS game will be the world's "first smart soccer match," allowing coaches to track player performance on the pitch. Adidas hasn't revealed too many details on how the service will work, but it appears that coaches will be able to access real-time player statistics, including speed, acceleration, and power output, from a tablet. The software also provides alerts coaches might need to consider.

Although Adidas calls its player-tracking software the "next step in player performance analysis technology," it might make some sport purists take a step back. The kind of information to be made available to the MLS All-Star Game coaches is unlike anything they've had before. And that kind of data could make the game more reliant upon raw data than instinctual decision-making -- a key aspect of soccer since its inception.… Read more

While you might be enjoying eating various confections of bunny this weekend, IBM's CEO, Virginia Rometty, has to wear casual business attire and mix with men for whom she is an unwelcome species.

For Rometty's company, you see, sponsors the U.S. Masters. The U.S. Masters tournament is played at the charming Augusta National Golf Club. And the Augusta National Golf Club hasn't -- as far as we know-- invited Rometty to join.

It's not that Augusta has anything against IBM's fine CEOs. The last four have all been offered club membership. It's … Read more

NEW YORK--Today at the 2012 New York auto show, Hyundai debuted not one, but two new versions of the 2013 Hyundai Santa Fe for two different kinds of crossover buyers.

The first debut was the Santa Fe Sport, a small crossover that seats five. Under its hood, drivers have a choice between either a 190 horsepower direct-injected 2.4-liter engine that should net an estimated 33 highway mpg or the turbocharged and direct-injected 2.0-liter engine that outputs 264 horsepower at the expense of a pair of highway mpg. If these engines sound familiar, it's because they're the … Read more

I'm usually too concerned with actually hitting the ball, let alone well, to worry about the strain of lugging clubs around the links. But I can see how FTR Systems' Caddytrek could make the ultimate non-human accessory to one's game.

A step up from remote-controlled golf trolleys, which make you pay attention to them, Caddytrek automatically rolls after you while carrying your woods and irons.

As seen in the PR vid below, it receives signals from the control unit in your pocket and will stop when you do. You can use the remote control to send the gizmo to the next tee--or the nearest bar for a can of suds. … Read more

Some say our inner teen never leaves us, but merely takes on more sophisticated tastes.

One wonders, therefore, about the inner teen of a parent at a high school girls hockey game in Massachusetts, who allegedly brought along his laser pointer.

Did he wish to use it to feature some aspect of the home team's strategy? Not quite. He is accused of using it to distract the opposing team's goalie.

I know that hockey exists largely so that people can reconstruct each other's faces, but the idea that a parent could try to do this to a … Read more

It's a holiday weekend in America and, this week, the most important issue hasn't been the national debt or the dearth of novel political thought.

It's the entry of Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks into the national consciousness.

Just this morning, ESPN announced that it had fired an online headline writer for offering this on Lin's first defeat as a starter: "Chink in the Armor."

And now, as I am torn between my affection for a former Golden State Warrior (most do better when they leave) and my fondness for the Cubans … Read more

Those who use numbers to define life frighten me. Especially when they're right.

How, then, might Ed Weiland be feeling this week when his numerical analysis-- one that no one believed-- came true over the last two weeks? Yes, this is man who had a feeling--no, a certainty-- that Linsanity was going to happen.

Should you have been an unusually devoted fan of the Charlotte Bobcats lately, you might not have noticed that the NBA has gone all Lin, all the time.

Jeremy Lin, the Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, has brought things to the New York Knicks that were in short … Read more

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She's billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from "Hockey Night in Canada" and you can't beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm Robotis.

The challenges facing Chris Iverach-Brereton and colleagues on the University of Manitoba team include getting the robot to hit the puck from a sideways orientation and improving her skating skills. She's not ready to join the Winnipeg Jets just yet.

"We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling," Iverach-Brereton told Postmedia News. "By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide." … Read more

Spring training has barely begun, but Baseball Boyfriend already has people thinking about which player they would most like to "date" this season.

Baseball Boyfriend is a $2.99 mini-game add-on to CBS Sports' fantasy baseball offerings. (Disclosure: CNET is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) Users choose a single draftee and collect points based on the player's performance. You can keep or dump a draftee, depending on his stats and your level of emotional attachment.

The app offers three looks: clean, original, and pirate. The original look could have been cobbled from a love-struck … Read more