College basketball fans all over the country have become decidedly less productive at work this month, because they have been following the NCAA® Division I Men’s Basketball Championship. Years ago, spectators had to gather at their local watering holes to keep up with the scores of all the different games. The invention of the Internet brought the ability to track scores from home or work at any time. And in today’s world of battery-powered mobile technology, of course there’s an app for that!
CBS Sports NCAA March Madness on Demand app features real time brackets (left) and streaming video (right) of every single game over 3G and WiFi.
According to a survey from IMRE Sports, nearly one in four online Americans will use social media to follow the NCAA tournament this year, and more than a quarter of those fans will use a mobile application to do so. Turner Sports, CBS Sports and the NCAA announced that NCAA March Madness on Demand (MMOD) had already seen a 47% increase in total visits across the broadband and mobile products for the first three rounds of the tournament. In total, there were 26.7 million visits for the five days spanning the first three rounds and 36% of all streams for MMOD on Saturday, March 19 and Sunday, March 20 were from iPad and iPhone apps.
Whether they were using CBS March Madness on Demand or NCAA Fan Zone - March Madness, fans all over the world learned of Arizona’s defeat of the Duke Blue Devils via their mobile devices. And, as the VCU Rams upset top-seeded Kansas, lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries all over the country allowed fans to catch those last moments from the edge of their seats in airports, hospital waiting rooms and little league games.
Here at Palladium, after that VCU win, our brackets are as busted as yours (unless you’re one of the two people who correctly predicted the Final Four) but while we’re watching the championship games, rest assured we’ll have our eyes on all of the mobile devices that are battery powered. Advances in mobile technology have made it possible for networks and sponsors to engage fans in places the game has never gone before. Meeting the power requirements of these next generation mobile devices requires careful battery design planning, creative mechanical design solutions and in-depth integration of battery power source with device circuitry. Today’s batteries must play hard in order to survive weeks of constant bracket checking and live streaming of back-to-back games.
Palladium Energy is the most experienced battery pack designer and manufacturer for handheld electronic devices for consumer applications – including those used by college basketball fans. Palladium has the industry’s only independent and accredited test lab, IQ Laboratories, where we can design, test and certify each battery pack to the most stringent of industry standards, ensuring that our batteries can make it down to the last buzzer.
–Rebecca Kritzman, Director of Marketing
