Peaceful protests following the shooting death of Stephon Clark disrupted a Sacramento Kings game last week, dwindling attendance at the 17,000-seat Golden 1 Center to just 2,400 fans and delaying the final round of the Kings’ March Madness-like Capitalize startup competition.
This Sunday, the team held its own NBA-backed protest ahead of its game against the Boston Celtics when players from both teams wore warm-up t-shirts emblazoned with the name of Clark, who was killed by two Sacramento police officers in his grandmother’s backyard. It also announced that Capitalize, its annual crowdsourced tech contest powered by the Sacramento Urban Technology Lab, would be rescheduled to its March 29 home game against the Indiana Pacers.
The third-annual competition, which started with more than 75 startups, was narrowed down by judges on March 2 from 16 semi-finalists to just these four: Cognivive, a developer of digital medicine and therapeutics; Highlands Power, a startup building next-generation motors for electric vehicles; HomeZada, a cloud-based management platform for homeowners; and Protxx, a developer of a wearable sensor that detects brain injuries in athletes. While the final event of the weeks-long competition was set for March 22, the team decided to postpone the event to a time when it could safely get more fans into the arena.
On Thursday, each remaining company will show their pitch videos to fans in the arena on the 4K screen during the game. Fans will be able to place votes on Twitter, with fan voting ending at halftime, the judges tallying their votes alongside the fan vote, and announcing the winner during the second half of the game. The winner will be awarded a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors.
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While the Kings rescheduled Capitalize, a pre-planned event showcasing the team’s latest in-arena technology went on as scheduled at the March 22 game for the team’s annual Tech Night. Last week’s event revealed new technologies the Kings hope will create more interactive fan experiences, including an augmented reality t-shirt cannon (first implemented for the Jets at Metlife Stadium last NFL season) built by a company called Xperiel, which will be on display again at the game this Thursday.
“At every opportunity, we aim to reimagine the fan experience during Kings games and Golden 1 Center events,” Sacramento Kings Chief Technology Officer Ryan Montoya said ahead of last week’s Tech Night event (and the protests). “Cutting-edge technology, like our award-winning app, allows us to enhance how our fans interact with the team, in the arena and beyond. On Tech Night, we have an opportunity to showcase technology that is changing the game experience.”
Xperiel, which helps companies build augmented reality apps that take advantage of existing technology in venues and consumers’ mobile devices to engage them in games and interactive ads, has collaborated with the Kings since 2016. The Kings’ “Call The Shot,” a predictive gaming program that enables fans to predict what will happen during the game and collect points based on wagers, and “Photo in the Plaza,” which enables fans to submit photos to the team’s app to have them displayed on Golden 1 Center video screens upon arrival, have all been implemented by Xperiel. The Kings participated in a $7 million funding round for Xperiel in January.
Several technology exhibits were also on display throughout the arena on Tech Night and might also reappear on Thursday, including a 3D printer setup, a light matrix displaying the Kings logo, and a tabletop robot battle pit by Hacker Lab. The Sacramento Kings NBA 2K League team, Kings Guard Gaming, hosted a gaming station equipped with a Nintendo 64 and Playstation 4 for fans to play.
The Kings Foundation also showed its support for Sacramento nonprofit ReCreate, which is reducing waste in the Sacramento area by recycling unwanted tech items to promote science, technology, engineering, art and math projects for elementary students.