The 2014 World Cup, like so many World Cups before it, doesn’t exactly make for convenient television watching for Australians.
Short of taking the next few weeks off work, you might find it difficult to follow all the games — given many have a start time of 2am or later.
However, thankfully technology and social media keeps making it easier to follow what’s going on from bed, your desk, smart phone or wherever you’re able to tune in.
Firstly, you may want to get the following dates and game times in your diary. Australia’s not exactly expected to change sporting history while over in Brazil, but that’s no reason not to tune in.
Australia v Chile June 14: 8am
Australia v Netherlands, June 19: 2am
Australia v Spain, June 24: 2am
Over on Women’s Agenda sister publication SmartCompany, Andrew Sadauskas has examined how the tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Twitter are attempting to cover the event, potentially making it easier for you.
Here’s what he’s found:
Google has announced that users searching for “World Cup” – either by itself or followed by a country name (for example “World Cup Australia”) – will be taken to a special page with team lineups, live scores, information about attempted goals and player stats.
Users will be able to switch between standings, schedules, specific teams and players from the page, along with a timeline covering key highlights during matches.
Meanwhile, Android users will see a special front page on Google Now which will list matches, allowing users to tap on a match to see more detail.
The search giant has also set up a special World Cup edition of its Google Trends service that lists which teams and players are trending during the tournament.
Not to be outplayed, Google rival Microsoft has announced it’s adding a feature called predictions, which displays a list of match results to users searching for “predictions” in its Bing search engine.
In an official statement, the tech giant explained how its predictions will be calculated.
“For the tournament, our models evaluate the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous win/loss/tie record in qualification matches and other international competitions and margin of victory in these contests, adjusted for location since home field advantage is a known bias,” said Microsoft.
“Further adjustments are made related to other factors which give one team advantages over another, such as home field (for Brazil) or proximity (South American teams), playing surface (hybrid grass), game-time weather conditions, and other such factors.”
Similar to Google, Microsoft is also displaying special pages of information for users searching in Bing for “World Cup Schedule” or “World Cup Scores”.
Meanwhile, Mozilla has announced a partnership with Goal.com to create a free sidebar for its Firefox web browser. Users can add the sidebar by clicking this link.
Finally, Twitter has created lists containing the official Twitter accounts of 30 of the 32 nations competing in the World Cup, along with a list of all the players, along with a list of all the Australian players.