Welcome to The Tech Race.
Do you know your dribble and crossover speed?
Who has the best technique?
This basketball will answer all these questions.
(PERFORMANCE, POWER, PRECISION, TRAINING,)
(SPEED, GADGET, ENDURANCE, DATA, INTELLIGENT BASKETBALL)
This smart technology measures your dribbling speed,
analyses your ball-handling skills
and lets you know what to work on
in order to enhance your performance.
Connected to a smartphone, it enables players to
see advanced metrics, which helps them improve
in record time,
and ensures they keep on challenging themselves.
Meet your virtual coach.
(UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)
(NEW YORK)
We visited Long Island, New York,
to meet the two brothers who invented this technology.
DribbleUp really redefines the way basketball is played.
You can practise your dribbling on your sidewalk,
on your driveway, wherever it is,
but it's not an interactive social experience.
DribbleUp makes dribbling fun, amazing
and extremely effective.
Basketball changes through this technology,
since now everything will become measured.
Before now it was all talk.
How good is your ball-handling?
What's your dribble speed? Nobody knew.
In order to use the device, the basketball must be presented
to the system by scanning it with a smartphone,
that in turn puts its tracking system to work.
All ball movements are then recorded
and captured in real time, obtaining crucial
and precise data regarding ball movements and speed.
My left hand improved a lot,
because it was always my weaker hand,
and my crossover is always improving.
I always bring the ball everywhere I go.
The beauty of DribbleUp is there's really only one part -
it's the basketball.
The other part is your smartphone.
So, because it's one part, it's perfectly balanced.
There's nothing shaking inside here.
This is an official-size ball.
The mobile application and intelligent basketball
act as a virtual coach,
offering the player many advantages
compared to a traditional coach.
Trainers are always expensive, and they're always...
You have to go to a trainer every time.
You have to meet them at a place.
You have to go places. You have to pay for them.
This ball, it's a one-time pay
and you can do it wherever you want.
By translating live, accurate data
onto the mobile app, players can analyse their technique
and weaknesses on the go, and with precision.
With no need for human intervention,
basketball athletes can enhance their skills anywhere,
any time and faster than ever before.
(OLYMPIC GAMES BERLIN 1936)
The presence of basketball first at the Olympic Games
dates back to Berlin 1936.
The United States
is by far the most successful country in the sport.
Men's teams have won 15 out of the 18 Olympic tournaments
and women eight out of ten.
In the last 30 years, the men's USA basketball team
has only been beaten twice -
in the Olympic Games Seoul 1988,
where the Soviet Union won a gold medal, and in
Athens 2004, where Argentina was proclaimed champion.
How did these young brothers invent this smart technology?
After playing himself, Mark had the need to find a way
to train basketball on his own.
Eric then made the idea reality.
My brother and co-founder Mark played basketball
all throughout high school,
total MVP, basketball nut.
And what he used to do was he used to watch YouTube videos,
and basketball DVDs, and then go outside and try to copy it.
My background is engineering and computer vision.
We came up with this idea of using your smartphone camera
to track your basketball dribbling.
The testing process of the technology was extensive.
The founders had to travel the world to get feedback
from the best trainers, pro players and top athletes.
To create the tracking technology
was a very, very big challenge.
Our app uses a smartphone camera to track
the Dribble-Up basketball live,
and to do that took us about a year.
We went through all sorts of different technologies
and software, and we got a patent granted
on the tracking technology for our invention.
We actually invented the term "dribble speed".
The dribbling speed is the maximum speed at which a player
can manoeuvre the ball whilst moving in a given direction,
avoiding defenders' attempts to intercept the ball.
Rock with the right hand. Rock it with the left.
It gives them homework to do,
so when they come work out with us,
we give them a baseline of what we want them to work on,
and then it gives them that extra motivation
to just take that ball home,
and do the DribbleUp, and then it gives them homework,
so that when we come back we can really see
the level of improvement from earlier in the week
to the next week.
The founders are already looking at how to apply
this technology to other Olympic disciplines.
After reaping great benefits for basketball,
football is now in the spotlight,
but what will be the next ball they dribble?