FC Barcelona has named WhiteBit as its official cryptocurrency exchange partner for three seasons, ending in June 2025.

As part of the wide-ranging agreement, WhiteBit will engage in digital and physical activations around not only the famed men's soccer team but also the women's team and other sports in FC Barcelona's portfolio: basketball, handball, roller hockey and futsal. WhiteBit will also support the esports team and become a partner for Bar?a Innovation Hub.

Founded in Kharkvi, Ukraine, WhiteBit touts itself as Europe's largest cryptocurrency exchange. This partnership comes amid a public reckoning of other crypto companies that fell into bankruptcy, led by prominent sports sponsor FTX and joined by BlockFi, Voyager and others.

The news release announcing FC Barcelona's partnership with WhiteBit cites the crypto company's highly rated security, its ease of withdrawing funds into traditional currency and its personal data and token protections. Barcelona has struggled financially in recent years but announced a profit of nearly $100 million for the past year.

Virtual Tables is expanding on its DigiSign platform with the launch of Autographed Videos, which will allow athletes to sign their names in real-time onto a 10-second video clip during a live digital autograph session.

The original premise of DigiSign by Virtual Tables was to connect athletes or talent with fans through a virtual autograph session that would conclude with a digitally signed photograph to be downloaded, shared on social media or turned into a physical NFT. Fans could even hire third-party manufacturers to place the digital autographs on a physical jersey or ball.

But the company's latest event solution, through its proprietary software, gives fans a chance to obtain an actual autographed video. To accomplish it, an athlete will enter a web based DigiSign platform with a smart device or laptop. A DigiSign producer will then help connect the player with the fan, who also arrives via smart device or computer.

The athlete and fan are then placed in a virtual “signature room,” where the fan can witness the personalized video being autographed. The fan then is placed in a post-signature room, at which point they can download the video and/or receive an immediate automated email with the video attached.

Last fall, DigiSign by Virtual Tables reached a deal with the Athletes Unlimited League to schedule exclusive digital autograph sessions for its leading softball and lacrosse players. Prior to that, the platform hosted a virtual event with players from the WNBA's Connecticut Sun.

Most recently, the startup was selected to be part of Minnesota Twins Techstars Accelerator, which is now in its second cohort based out of Target Field in Minneapolis. The Demo Day is scheduled for Feb. 15, 2023.

Former NFL running back Merril Hoge and longtime NFL neurosurgeon Dr. Joe Maroon have joined the inaugural advisory board at smart mouthguard company Prevent Biometrics. Others added to Prevent's new advisory board include retired U.S. Army neurologist Dr. Sidney Hinds, Veritas Sports Injury Research Network CEO Dr. Peter Cummings, Scrum Ventures managing director Michael Proman, and former French rugby player Fr?d?ric Michalak.

Prevent's sensor-embedded mouthguards to track the severity of head impacts outfits youth and pro athletes across World Rugby and the 2021 women's Rugby World Cup, the Rugby Football Union, Super League Europe, Rugby Football League, U.S. youth and college football programs, as well as soldiers in the U.S. Department of Defense. Dr. Hinds currently serves as the chief health equity officer and deputy medical director for the NFLPA and the medical director for the MLSPA. Prevent Biometrics released a 2.0 version of its mouthguard in November that's intended to push the company's presence beyond football and rugby into sports such as basketball and soccer.

Maroon has worked as the Pittsburgh Steelers' team neurosurgeon since 1977 and also now serves as a senior advisor on the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee, and medical director for the WWE. Cummings is also a senior medical advisor to Tom Brady's TB12 Sports. Hoge, a former ESPN analyst, was forced to retire early from the NFL in 1994 due to head injuries. He has since authored a book titled “Brainwashed: The Bad Science Behind CTE and the Plot to Destroy Football.”

The smart watch developer Garmin released its annual fitness report on Monday, claiming that out-of-home activities such indoor swimming, rock climbing and gym-centric HIIT workouts are back to pre-pandemic levels.

The Garmin Connect Fitness Report — which relies on data from Garmin wearables — also showed that, with leisure travel returning, sports such as skiing, scuba diving, sailing and surfing rose significantly. Skiing and snowboarding particularly gained the highest numbers, rising 143% over the year. The company also listed gravel cycling as a burgeoning activity, up 40% from 2021.

Conversely, the company's data showed that home workouts such as yoga and indoor cycling leveled off in 2022, which could be viewed as a sign that Covid-19 is no longer affecting workout habits. Garmin's report specifically said sailing rose by 39%, Pilates by 38%, surfing by 35%, esports by 35%, lap swimming by 34%, breathwork by 28%, stair-climbing by 24%, strength training by 20%, rock climbing by 17%, elliptical training by 15%, triathlon by 11%.

Garmin relied on its smart watch products such as the Forerunner 955 Solar and the Forerunner 55 for running data and its quatix 7 and Instinct 2-Surf Edition for watersport data.

WIN Reality, the virtual baseball tool that simulates live at-bats through a Meta Quest Oculus II, has designed a new truncated weighted bat attachment for release in March.

As of now, users either swing a basic remote or place an attachment on their regular bat when facing virtual reality pitchers. But WIN Reality's new product is roughly a third the size of an actual bat and can be adjusted to match the weight specifications of what a player usually swings.

“We want to be able to have our players practice exactly how they play,” WIN Reality‘s head of data Chris Fiaschetti told SportTechie at the Baseball Technology Innovation Exhibition during last week's MLB Winter Meetings. “So, this is actually weighted to specifications that a player would want to have. A drop-3, a drop-8, a drop-12, depending on their level.”

“You're able to swing and have the same feedback from the weight of the bat that [you're] swinging or mimicking…This is an alternative [for users]. Sometimes in limited space, you can't use the huge bat because you're in a room that's small.”

At last week's Winter Meetings, MLB teams were particularly enthralled with the Trajekt Arc, an 3D pitching machine that can simulate every big-league pitcher and every big-league pitch down to 0 to 1% accuracy to help players prepare to face the same pitcher in real life. As of last season, seven teams — including the Chicago Cubs and purportedly the New York Mets — deployed the Trajekt product, a number that the company believes will rise to 10 to 12 in 2023.

But WIN Reality is already utilized by the majority of MLB franchises and over 100 NCAA baseball and softball programs. It contains a digital library of approximately 7,000 actual pitchers, featuring two million of their pitches. A joint study in 2001 between MLB and WIN Reality showed that big league hitters increased their batting averages by 19% and on base percentage by 12% when using the product pre-game.

“We work with Major League players every day,” Fiaschetti told SportTechie last week. “We have players that are really, really into it and use it on a regular cadence. They use it in a bunch of different ways. Whatever it is they have to do to get themselves mentally prepared to be able to dominate that day is generally the idea. But as a game preparation tool, can certainly facilitate that, as well as a skill development tool in the off-season. So, we see a number of guys that pick it up in the off-season and are able to stay sharp because there's not as much live pitching, of course, in the offseason. This is their alternative to that.”

As recently as June, the company raised $45 million in funding from Spectrum Equity, a firm specializing in internet and software.

Conversational AI platform MeetKai has become the official AI partner of the Los Angeles Chargers to develop new in-stadium and at-home fan experiences, including a digital locker room tour accessed through the team's website and app. The deal kicked off Sunday with MeetKai's logo displayed on video boards inside SoFi Stadium.

The Chargers are the first U.S. sports team to partner with MeetKai, whose AI chatbot has more than 50 million users worldwide mostly in Europe and Asia. MeetKai was co-founded in 2018 by James Kaplan and Weili Dai, the billionaire co-founder of semiconductor giant Marvell Technology. MeetKai describes itself as a “metaverse” company and its website shows its chatbot answering questions across food, entertainment, news, and more.

“What we're trying to accomplish more broadly, is that we built all this tech around AI to have it be able to have a conversation with people,” Kaplan told SportTechie. “And the next step of that is to put them into 3D spaces where those conversations are a lot more immersive than either a little chat bubble on a webpage, or hidden voice on your phone.”

MeetKai's website showcases its animated chatbot integrated into an Oculus virtual reality headset for guided fitness classes and VR tours of museums. Other companies creating AI chatbots for teams and leagues in the sports industry include GameOn and Satisfi Labs.

“It's a lot more interesting if you can do things like searching for [NFL] plays by a description of what happened in them, and then being able to see them in a 3D context,” Kaplan said about MeetKai's potential activations with the Chargers. “Being able to search to say things like, can you show me clips of every play that's had an interception in the first quarter in the last season? What we're trying to do is partly for the fans, but also largely the team itself. Members of the training staff are one of the bigger intended users, for them to pull up this type of information and this type of content.”

Voon Sports, a tech company whose devices help soccer players train technical skills, has signed Leeds United as its first partner in the English Premier League.

Founded as Futboltek before its summer rebrand, Voon Sports makes sensor-laden panels that detect ball impact. The stand-up panels flash colors to signal what action the player should take next, and then they collect data on such metrics as reaction time, precision and power. This information can be used to follow progress and develop individualized training plans.

LaLiga club Real Sociedad has been a development partner since 2019. Among its other listed adopters are the Swiss Football School and Marc Cucurella, a Spanish national team player who starts for Chelsea, through his camps. Leeds United is Voon Sports' first client in any of the top-tier international leagues.

The Women's Tennis Association will enlist the cloud protection firm Zscaler and the company's Zero Trust Exchange platform to secure the tennis tour's userbase, data and infrastructure.

The WTA Tour — comprised of roughly 1,600 players and over 50 events across six continents — was looking for safer Internet experience for its players, staff, media and global audience. According to Paul Sheth, the head of information security at the WTA, the well-established Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange enables the tour to “move away from third party VPN solutions, thus minimizing the attack surface and eliminating additional point product purchases while also reducing operational overhead.”

The collaboration with Zscaler accelerates the tour's digital transformation initiatives. It gives WTA staff and authorized entities secure and fast SaaS access in private and public clouds, as well as Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) encrypted traffic and critical threat security. Zscalar should also enhance the digital capabilities of the tour's large hybrid workforce and protect its work-from-anywhere business model.

FIFA's high-performance team, led by legendary former Arsenal manager Ars?ne Wenger, has developed 11 new advanced metrics that will be made available to broadcast and digital audiences during the World Cup in Qatar.

The new metrics, based largely on player and ball tracking data, will be used to inform fans during the World Cup as well as be used by FIFA for internal uses. They are:

Possession control
Ball recovery time
Line breaks
Defensive line height and team length
Final-third entries
Forced turnovers
Pressure on the ball
Expected goals
Team shape
Receptions behind midfield
Defensive lines and phases of play

Wenger is FIFA's chief of global football development, and the high-performance team includes analysts, data scientists and engineers.

The federation said it will conduct developmental analysis to track longitudinal changes in how the sport is played as well as have more objective measures about the physical and tactical demands of the game at the highest level, with an eye toward understanding player development from lower levels. Chyron's TRACAB provided the optical tracking cameras and algorithms powering electronic performance and tracking systems (EPTS) in the 2018 World Cup.

FIFA World Cup sponsor Visa says that consumer spending on Visa cards at this year's tournament in Qatar has already surpassed total Visa card spending recorded at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The credit card company says 94% of purchases in Doha have been cashless and 88% have been made through Visa's 5,300 contactless payment terminals inside Qatar's World Cup venues.

This year's World Cup data from Visa accounts for spending at all tournament venues from Nov. 20 kickoff through group stage matches on Dec. 2. Visa card spending is up 192% compared to the 2014 World Cup and is already 89% of what Visa recorded at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Average in-stadium transaction amount for all matches during this year's group stage was $23 USD, despite Qatar's ban of beer sales at World Cup venues. For all matches though Dec. 2, the top three spend categories were: Merchandise (47%), Food & Beverages (36%), and FIFA ticketing (11%).

Visa is also piloting facial recognition payments at the World Cup in partnership with Qatar National Bank and biometrics company Pop ID.

The AI-powered weight training product Perch claims it had a record performance in 2022 after gaining traction with players and coaches across college and professional sports leagues.

Developed by three former MIT students, Perch combines a compact 3D camera with machine learning to produce a foot-long device that calculates a weightlifter's sets, reps, velocity and power output. The device — consisting of a battery pack and smart tablet — can be attached to any weight rack, and once the user logs on to the tablet, the 3D technology provides the athlete and his strength coach with training data via a mobile phone or the web.

According to co-founder Jacob Rothman, the company tripled its Annual Recurring Revenue and installed hundreds of its units with new teams such as the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL, Miami Heat of the NBA, Toronto Maple Leafs of the NHL and Auburn, Wake Forest, Oregon and Baylor from the NCAA.

In addition, the firm raised a $4 million funding round in September with significant investment from Miami Dolphins cornerback Byron Jones, bringing Perch's total investment to $6 million since its inception in 2017. The company also doubled its staff from 10 to 20.

Over the summer of 2022, the USFL also incorporated Perch into its core training facility in Birmingham, Ala., using Perch's proprietary AI technology to monitor and then store players' weightlifting data heading into their season. The company's longstanding clients, from before 2022, continue to include the Dolphins, New York Giants, Tennessee Titans, Seattle Seahawks, Jacksonville Jaguars, Philadelphia Phillies, Orlando Magic and Columbus Crew, as well as college programs such as Maryland, Ole Miss, LSU and Georgia.