Wireless Watch for September 1, 2004

A Sponsored Football Award, with SMS Voting

Cingular Wireless is sponsoring an ABC Sports/ESPN award designation that will use SMS votes from fans to name an “All-America Player” during each week of the college football season.

Every week, ABC Sports college football analysts will choose four player-of-the-week candidates, who will be named on ESPN after the last college game each Saturday. Fans will then have until Sunday night to text in their votes, and a winner will be named during ESPN’s “SportsCenter” late night broadcast.

Each winner will be awarded a trophy, and a $1,000 scholarship from Cingular will be made in his name to his college or university. A player of the year winner, also voted on by fans, will draw a $10,000 scholarship. Fans who vote will be entered in a sweepstakes.

“Cingular, ABC Sports and ESPN share a vision of using wireless text- messaging to allow sports fans to become a part of the action,” said Daryl Evans, VP of advertising and marketing for Cingular.

Nextel is sponsoring a text message alert service that’s tracking the U.S. Open. Upoc provided the infrastructure that offers 23 opt-in SMS channels with different filters letting mobile subscribers determine which of the tourney’s breaking scores and match results they wish to receive. Tennis fans can subscribe to daily highlights, per-match highlights beginning with the quarterfinals, or per-player match results throughout the Open.