Good Idea! Now find a better one.

To butcher the old saying: For Cisco, their routers are hammers - and everything else on Earth is a nail - including Pro Baseball Stadiums. CNN published an AP story on a pitch by Oakland A’s owner, Lew Wolff, to city council members in Freemont California to build a new stadium backed by Cisco’s networking muscle.

Apparently, Cisco had been talking with the A’s about how they could use Cisco technology in their new stadium. The AP reports it as a potential STADIUM OF THE FUTURE (cue echo) and some of the concepts do make you go hmmm:

Fans will swipe electronic tickets stored on cell phones. Bleacher bums will view instant replays at their seats with laptop computers. And digital advertising displays will be able to switch images based on the buying habits of the people walking by through data embedded in their cell phones.

…Cisco technology and intelligent networks would enable fans at the hypothetical stadium to buy and upgrade tickets through smart cell phones, access real-time scorecards at their seats and buy pictures of themselves from crowd cameras and pay to show them on the Jumbotron.

Now, the AP’s summary of what Cisco and the A’s talked about is probably terrible and it’s certainly short on details. I say that because, from the article, we can’t see everything Cisco is talking about so we probably aren’t getting a good look at their ideas.

Certainly, bringing a laptop to a ball game with beer and hot dogs doesn’t seem ideal. And using data in cell phones to target ads is most likely solving a problem that a lot of people don’t have.

But this is the blogosphere and there are already people lining up to take pot shots. Let’s do something more constructive. Let’s find a way for Cisco and the A’s to provide even more valuable services to baseball fans and continuously improve those services over time.

What Cisco Does Best

If you don’t know, Cisco’s networking hardware is used in quite a range of places and forms a critical part of today’s internet infrastructure. High speed Switches, Routers, Optical Networking, etc. Just about anything that involves moving data over a wire, through a fiber or through the air.

But as I look at these Cisco-A’s talks, I wonder about the difference between building infrastructure and finding the great ideas that use that infrastructure.

So here is the trillion dollar question: While a good portion of internet traffic runs over Cisco hardware, how many of the brilliant uses of that hardware came from Cisco?

Did Cisco come up with the ideas to found Google? YouTube? Did Cisco look at their hardware and recognize that blogging would be huge? Did they see “web 2.0″ and the venture capital it would attract? No, of course not.

But, they did build the fast, reliable, scalable, adaptable hardware that each and every one of those ideas and corporations uses - and put a little coin in their pocket in the process.

And the founders of Google, the first web loggers and the “web 2.0″ developers, were they looking for ways to use Cisco hardware? Were they trying to find reasons to push more data through the internet’s routers?

Or were they focusing on People: what do they like and dislike? What do they want the freedom to do? What do they want freedom from doing? What problems do they have that can be solved faster, or eliminated or managed with better design?

The Internet…Only Smaller.

If the Oakland A’s and Cisco do partner on this stadium, Cisco will no doubt do what they do best: Provide fast, reliable, scalable, adaptable hardware and give the new A’s ballpark solid infrastructure.

But they also want to build applications on this infrastructure. Some of their ideas are good. Some are bad. And all of them can be seeds for better ideas. But it would seem that the lesson from the internet is that there are others who are much better suited to create the applications that sit on that infrastructure.

Instead of building a completely closed system build one that enables fast access to all the various streams of information created at a ballpark. Provide access to all the feeds from all the cameras, all the microphones, all the statistics. Link into the databases that the TV networks use to harvest those ridiculously arcane but strangely intriguing baseball statistics (You know, player with the longest last name to hit the most doubles on the 3rd pitch from a left handed pitcher following a year when the national GDP increased by exactly 4.2%).

It’s Valuable - Charge for it

Don’t provide access to this for free, lease out access to developers and small businesses who can create new services and gadgets that baseball fans can buy, rent or subscribe to.

What’s the best handheld gadget for keeping track of a game scorecard? I don’t know. Cisco doesn’t either. Why not let 10 local entrepreneurs give it a go?

What’s the best user interface on a cell phone or pda for viewing stats and instant replays. Don’t know. Get other businesses in there to compete.

What’s the best way to allow people to have their picture taken in the crowd? Set up a phalanx of cameras around the stadium and automatically triangulate the person’s position from their cell phone? Or could a group of local photographers start a small business together, stand in various locations in the stadium and arrange shots with customers via cell phones? I have no idea. Let them try.

What would a portable TiVo like device look like in a baseball stadium for viewing all the various video feeds? How much would people pay to bring some of that video home? Why speculate? Let someone else get some skin in the game and find out.

What other crazy services could be provided? Remote post game interviews by fans in the stands? Real time trajectory information on the speed and flight of the ball? Remote ordering of concessions?

Cisco, Use the Force…err, Market

Time and time again we see this happen. Many of the greatest uses for some new tool are ones the creator never thought of. We talk about how great it is to have such freedom in the marketplace and how many great ideas are born out of that freedom.

But when you go to a stadium for a sporting event with 25,000-100,000 people - a good sized town - all that idealistic talk of freedom goes out the window and we confront a world of quasi-socialist lack.

Long lines for food. Long lines for bathrooms. Artificial scarcity and high prices. Lack of food options. Everything is designed to handle the masses, nothing cares for the individual.

And if Cisco builds the infrastructure and the only applications that are allowed in the stadium, this unfortunate quality of “going to see the game” will remain, but with a more high-tech twist.

I hope Cisco sticks to what they do best and becomes the market maker for other players to offer their best. Entrepreneurial freedom has done great things on the Internet, it can do the same in the Oakland A’s new ballpark.

Other Perspectives:

The original AP story via CNN

Potential problems with cellphone tickets and huzzahs for Nextel’s FanView system for Nascar races in the comments over at Broadband Reports.

Nextel’s FanView.

An artists rendering of the stadium development and new residential development that would come with it at Gizmodo.

Jon at San Francisco website, sfist, takes issue with the new ad technology:

There will also be these digital ads that change depending on the buying habits of the person walking by. Yes, if that sounds kind of scary and a little “Minority Report-ish” you would be correct. And yes, the idea that some chip on a cell phone could determine which kind of advertising we would be into would be scary.

StikyPad, on Slashdot, takes exception to the whole idea - on cell phone tickets:

Tickets on a cellphone? This is obviously change for change’s sake. Two peices of paper are just fine as it[sic]. You can put them in your shirt pocket, give one to a friend, or sell them when you can’t make a game. Why in the hell would I want to tie that to my cellphone? Even if it worked exactly as intended, it would be less functional than the existing solution. There’s a reason e-books haven’t caught on.

Video of Cisco CEO, John Chambers, and Chief Demonstration Officer, Jim Grubb, demonstrating these new technologies at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Looking at what they did with an Ultra Mobile PC, I’d love to see what someone else could do with managing and presenting that information backed by Cisco’s infrastructure.

Computerworld’s coverage of Cisco’s OpenWorld presentation.

Restaurants at the ballpark could use Cisco’s newly announced TelePresence videoconferencing system to show the game on huge screens and allow diners to contact remote friends to watch along with them.

I need more information to know how this is different from showing broadcast coverage on big TV’s in a restaurant. Are they lashing 3 HD cameras together to provide a panoramic view?

Marine Layer on New A’s Ballpark has more info and a couple of interesting ideas.

A longer video of Cisco’s OpenWorld demo from the Cisco’s Networkers user conference in Las Vegas last June via the Silicon Valley Sleuth along with the team sponsorship goings on in the valley.

Tags: Cisco, Oakland Athletics, stadium, future, marketplace