SortiPreneur

Inspired by Kaka

Milan's Brazilian superstar Kaka just rejected $700K per week in wages to stay at his club, turning down a transfer bid from Manchester City.  It is a truly inspiring move and I had to mention it.  And, it's not entirely unrelated to this blog's main themes.

I try to focus my blog on value creation.  Wrongly, value creation is solely associated with transaction value.  However, time plays a tricky role in calculating the total value of any deal.  With his decision to stay at Milan,, I think Kaka's made the value maximizing choice for his career.

HeliSkiing in the Kackars

I had heard about how wonderful heliskiing is from a few good friends who've done it before and have been following Fabrice Grinda's writing on it, but I had no idea that the experience would be this amazing.

I got the opportunity to join a group of friends for a weekend of heliskiing in the Kackar mountain range in the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey.  We were not terribly lucky about the weather, and on Sunday, the only day we got to fly, I learned that there is such a thing as "too much snow" (4-6 meters base, 1-2 meters powder), but the little I got to ski, espceially higher up in the mountains, was incomparable to anything I have experienced in my 30 years of skiing.

The outfit Turkey HeliSki is a 3 year-old operation and they do an amazing job.  A friend warned me before I left that I was about to take a very expensive step and he was right.  I am getting ready to book next year's trip.

PS. that's my friend Refik in the pic who was skiing with a seperate group, since no one in our group took a camera up :)

SportsMates

I came across SportsMates (via Can Karasikli). I had written about sports social networking before. I continue to think that, like music (think MySpace's early days), sports fandom is another universal bonding agent. SportMates seems to follow the blogging-community-as-the-network model.
It looks like Joga has failed to maintain traction after the world cup. Alexa reports that NBX is ahead of SportsMates. I remain curious to see how this will play out.

Signs and Soccer

I have been meaning to blog about this article since having read Freakonomics, probably the best non-fiction I read this year.  The article deals with the curious phenomenon of why elite soccer players tend to have birthdays concentrated in the first three months of the year.  Worth a read.

Joga Arrives

On the heels of my posts on how sports, specifically football (soccer) could be the unifying factor in a MySpace-like social networking platform, came the announcement for Joga, the new social networking platform from Google and Nike.  A nice tie-in is the Joga Bonita TV campaign starring one of my heroes, Eric Cantona.  I expect Joga to capitalize on the World Cup fever.  There has to be independent plays going after this niche, too.  I am excited to see the space develop.

UPDATE: I commented on Baris's blog on how Joga's biggest assets (Google and Nike) will also be its biggest handicaps.

 

Sports Social Network: NBX

I have been writing about the lack of sports social networking platforms, and here I come across NBX via the a:c. It seems to incorporate much of what's been on my mind: groups, video, photos and betting stuf.  However, for a global play, this needs to be for soccer (football).

The Homeless World Cup

My friend Craig Thompson told me about a project that he’s now involved in: The Homeless World Cup. It sounds like an excellent way to leverage the power of soccer, the social draw of which I find consistently under-utilized, to help alleviate the problems and pains associated with homelessness.

 

Here are some stats from the 2004 World Cup:

• Today 78 of the 204 World Cup players work in regular jobs
• 16 signed with football clubs or work as coaches
• 95 improved their housing situation

I think it’s additionally brilliant because soccer is inherently a street game. The common story these days is the soccer star rising from the streets (usually poor, if not literally homeless) very quickly (most exceptionally talented players are discovered and make it through the very efficient filters of the game by their late teens), but, in the process, losing ties to their community. True, they remain role-models to the kids on the street, but the interaction is little.

The Homeless World Cup is an opportunity for the global soccer industry to pay its debt to the cradle of the game – the streets.

Sports Citizen Journalism Will Explode at the World Cup

Rafat Ali posted that FIFA has lifted its restrictions on the digital publishing of photos.  My contention has long been that sports is the only other super-strong unifier of people (along with music).  This move by FIFA should unleash a web of activity of fans, led by those in the stands in Germany, publishing photos and commentary on the World Cup this year.  Get your camera phones ready.

Death of a Legend

The football (soccer) legend George Best has died after a series of problems with his health.  Although I am not old enough to have seen him play, he would have been fun to watch and, probably, more fun to hang out with.

He has a few classic quotes I found amusing,including:

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."

"I used to go missing a lot... Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World."