Georgia Tech University's athletic department will be launching applications for various sports to keep users up to date on games and teams.

The institute?s athletic department has signed an agreement with Whoop, which will enable the university?s sports professionals to easily produce and publish mobile applications. The applications will run on any mobile device. 

?When Georgia Tech?s athletics department decided to expand into the mobile medium, it looked at a number of different options,? said Jeff Wilson, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Whoop Mobile, Atlanta, GA. ?Most were from iPhone developers and even a few BlackBerry developers.

?However it didn?t make strategic sense to focus on just one platform like iPhone because that would exclude more than 85 percent of the audience it sought to reach,? he said.

?The Whoop solution enabled Georgia Tech to build applications that run on multiple different platforms in a highly optimized way.?

Whoop is a company that produces and publishes mobile media content.

Mobile variety
Whoop?s platform can be shared among different devices. An iPhone user can share the application with a BlackBerry user and vice versa.

The first application that Whoop worked on for the university focused on football and men?s and women?s basketball.

This application offers up-to-the-minute live updates of games, news feeds, team and player statistics, schedules, audio and video highlights, and links to ticket sales.

Users can also access the athletic director?s ?The Good Word? blog directly from their handset.

The company wanted to test the mobile space with the combined application for 60 days and adjust it if needed.

Additionally, after looking at the adoption rates in the first 60 days, Georgia Tech?s athletics department decided to move forward with other applications for baseball and softball with plans for other sports as well.

?With the initial application roll out, Georgia Tech exposed the opt-in process in a number of different ways,? Mr. Wilson said. ?This includes online promotions, newsletters, announcer mentions during games, spokesperson mentions during interviews and coverage in other mediums as well.?

?As Georgia Tech expands its mobile application strategy into other sports, it will continue to evolve its marketing and opt-in strategy,? he said.

In addition, Georgia Tech?s Sports Licensing Partner (ISP) will be working with potential sponsors and advertisers to help generate revenue for the athletics department and help the end user benefit from local and regional mobile marketing offers from these sponsors and advertisers.

Georgia Tech?s mobile application was built in the Whoop Creative Studio, a Web-based platform that the company claims is as easy to use as PowerPoint.

?Applications built on the Whoop platform run on hundreds of different phones, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices and an array of other Java feature phones,? Mr. Wilson said.

?In all cases, the applications run in a native way on the devices, which means that they are optimized for the platform,? he said.