Jackson Jambalaya

Change if coming to football stadiums across America.  The NFL decreed they shalt offer wi-fi service to the fans. What does that mean? Watch the game, get hungry, open an app on your cellphone, order your food, runner delivers it to your seat. Eat.  Fortune magazine reported last fall:

"You want a 49ers Dog? How about a drink with that?"

Doug Garland pulls out his iPhone and gets ready to take my order. After I confirm that, yes, thank you, I'd like a hot dog and Coke, the general manager of stadium experience and technology for the San Francisco 49ers taps his screen and waits. We're sitting on the 45-yard line, five rows up from the sideline, during a recent game. With 12:50 to go in the second quarter, the 49ers are leading 10-0, but the Minnesota Vikings have the ball. The home crowd groans as Vikings backup running back Toby Gerhart barrels around right end for a six-yard gain -- then cheers when the play is wiped out by a holding penalty.

Neither of us is eager to make a run to the concession stand. And Garland is about to show me why -- today and in the future at 49ers games -- it won't be necessary. Using the new app that his group has been developing, he's going to order food to be delivered right to our seats. There's just one small problem -- the app won't load. Instead, it offers a message: "No data connection." Undeterred, Garland borrows a phone from one of the other dozen or so team employees who are testing the app's functionality on this chilly Sunday evening at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, and successfully places the order. Minutes later, with 8:17 left before halftime, a runner arrives with our hot dogs and Cokes, nicely wrapped and bagged. So what if we're missing straws?

"Hey, not bad, right?" says Garland, 53, a veteran of Yahoo, Google, and Shazam who joined the Niners this year. "This is version 1.0 of the app we're testing here. But we're already on to 2.0 back in the office. Like any startup, we're trying to rapidly iterate."

Imagine if Silicon Valley created a football franchise. The owner/CEO would be barely more than 30, and he would talk a lot about learning to embrace failure. The president would be a veteran of Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube. The coach would be interested in what analytics could tell him about his two-minute offense. The COO would be finding ways to harness the power of Big Data when negotiating contracts. And, of course, the team would play in a brand-new, solar-powered football palace with Wi-Fi robust enough to make folks in the Googleplex jealous -- enabling fans to use a mind-blowing mobile app that might just redefine the live sports experience.

Welcome to the San Francisco 49ers, startup edition. With a history dating back to 1946 and a glorious past that includes five Super Bowl victories, the Niners are one of the National Football League's most venerable franchises. But under the leadership of owner Jed York, 32, the team has undergone a complete reboot over the past few years.....

For York and his executives, that means not only building in unprecedented technology infrastructure but also establishing the new normal for attending professional sporting events. "We're really trying to go for big here," says 49ers president Gideon Yu, 42, who joined the team in 2011 after stints as CFO of Facebook and YouTube. "And if we do it right, we can change the way live sports is experienced. And that's very Silicon Valley. That is, you know, there's a situation right now that needs to be massively fixed. It's run by incumbents. How do we go in there and use IT to fix it or to make it better?"

On a morning in early March, some 2,700 sports-obsessed brainiacs packed into the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for the seventh annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The event was co-founded by Daryl Morey, a former Boston Celtics executive who is now the GM of the Houston Rockets, as a way for sports enthusiasts bookish enough to know the meaning of the word "sabermetrics" to share ideas. It barely filled a lecture hall the first time. This year the conference drew executives from most NBA teams and more than a dozen franchises from the NFL and Major League Baseball. With Ph.D.-level analysis of performance data rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance in sports, it has become almost a must-go event.....

The 49ers have also come up with creative new ways to market premium seating beyond the traditional suites (though it does have 176 of them). There will be a variety of hospitality areas and clubs in the stadium. One level of premium seats will include an area where ticket holders mix and observe from the field level. Another will allow fans to watch the game from the stadium's landscaped "green roof." In a final California touch, there are plans for bicycle valet parking on game days.

But the biggest focus is using technology to transform the stadium experience. The challenge is significant. Anyone who has attended large sporting events in the smartphone era has almost certainly had the frustrating experience of slow or nonexistent data service. The basic reason is that cellular networks are designed to serve people moving around spread-out areas, not huge clusters actively using data in one spot.

The NFL has decreed that all stadiums should provide Wi-Fi, but progress is uneven, in part because every team other than the 49ers is dealing with a need to retrofit existing facilities. Advances in Wi-Fi technology, combined with the 49ers' innovative network design, says Garland, will allow the stadium to offer speedy service to all 68,500 fans at each game -- a big leap compared with anything else in pro sports.

To hardcore fans, the picture the 49ers paint of the tech-enabled game day is tantalizing. To begin with, everyone in the stadium will be able to order food from smartphones or tablets for pickup or in-seat delivery. If you're feeling the need for a pit stop, you can check the wait times at the closest restroom. If Colin Kaepernick runs for a touchdown, your app can access video replays from both the stadium's cameras and those of the TV broadcast. If there's a controversial call, you can listen to what the 49ers radio team is saying about it, then switch over to the other team's broadcast. If your daughter wears you down and persuades you to buy her a Kaepernick jersey, you can order it from your seat, and have it waiting at the team store for you to pick up on the way out.

The cost of creating this is huge, of course. The stadium budget has risen recently from $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion, largely due to the tech ramp-up. And the pressure is intense. Unlike most startups, the stadium won't have a soft launch. When San Francisco tees the ball up in its first home game next season, a stadium full of fans will be forming strong opinions about the experience. So the 49ers have boosted the limited Wi-Fi at Candlestick and will spend the team's final season there doing as many trial runs as possible.

 At halftime of the game against the Vikings, the team's last preseason home contest, Garland and 15 other staffers working on the app test gather around a conference table in a windowless room in the stadium operations center for a debriefing. They rip into the problems mercilessly. "The app is really slow in stat view," points out one. "And it's not intuitive to get back to the game feed." Some food orders are taking too long to process or not going through at all. But the group seems excited by its progress, and Garland concludes with a pep talk. "We need to go as fast as we can through the Super Bowl, guys, and we'll have time to breathe in March," he says.

Down on the field a short time later, Garland talks about the potential for exporting the team's technology to other sports franchises. They've even discussed forming a new company to do that. "We think what we're building is pretty cool and there might be a market for it," Garland says. "But, of course, we have to make it work for the 49ers first. Otherwise we're all in trouble." Just then a 49ers running back dives into the end zone, the crowd erupts, music blares, and the cheerleaders begin to dance. It'll soon be a made-for- app moment. Rest of article