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Sports fans who use Google to keep track of their favorite teams can now enjoy a more rich experience. On Google+ today, the official Google page announced an update to its sports results that can be seen via desktop, tablets, and phones. Here are the new features:

• League schedules now grouped by day and week
• Click on a game for more details and links to websites with more details about the game
• Find out complete league standings by doing a quick search such as “NBA” and see latest stats on your favorite players
• Searching “March Madness” displays a full bracket to see where your teams currently stand

Source: Google+

Come comment on this article: Google Updates Sports Results, Brings Better Grouping And More Detail

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A Brooklynite named Matt Richardson has built a working prototype of a bicycle headlight that uses a Raspberry Pi to project his current traveling speed as he rides around the city. Richardson calls it the Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight, and it’s one of those jaw-dropping DIY projects that makes you wonder why this isn’t something you can buy in a store yet.

The prototype has a small projector mounted to the handlebars of the bicycle, which is connected to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI cable. The projector and the Raspberry Pi are both powered by a USB battery pack. The Raspberry Pi and the battery pack seem to be crudely glued to a triangular piece of wood that is strapped onto the center of the bike, but Richardson says in his video that he’s hoping that future prototypes will combine all the components into one single piece that will be mounted onto the handlebars.

The Dynamic Headlight for now only projects the speed of the bike, but Richardson is looking to add all sorts of interesting functions to future iterations like GPS and other “animations and visualizations”. He’s also planning on writing about it for MAKE and including instructions for those that are brave enough to build one for themselves.

Someone needs to get him some of that Veronica Mars Kickstarter money, stat.

Today is the first day of spring. It’s still cold here. Stupid spring.

It’s also the birthday of television legend Fred McFeely Rogers.

Mr. Rogers was a wonderful and fascinating human being. And as Mental Floss shows, there are plenty of things that you probably didn’t know about him. Did you know his middle name was McFeely? I sure didn’t.

Harvard Business School and TopCoder recently performed a study where they took a big genomics problem being worked on by Harvard Medical School, broke it into discreet abstract parts, and the threw the problem’s parts to the crowdsourced coding community to solve. What they gleaned was an interesting insight: the smartest guy in the room isn’t always your best problem solver.

Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference Wednesday, Harvard Associate Professor Karim Lakhani said crowdsourcing the genomics project did several things. First and foremost it generated dozens of different approaches to tackling the same problem.

Before the TopCoder contest was created, researchers were considering two different paths of investigation. The contest revealed 89 differing approaches to the problem, 20 of which were extreme values — possibilities Harvard and its National Institutes of Health counterparts had never considered.

Second, the contest was able to create motivation to solve problems that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a group of researchers. An institution like Harvard may have brainpower in spades, Lakhani said, but throwing a bunch of geniuses at a problem doesn’t necessarily lead to result if they’re unmotivated to solve it.

“When you go into a self-selection model you don’t have to worry about motivation,” Lakhani said. There are monetary rewards for winning a TopCoder contest, of course, but taking home a prize is not guaranteed. Everyone has their own motivation for participating, whether it’s cash, experience, scoring reputation points or even the free T-shirts given to each participant. “Because there are large numbers of people participating, there’s a greater chance you’ll find the right skills and the right motivation,” Lakhani said.

Ultimately crowdsourcing your science isn’t a replacement for having smart people of your own, Lakhani said, but it certainly helps, something Harvard’s counterparts at NASA have discovered.

CHeck out the rest of our Structure Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health
• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution

Ebscer, developer of Xploding Boxes and Runaway Trains has released a new puzzle game for BlackBerry 10. In Starbeams there are stars connected by lines like constellations and you need to color all the stars without having a similar color on the neighboring star.

The game starts of easy and gets much harder as the levels go up. The first 25 levels are free and players can upgrade to the full version via a one-time in-game purchase. Right now the game has 100 levels available to full version holders, with even more on the way with coming updates.

Starbeams is compatible with the Z10, DevAlpha and the Q10.

Click here to download Starbeams for BlackBerry 10 from BlackBerry World.

Pebble has just updated its smart watch, complete with a much-improved interface and new watchfaces. But the exciting thing here is the addition of a game you likely remember from the days when your cell phone’s screen wasn’t much different from the Pebble’s itself – Snake.

The interface changes include a menu that now puts your selected watchface at the end of a sequence of pushes of the back button no matter where you are, and the up and down buttons on the right-hand side now switch between watch faces, so you don’t have to dig through a menu to find them. Pebble also revealed in a Kickstarter update last week that it has made improvements behind the scenes to improve the text rendering engine with this firmware, laying the groundwork for its upcoming SDK.

Pebble has also improved ambient light detection on the smart watch, which is good news since the auto-backlighting feature has been one of the device’s major flaws since launch. Hard to tell so far just how much of an improvement firmware 1.9 provides in that area, but it would be hard not to improve at this point.

The Snake game is the highlight of the show, since it’s our first hint of how apps other than watches might work on the Pebble. Controls are fiddly as you might expect, but it is most definitely Snake, running on your wrist, and it’s meant more as a tech demo of what kind of limited capabilities will be available to developers in the first version of the SDK. I’m not likely to sink great hunks of time into playing it, but I’m glad it’s there. The Snake game sits in the Pebble’s main menu, and installs from the Watchfaces section of the iOS/Android app, so it’s clear the company will have to do yet more interface optimization when it’s ready to ship a proper app library.

Google announced today that it is debuting the Trekker for the first time in Canada, as it lends the devices out to some locals.

Earlier this year, Google launched the first Trekker-based imagery for the Grand Canyon. Trekker is a backpack-based camera device, which takes panoramic imagery for Street View. You can see it in the photos below.

“Two Trekkers will be worn by local mapping experts from Nunavut and members of the Google Maps team, and they’ll be used to collect panoramic Street View imagery of Canada’s most northern capital,” a Google spokesperson tells WebProNews. “This is Google’s first visit to an arctic climate in the winter… so don’t be surprised when the Street View team takes a detour to a nearby igloo!”

“As usual, the imagery will take some time to prepare for publication on Google Maps,” she notes.

Chris Kalluk, one of those local mapping experts, wrote about the experience in a post on the Google Maps blog. “I’m wearing the backpack to collect Street View imagery as I walk to the shore of Frobisher Bay, where the wind is the strongest and you can see the tide piling up mountains of sea ice,” he writes. “On the way I’ll pass sled dogs tied up outside houses, yapping in anticipation of their next trip. And I may stop to check out an igloo, built by Inuit craftsmen using methods passed down over a millennia.”

“As part of its commitment to build a comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s north, Google visited my home, Cambridge Bay, last August and published imagery of the trip that fall,” he adds. “But this visit to Iqaluit marks the first time the Google Maps team has ventured into an Arctic climate during the winter months, where average temperatures can dip below -30°C [-25°F].”

Here are pictures of Kalluk (top) and Google Maps product lead Raleigh Seamster (bottom) in the streets of Iqalit with Trekker:

“At the end of the day, when it’s time to warm up, our community will gather around two dozen computers at the local library to conduct a MapUp workshop,” says Kalluk. “I’ll work with Iqaluit’s elders, local business owners, political leaders and high school students to show them how we can use Google Map Maker to add the streets, shops and points of interest – those places that make Iqaluit home – to Google Maps.”

The Street View imagery from this endeavor will become available on Google Maps in a few months.

Earlier this week, Google launched some new mountain top Street View imagery.

As if you didn’t already know this: your cell phone carrier is trying to earn as large a profit as possible. The top three carriers in the US are public corporations, meaning they serve their shareholders first and foremost. That means beating last quarter’s earnings. As we’ve seen in the last few years, carriers will rearrange the deck chairs if it means squeezing a little more money from its customers.

Yes, the big carriers offer expensive plans. This is partly because a portion of your monthly bill goes to subsidizing the cost of your handset. You might pay $200 for a new smartphone or get a new feature phone for free, but the carrier pays full price. They make up for it by signing you up for a two-year contract. In theory, you’re paying not only for your monthly service, but also for the subsidy.

If you happen to keep your phone past the two-year term, you’re still paying the same price for service. That might seem a bit unfair, but that’s the pricing that the carrier offers. It would be nice of them to lower pricing after two years, but corporations are not in the business of being nice. They are in the business of making profits. That’s why Rich Brome’s complaint strikes me as odd. He not only bashes carriers for this practice, but uses harsh language such as “scam.”

Trust me: while carrier pricing might be unfair, it is not a scam.

Why is it not a scam? Because once your two-year term expires, you are free to leave. You are no longer under obligation to pay the carrier, which means you don’t have to pay the subsidy any longer. You can choose to take your business to a different carrier, one that charges less because it doesn’t offer subsidized pricing.

This option works out better now than ever before. If you are on Verizon, you can take your phone directly to Page Plus Cellular and they will activate it on one of their plans. Those plans are far less expensive than Verizon’s and provide similar services. You’ll lose the roaming network and LTE, which stinks, but you get full 3G service in Verizon’s coverage area.

If you have Sprint, you can take advantage of Sprint’s new policy of allowing its MVNOs to activate Sprint-branded devices. If you’re out of contract you can take your phone to any number of these MVNOs — and there are many of them — and have them use your Sprint phone directly.

There are other carriers still, such as Straight Talk, that will allow you to place their SIM card in an unlocked GSM phone from AT&T or T-Mobile. Unlocking your phone is tougher now than previously, but if you’re out of your contract term you can almost always get your carrier to authorize it. You’re then free to pay Straight Talk’s $45 per month, rather than AT&T’s $90.

Yes, there are disadvantages to using a prepaid carrier. Customer service is often worse. Roaming is typically not allowed. There are few prepaid carriers offering 4G services, whether LTE or WiMax. Those are some sacrifices, sure, but if you’re disgusted with carrier pricing it’s the only real alternative. Is it worth the savings?

To put it another way: why is it a scam for carriers to imply subsidy pricing, even after the subsidy is paid, but it’s not a scam for them to rearrange deck chairs in the name of profits? Before it introduced Share Everything plans, you could get adequate Verizon smartphone service for $90 per month. It included:

• $40 for the 450-minute plan, which included unlimited nights and weekends plus unlimited calls to Verizon’s 110-plus-million customers.

$20 for unlimited text messaging, though there was an option for $10 per month for 500 texts plus unlimited texts to and from Verizon customers.

• $30 for 2GB of data — and that used to be unlimited data.