Welcome!

AJAX & REA Authors: Stephen Pierzchala, Sebastian Kruk, Elizabeth White, PR.com Newswire, Chris Pollach

News Feed Item

Portland Trail Blazers Launch "Social TV" iPhone app using Xamarin

The NBA team blazes the trail with mobile app as a social, second-screen experience to live TV

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Xamarin, the company empowering over 190,000 developers to build rich, native iOS and Android apps, today announced that the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team has launched a native iOS app using Xamarin's platform.

The Trail Blazers launched Trail Blazers Mobile just in time for the NBA season, with the goal of deepening fan engagement before, during and after games. At game time, the app delivers experiences tailored to the fan's location. Fans watching the game, either at home or in the arena, can "check in" to win tickets and autographed gear. Fans on the go can get live, play-by-play updates. And fans watching the live TV game can chat with other fans, using the app and their device as a "second-screen" social experience that augments live TV viewing. Between games, fans can buy tickets, access game schedules, news and blog feeds, and live stream Trail Blazers.TV shows.

The team's digital media group chose Xamarin's platform over HTML5-based tools because of Xamarin's performance and native user experience advantages, which were a must for this rich media, real-time mobile app.

"As an NBA team with an extremely savvy fan base, the Trail Blazers had to develop an app with an experience as fast, exciting and dynamic as the game itself," said Dan Harbison, senior director of digital media for the Trail Blazers. "With Xamarin, our app delivers a rich media experience that brings the game closer to our fans wherever they are."

An Android version of the app is already in the works. Thanks to Xamarin's platform, the team is able to share nearly 70 percent of source code between the native iOS and Android apps, which will accelerate the delivery of the mobile experience to fans using Android devices.

Enabling viewers to socially engage via mobile devices while watching live TV, often dubbed "Social TV," is increasingly seen as a way to drive up viewership and engagement. According to a 2012 Nielson report, 88 percent of tablet owners and 86 percent of smartphone owners said they used their device while watching TV at least once during a 30-day period, with greater than 40 percent reporting daily usage of mobile devices while TV watching.

Xamarin reports an increase in demand for their platform from media and entertainment companies. "Experience is the differentiator in the highly competitive media space," commented Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Xamarin. "Media companies are increasingly turning to Xamarin because they need to deliver native, social, mobile-unique experiences that can reach and engage users across a wide variety of devices."

Compared to the rest of the NBA, the Portland Trail Blazers are leading the way in next-generation social and mobile sporting experiences. Less than half of the 30 NBA teams have a mobile app, and only a handful of those offer a second screen, "Social TV" experience that augments live TV. Thanks to Xamarin, the Trail Blazers can reach fans and deepen engagement and viewership across mobile device platforms.

About Xamarin
Xamarin's mission is to make it fast, easy and fun to build amazing, native mobile apps using C#. Xamarin's cross-platform mobile development software allows developers to use their existing skills, code and tools to build fully native apps for iOS and Android that can share code with Windows apps. Developers get to market quickly with native apps while sharing up to 90 percent of source code across device platforms. From indie developers to consulting firms to enterprise organizations, businesses of all sizes use Xamarin to accelerate and simplify the creation of high performance, native consumer, corporate and gaming apps. For more information, visit http://xamarin.com/ or https://twitter.com/xamarinhq.

About the Portland Trail Blazers
Members of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Portland Trail Blazers were founded in 1970 and purchased by Paul G. Allen in 1988. The team's rich heritage includes 29 playoff appearances, three trips to the NBA Finals, an NBA championship in 1977 and a commitment to community service and sustainability. With a corporate mission to make it better in the community, the Trail Blazers strive to help children and their families throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington live, learn and play. The Trail Blazers are the first and only professional sports franchise to receive the prestigious National Points of Light Award for excellence in corporate and community service. The Trail Blazers home arena, the Rose Garden, became the first existing professional sports venue in the world to receive LEED Gold Certification. The team is also one of the founding members of the Green Sports Alliance. For more information, visit www.trailblazers.com.

Media Contact:
Nina Gill
Schwartz MSL Boston
xamarin@schwartzmsl.com
781-684-0770

SOURCE Xamarin

More Stories By PR Newswire

Copyright © 2007 PR Newswire. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PRNewswire content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of PRNewswire. PRNewswire shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

Cloud Expo Breaking News
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
“Cloud has everything to do with what has happened with Big Data,” explained Jason Deck, Director of Strategic Alliances at Logicworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Big Data doesn’t exist in its easily accessible way without cloud. From reduced startup costs, to cheap storage, to fast processing, to adequate security, to the easy incorporation of third-party analytics tools, cloud made Big Data accessible to customers of all sizes, with all different bud...
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...
SYS-CON Events announced today that BUMI (Backup My Info!), the premium provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for small to mid-sized businesses, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Manhattan-based BUMI (Backup My Info!) is a premium managed service provider specializing in online data backup and recovery. Founded in 2002, the company's data backup and recovery serv...
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in co...
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.” ...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...