Almost every business opportunity focusing on the 2010 Soccer World Cup will have an IT angle, according to well-known sports personality and former SA World Cup bid ambassador Gary Bailey.
Speaking at Internet Solutions' Internetix 2007 conference in Cape Town yesterday, Bailey said with an expected 220 000 overseas visitors, plus another 80 000 from Africa, the 2010 World Cup will have 10 times more visitors than the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 15 times more than the 2003 Cricket World Cup.
"All these visitors have to be accommodated, transported, and arrangements have to be very well co-ordinated to ensure they are able to get to their games and are kept occupied during the breaks between their teams' games," he told the gathering of IT vendors and executives.
Bailey said mobile phones will more than likely play an important part in this.
"One of the solutions being considered is linking a fan's ticket to their cellphone. So they arrive at a venue and the ticket, which will have the fan's name printed on it, will have to correspond to the information on the phone's SIM card," he said.
Information awareness
Another use for the cellphones would be for crowd management, where a display screen can show organisers and the authorities where overcrowding could be occurring, by picking up the density of the number of active cellphones and then allowing them to act in time, Bailey said.
"We, as a country, will also have to become far more information-aware by 2010. This includes everything from being able to learn another language, to making facilities such as Internet caf'es more available."
Bailey said there is a project to port online language translation application Babel Fish to cellphones, to help facilitate communications with foreign visitors.
He also mentioned the "special definition" TV set, which is a portable large screen TV that can be inflated and erected at fan parks, for people who cannot get entry into the games.
"Fan parks have proved a big success in Korea and Germany and facilities like these will be really important in SA," he said.
Official 2010 accommodation and travel IT infrastructure will be arranged by FIFA's own company called MATCH, Bailey concluded.
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