Play-by-play without delay
As I waded through the crowd outside of Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater on Saturday evening I spotted three or four guys dressed in referees shirts and wearing some tall contraption with a sign on it. Closer inspection revealed they were selling radios for $25 which would provide the Troy State-OSU broadcast to fans with “no delay.”
Apparently, the over-the-air broadcasts of college football games reach the earphones of listeners in the stadiums a few seconds after the play has ended. That makes for a frustrating listening experience.
So, someone came up with this alternative that catches the broadcast as it happens. I thought the sales folks were enterprising people who hit on an ingenious gimmick. Turns out, I was told, they were employed by the university.
Each of the four sales people I saw outside the stadium seemed to be doing a brisk business about one hour before kickoff.
Business Writer
New Data Center: Backup for your Backup
The highlight of my week has been touring the new Perimeter Technology Center data center facility that was just completed. The 23,000-square-foot building has everything to keep a business up-and-running during a disaster and access to its critical data.
A virtual whose who of Oklahoma City’s business community showed up Thursday for the open house that Perimeter held to celebrate its opening. The photo below shows part of the crowd and a pair of tents just outside the doors from which food and drink were served.
In the video above, Chief Operating Officer Stan Chase talks about the building and what it offers.
Jim Stafford
Business Reporter 
OC Rolls Out the iPhone
I walked into the Gaylord Student Center on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University Saturday morning and the first person I ran into was Dr. Mike O’Neal, university president. I was there to cover the first day of the school’s iPhone distribution to all full-time students for the fall semester. As O’Neal and I greeted one another I noticed he was carrying an iPhone in his hand. So I asked him to pose with it, and this is the result.
More about OC’s iPhone event in Tuesday’s Business section of The Oklahoman.
Business Reporter
The iPhone Goes to School
Oklahoma Christian University’s decision to provide an iPhone and a Macbook laptop to every fulltime student continues to earn national publicity for the Oklahoma City school. The latest publication to spotlight OC — and three other universities doing the same thing this year — was the New York Times, which published a feature on the iPhone program in Friday’s paper.
With a headline “Welcome Freshman, Have an iPod,” the Times article discusses some of the reasons schools are choosing to provide their students with iPhones and includes some criticism of the program. Professors fear that the iPhone will distract students during class and discourage participation. An excerpt:
“While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.
“Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.
“Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.”
In addition to Oklahoma Christian, schools providing laptops to the students include the University of Maryland, Abilene Christian University and Freed-Hardeman University. As is OC, both ACU and Freed-Hardeman are affiliated with the Churches of Christ.
Jim Stafford
Business Reporter
What’s yellow and black and read all over?
The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!
As Navin R. Johnson Jr. said in The Jerk, “this is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people!”
Actually, the new AT&T Real Yellow Pages for Oklahoma City made its debut on Monday in a ceremony at the Chesapeake Boathouse. The phone company is distributing 1.2 million of the fat, yellow books this year.
The cover features — what else? — a color photograph of the Chesapeake Boathouse, which has become a landmark on the Oklahoma River just south of downtown.
The Chesapeake Boathouse is also on the cover of the AT&T Real Yellow Pages Companion directory, a smaller, “more portable” version of the traditional print directory.
Delivery starts this week and lasts approximately four weeks.
Jim Stafford
Business Reporter
