KEY POINTS:
Today was D-Day for New Zealand's Segway Polo team which went up against the Silicon Valley Aftershocks in a game held near San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
I should back up for a minute and explain exactly what Segway Polo is. There's a good article on Wiki describing the
Segway device, which is an ingenious work of engineering and a brief one here describing Segway Polo, which is like regular polo but the horses are exchanged for two wheel electric transportation devices.
The sport has grown in Silicon Valley with the support of a dedicated bunch of tech sector Segway owners and Apple founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak who is a mean Segway Polo player himself.
New Zealand's Segway Polo team went up against the Woz-lead Aftershocks last year in New Zealand and managed to draw with them. Today's match left the Pole Blacks as they are called, feeling a little like Portugal's rugby team after its 16-try hammering by the All Blacks. At least the Portuguese got some points on the board.
The game (photos here in my Flickr album) started out promising with the Kiwis dominating possession and aggressively playing their way up the field, using a strategy known as "snaking".
But the tide quickly started to turn, and unsettled by the rough pitch, which had been torn up quite badly by the horses in previous games of conventional polo, the Kiwis started to lose their momentum.
It didn't help that one of the Aftershocks is Victor Miller, who wrote the screenplay for the ghoulish horror Friday the 13th. No one was quite sure what he was capable of doing with a polo mallet.
By the halfway mark, the Pole Blacks were already in serious trouble and that's despite the fact that Woz and two other key Aftershockers weren't playing.
So the end result was a 5-0 drubbing. Still, the Pole Blacks finished with their dignity intact and are already talking about next year's tournament which the organisers hope will feature other Segway Polo teams from around the world.
Yesterday was a practice day for the teams and I jumped on a Segway and joined the melee to get a feel for the game. It's fast paced and requires excellent coordination as you try to manoeuvre the Segway with one hand and use your polo stick to dribble or hit the ball with the other hand.
I came off the Segway numerous times as I smashed into other players, bits of my Segway, borrowed from Steve, one of the chefs at Google, flying off each time.
The real point of Segway Polo is for likeminded geeks to get together and as a result the last few days have been filled with talk of gadgets and technology business models, Web 2.0 trends and the next big things in the IT world.
I learnt a lot from the Silicon Valley guys and the Pole Blacks, all technology entrepreneurs in their own right, came away inspired. As the team was taking to the field, internet giant Yahoo was releasing
details of Mash, its rival to Palo Alto-based social networking website Facebook, which is run out of an unassuming building on the main drag through the town.
The big difference between Mash and Facebook is that Mash users can change each others' profiles. It sounds like a recipe for disaster but taps into that whole trend towards user-generated content and online interaction the social networking websites have embraced.
I'm not sure if Mash is the next big thing out of the US tech sector, but you can guarantee a bunch of young software engineers are working on whatever will be right now. Chances are, they'll find their way to market and the money to get them there up in Silicon Valley.
