Nordic Combined Troubleshooting: Not for the faint of heart. Resolve your non-technical spouse’s email connectivity issue over the telephone, within the air, while ski jumping.

Few activities engage an audience as effectively as sport. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where competitors will publicly struggle to master themselves and their rivals in contests of mental and physical prowess.

The human drama of sport, sadly, remains absent from the technology business, in the event you exclude iPhone line-waiting, a competition already on its way out. There isn’t any shortage of competition — we’ve patent wars, product release races, and battles for market share — but tech industry conflicts play out on balance sheets, in datacenters, and in living rooms, out of public view.

The tech community needs its own version of the Olympics, an international movement to celebrate success, innovation, and great engineering in a technique that affirms our common humanity and incompatible platforms. Just between us, we’ll be anticipating the crashes, as we do with NASCAR.

[Stop fighting a losing battle. Hey CIOs, Stop Saying ‘No’ To Consumer Tech.]

For the time being, let’s call our event the Tech Olympics. That could, obviously, invite a lawsuit from the usa Olympic Committee, were anyone to check out to stage such an event. So consider this a working title. If the Tech Olympics catches on, we’ll want a sponsor, and the corporate paying the bills will undoubtedly want its name added to the combination. Very likely, our games will emerge as being called something along the lines of the Microsoft Technical Games, Personal Business Pro Edition, if only to make certain the URL isn’t already taken.

Because the Winter Olympics are upon us and technology runs best when properly cooled, the Tech Olympics will feature winter sports. While this is able to arguably favor white men, it would nonetheless be according to Silicon Valley entrepreneurial trends.

We will specialize in here sports:

Mobile Biathlon
Traditional biathlon, within the context of winter sports, involves cross-country skiing and shooting. Mobile biathlon makes the game relevant to cellphone-toting technophiles. The article of mobile biathlon is to make it through a one-mile stretch of Manhattan taking walks in icy conditions, guided by turn-by-turn directions while tweeting pictures of famous landmarks. Time is of the essence, and each collision with another pedestrian adds 10 seconds to the competitor’s final time. Wearing reflective clothing is simply not required but is suggested for safety.

Tabboarding
It’s like snowboarding, but more extreme. Tabboarders compete in touchstyle or fullpipe. The previous involves trying to interact with a tablet app using multitouch gestures while descending a snow-covered slope in a handstand at the tablet. The latter isn’t such a lot a sport as a measure of mental toughness: In fullpipe tabboarding, the competitor attempts to stream a Netflix video with insufficient bandwidth. The winner is the last person to renounce and turn to cable.

Nordic Combined Troubleshooting
If you think that ski jumping on cross-country skis is hard, wait until you are trying resolving your non-technical spouse’s email connectivity issue over the telephone, on skis, within the air. This isn’t a sport for the faint of heart.

Podsled
Imagine shooting down an icy track on an iPod. That’s absurd, you assert, and rightly so — in the event you actually need to head downhill fast you utilize a Zune. But there’s only loads stress a human body can take. Mercifully, Apple has licensed its patented iPod design to the Tech Olympics and has agreed to fabricate a limited set of iPod-shaped sleds (laser-engraved so we won’t resell them when we’re done) sufficiently big to slot two people. The sled is steered using an ordinary iPod click wheel, to make things a piece more difficult.

Pairs Pairing
Among the foremost elegant spectacles on the Tech Olympics, Pairs Pairing takes two individuals and follows them in the course of the technique of pairing their Bluetooth devices. The explicit devices are left to the discretion of the athletes, but they could include phones and headsets, laptops and speakers, or any other combination. Judging is predicated on smoothness of execution, driver installation finesse, and poise during connection troubles.

Speed Downsizing
A Silicon Valley sport that mixes the altruism of King of the Hill with the social conscience of Ayn Rand, Speed Downsizing begins with a team of a minimum of 100 and ends when that team was reduced by at the least half. The process of the required reduction aren’t specified, which ensures the development would be surprising and appealing to a mass audience used to the bloodsport of reality television. Spectators should be 18 or older, because of the intense emotions involved.

Mouse Hockey
The circular mouse Apple shipped with its iMacs between 1998 and 2000 was often known as a “hockey puck.” Taking that description to heart, the Tech Olympics will feature ice hockey played with a vintage circular Apple mouse. Games have a tendency to be short because of the fragility of plastic peripherals.

Alpine Texting
We text deep thoughts like WTH and OMG because it is simple. Just try texting in subzero temperatures atop a mountain peak — bare hands only, no capacitive gloves. It’s now not child’s play. Every emoticon requires concentration and fortitude. Medals are awarded for the absence of typos, and use of vehicle-correction is forbidden.

Freestyle Procrastination
Dating back before the times of Minesweeper, Freestyle Procrastination just recently was acknowledged as a proper Tech Olympics sport. We intended to incorporate it four years ago but, well, you already know… first there has been that YouTube video, then we were entranced by that hilarious cat .gif, and we form of lost track of time. Further complicating matters, FP (as it’s known among fans) doesn’t really have a winner. It only has losers, who are usually revealed when there’s someone new sitting beside you within the office.

Cord Curling
Among the IT elite, no skill is more prized than the flexibility to neatly wrap and store electrical cords. Cord Curling demands speed, precision, and fearlessness within the face of dust bunnies, which invariably cling to coils of cable. The game leaves binding options as much as individual contestants. Ties will be made from Velcro, plastic, rope, or metal. Extra points can be awarded for innovative knots. Rubberbands bring about immediate disqualification.

E-Waste Moguls
Remember your Palm Pilot, your first iPhone, and that 1999 Dell Dimension XPS you donated to Goodwill? Well, we repurchased your unwanted devices from chop shops in China and India and used the debris to coat a whole mountainside. E-Waste Moguls competitors might be expected to accomplish a sequence of acrobatic maneuvers just like the TRS-80, the Backup Interruption, and the Archival Restore, without impaling themselves on sharp-edged circuit boards and toxin-laden scrap metal.

Hype Skating
Open to both journalists and public relations professionals (frankly, we sometimes have trouble telling them apart), Hype Skating requires participants to convince a panel of judges that a novice skater, a startup of types, is performing amazing jumps and spins.

Short Attention Advertising
While a speedskating race happens, the real competitors remain in a close-by office complex where they need to write and submit copy to Google AdWords. The ads are then blasted to phones within the area as text messages. The winner is the person who creates the ad that gets essentially the mostsome of the most clicks without being tempted to exploit the unprotected database of private information on competitors’ computers.

There you’ve got it. a contest fit for the startup set. Let the Games begin! And if there are any underappreciated IT sports you would like to peer on the 2018 Tech Olympics, be at liberty to tell us below.

InformationWeek Conference is an exclusive two-day event occurring at Interop where you would join fellow technology leaders and CIOs for a packed schedule with learning, information sharing, professional networking, and celebration. Come learn from one another and honor the nation’s leading digital businesses at our InformationWeek Elite 100 Awards Ceremony and Gala. Yow will discover out additional information and register here. In Las Vegas, March 31 to April 1, 2014.

Thomas Claburn was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications resembling New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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