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Closing Case BEIJING 2008: A DIGITAL OLYMPICS

Known in China as “Superfish,” Michael Phelps was on his way to achieving his goal of eight gold medals. His most difficult competition was the 100-meter butterfly. On PCs, cell phones, electronic billboards, and televisions, millions of viewers worldwide watched him win the event by .01 seconds. The results appeared on the screens almost in real time. If you did not see this exciting race, you can access it on YouTube. This was only one component in the “most wired,” or digital, Olympics.

The Problem

It was not an easy task to manage 42 events in seven different cities in China. Competition results had to be displayed worldwide not only on PCs and televisions, but also on jumbo public display screens in stadiums and streets in hundreds of cities, and on millions of tiny mobile device screens.

But, this was only one problem. The Olympic organizers also had to manage the logistics of the participants and address the requirements of the media, while also accommodating over 100 million tourists. The following are some of the specific requirements that the Beijing Olympic organizers had to meet:

Record the performance of all athletes and determine the winners instantly, sometimes based on millisecond differences. These results then had to be disseminated around the globe in real time.

China hosted about 300,000 athletes, referees, trainers, journalists, and other workers from more than 200 countries, speaking dozens of languages. All needed to have accommodations, transportation, and food.

Nearly 8 million visitors from abroad and close to 120 million domestic travelers attended the Olympics. They needed accommodation, transportation, and so forth.

Tickets to all events had to be issued, many in advance, and to people in other countries. Protection against counterfeiting was necessary.

Approximately 1,000 percent more Web-delivered videos were needed in 2008 than were needed by the 2004 Olympics.

The organizers anticipated a greater than 1,000 percent increase in page views, and even more in video watching. Sufficient infrastructure had to be in place.

In real time, the system had to collect and filter more than 12 million monitored events and identify potential security threats.

Real-time, transoceanic coverage, including digital videos, required sophisticated hardware, software, and networks.

Many visitors preferred to shop online and have

Olympic souvenirs shipped to their homes.

Overall, it was necessary to securely process more than 80 percent more information compared with the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

Traffic in Beijing can be a major problem and is a major air pollutant, so monitoring and controls were needed to minimize it.

These problems and requirements can be classified into seven categories:

1. Information collection and monitoring

2. Information dissemination to the world

3. Tickets and souvenirs management

4. Food and supplies along the supply chain

5. Security and privacy monitoring and protection

6. Transportation and pollution control

7. Social networking for the public

The $4 Billion IT and EC Solutions

To address the administrative problems just discussed, as well as many others, the organizers employed the latest information technology tools, including electronic commerce. To explain how this was done, the seven requirements have been divided into five basic categories, as shown in the following exhibit (left side), which also shows the e-commerce solutions used (right side).

The following major e-commerce solutions were implemented:

The instant display of the results was possible due to the use of sophisticated photo-finish cameras and computers. The system was capable of identifying winners accurately even when the difference was only milliseconds.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched a YouTube channel to broadcast clips that were accessible in 77 developing countries (but not in the United States). Viewers were able to watch free clips on demand from PCs, as well as news and commentaries. These clips were broadcast on television and display boards as well. Videos were downloaded with Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash.

Over 12 million tickets were available for the events. Many of these tickets were purchased online, using Beijing Gehua Ticketmaster, in what we call B2C electronic commerce.

All the tickets were equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that were loaded with information designed to prevent counterfeit tickets. (See Online File W1.7 for an introduction to RFID.)

Millions watched the Olympics through online videos and Internet-enabled cell phones and other mobile devices.

Using RFID tags, the Olympic coordinators ensured the safety of athletes’ food by tracking the ingredients from farms to plates.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were used to track the position of sailing and rowing boats five times per second for comparison purposes.

RFID tags were attached to one shoe of each marathon runner. When the runners passed RFID readers at certain locations along the running route, their whereabouts were known as well as their exact time of arrival there.

More than 50 software applications supported the games’ management. For example, a workforce management tool was used to manage the work of hundreds of telecommunication technicians and others during the games.

Bloggers were encouraged to blog. For example, the Bank of America sponsored a site called “America’s Cheer” where athletes were blogging. Others blogged on rotorblog.com, as well as thousands of other sites. Twitter (see Chapter 2) was also a great source of coverage and result dissemination. Social networking capabilities were provided by the “Olympic Network TV Station.”

Electronic collaboration among over a dozen IT companies and especially Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Limelight Networks ensured the successful execution of the supporting IT and EC systems.

The Results

The organizing committee clearly deserved a gold medal. Everything was perfect, even the computer-generated fireworks that were displayed in the video of the opening and closing ceremonies! The EC solutions were able to handle over 20 times more video screens than the 2004 Olympics, satisfying approximately 60 million unique users (versus 11 million in 2004) who viewed more than 1 trillion pages (versus 230 million in Athens). All of this was accomplished without any major problems. The Olympics helped create many new online communities that provided instant feedback to NBC and Microsoft, which improved the coverage. Finally, a social network that covers all the Olympic games was developed at olympic-network.net. No other Olympics had such sophisticated information processing capabilities and superb EC applications. Even the illegal e-commerce market that was selling pirated Olympic merchandise was minimized.

EC Solutions at the Beijing Olympics