Want to know what college coaches all over the country are going to be talking about when it comes to technology in 2011?  Here’s our list of this year’s top seven technology stories you’ll need to know as we start the new year:

1. iPad 2 Its the original iPad but smaller, lighter, and rumored to have dualcameras. Done deal.

2. iPhone on Verizon The rumors of this have been going on for a long time now, and yet somehow they have never come to fruition. Well, from what we’re hearing, 2011 should be the year that Verizon takes up the iPhone and tests its network on the most formidable of phones.

3. 4G and the expansion of the mobile web 4G is a marketing term used to describe the next generation of mobile standards. This year will be the break-out year for 4G and the connection rates [...]

At the AVCA convention Front Rush released the University Athlete Auto-sync. When you are at a tournament and create a note in University Athlete, that data is automatically added to Front Rush. You literally don’t have to do anything. There are no exports, no imports, nothing. You don’t even have to go back to your computer. Front Rush’s servers speak directly with University Athlete’s servers and sync the new data automatically. It is almost too easy!

So in our last post we spoke about the up and coming Facebook messages section and the @facebook email addresses. Over the past week, we have had access to the new Facebook system and just wanted to share some of our observations.

If you are not friends with the recruit then you are at a disadvantage. If you are friends with a recruit, and you send a recruit an email then that email will go directly into their priority inbox. If you are not friends with the recruit and you email them, it will automatically go into the “other” inbox which is a secondary inbox designed for bulk messages.

Secondly, if you are friends with the recruit then your picture shows up next to your email message. This makes the email familiar to the recruit and gives a layer of comfort. If you [...]

Facebook email addresses?

On Monday, November 15th, 2010, Facebook announced that they are overhauling their message system and will provide “email addresses” to their users if they choose to opt-in.

This announcement potentially is game changing for college coaches, particularly relative to recruiting abilities and NCAA rules.

Overview Facebook basically took email, instant messaging, and text messaging and combined them into one. If a recruit gives you their new @facebook.com address, and you send them an email, a couple things happen depending on where they are:

If they are not in Facebook, it will show up as a standard message. If they are in Facebook at the time, the email will show up as an Instant Message instead of as a standard email or Facebook message. If they have the Facebook app on their mobile device (which they probably do), then it will show [...]

So we recently went through the process of finding a new office…

We essentially outgrew our old space because of new hires and needed something much larger.  At first, it was exciting and fun to check out new digs, brainstorm ideas, check out office furniture online, and everything else that comes along with a big move.

What we quickly realized is that what seemed like would be a fun project was really just a time vampire.  It sucked the productivity right out of us.

Fortunately, we realized this early and began scheduling times to check-out offices during off hours, and when we had our top priority projects completed.  However, this process has made us think about what other time vampires, maybe more subtle that exist throughout our typical day.

Think about how many times you check your email (studies show its much more than you may [...]

Just recently in the news we read of a professor from Umea University in Northern Sweden who had his laptop stolen. Its not the price to replace the laptop that concerned him, but rather the 10 years work of work that he had saved on it.

What makes the story interesting is that a week after the laptop was stolen, he received a USB stick in the mail with all of his data. The thief spent hours downloading it and returned it to him (minus the laptop).

This story inspired us to speak briefly about some really common security issues that we see on a day to day in our work with college coaches who are clients of Front Rush. We aren’t going to get into the debate on requiring alpha-numeric-capslock passwords, but here are just two subtle items we wanted to [...]

More and more universities are using Gmail as their primary email client. The general consensus is that everyone dislikes the fact that Gmail groups emails together…or “threads” them in what they call their “conversation view”.

For many users, this is the #1 way emails get lost. For example, if you send 10 emails to recruits with a subject “Great Game!” and 10 recruits reply, you have to manually sort through the 10 “Great Game!” emails to answer each as all ten are grouped together. Oh, its a mess…big time.

As of just a few days ago, Gmail is giving you the ability to turn this off. Its this easy…

1) Sign into your Gmail account 2) Click the “Settings” button at the top 3) Under “conversation view” choose “Conversation view off” 4) Click “save changes”

For all our Gmail users who look to us for direction and advice, [...]

Is the Blackberry’s reign over in college sports?

There is no doubt which device (between Blackberry, iPhone, Android*) is dominant in college sports. The Blackberry is the most used device by Coaches and due to University contract deals with Verizon, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. But…and this is a big “but”…this is definitely shifting.

- In the corporate world, financial institutions who historically distributed Blackberries are now allowing their workers to buy iPhone and Android devices. - In the consumer world, iPhones and Android devices are gobbling up market share / taking it away from Blackberry. - In the “Geek” world, the Blackberry is considered old, boring, and old. - RIM (company that produces the Blackberry) recently came out with the new Torch device. This device was supposed to be somewhat game changing but has been met with an at best…”meh” attitude. - Our [...]

Today was our first ever Front Rush Release Conf. This is a platform we put together to announce some really cool new stuff. You can watch the video at the home-page for the Release Conf at http://bit.ly/frliveconf or just click on the vid below.

Wayne Gretsky always said, “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.”

Well the proverbial puck in the recruiting space is going mobile. We used to see a trend of coaches moving toward smart phones with the Blackberry being the de facto choice. It was really just a matter of which Blackberry.

We are now seeing this trend shifting slightly where it is no longer the goal to have a “smart phone” but rather to have the smartest phone.

For instance, the Blackberry users who are college coaches are dropping off as recruiters are exchanging these devices for Android devices and iPhones because of their more advanced web-browsing and app support. The concept of an iPad, only a drawing board idea just one year ago, is now exploding in the recruiting ranks. And in the consumer space, expect to see [...]