Wimbledon<\/a> app, where point-by-point scores from every match on every court are available within seconds.<\/p>\nThe app is an all-year-round platform for everything Wimbledon that is tailored to the needs of individual users, allowing fans to buy tickets, players to book re-strings for their rackets and, in the other 49 weeks of the year, All England Club members to book courts.<\/p>\n
But there is, inevitably, a huge surge in \u201cinteractions\u201d during the tournament proper \u2013 18bn last year, from 21 million individual users \u2013 with more expected this time around \u2013 and a team of IBM technicians, in what they describe as their \u201cbunker\u201d in the bowels of the main admin building, is tasked with ensuring that the supply of information meets demand.<\/p>\n
The current tournament also marks year one of what Fred Baker, sports lead for IBM Consulting EMEA, describes as a \u201ccomplete rebuild\u201d of the Wimbledon app and website, \u201credesigned from the ground up\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve launched and enhanced key features,\u201d Baker says, \u201clike the live \u201clikelihood to win\u201d, which has an added feature for key moments and explains the turning points, and MatchChat, where fans can ask questions about a match as it\u2019s progressing in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some questions, though, remain off-limits. \u201cThere are some we don\u2019t want to engage in,\u201d Baker says. \u201cIf someone asks which player is dating which player, we\u2019ll steer the person back on topic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maria Sharapova attends an IBM event on London\u2019s South Bank. Photograph: Matt Crossick\/PABirds stop play<\/p>\n
Pigeon problems are largely a thing of the past at Wimbledon, not least as a result of Rufus the Hawk\u2019s sterling efforts in the field of avian deterrence over the last 18 years.<\/p>\n
But the decline in the pigeon population appears to have opened up a niche for the smaller \u2013 and, let\u2019s be honest, much classier \u2013 pied wagtail, several of which seem to have found nesting sites in the sliding roof mechanism of No 1 Court.<\/p>\n
There was even a brief interruption to play during the first match on court on Thursday, as a busy parent with chicks to feed landed in the tramlines in the middle of a game, blissfully unaware that 12,000 spectators were watching Madison Keys preparing to serve just a few feet away.<\/p>\n
A wagtail in question. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev\/AFP\/Getty ImagesRockets fizzle out<\/p>\n
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard broke a 15-year-old grand slam record here 12 months ago when he sent down a 153mph (246km\/h) serve, eclipsing the mark of 148mph set by Taylor Dent in 2010, before predicting that \u201c260 or 270km\/h is maybe the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the moment, though, his record seems safe, as Thiago Tirante (238km\/h) and Ben Shelton (235km\/h), the only players to serve faster than 232km\/h so far this week, failed to make it into the second round, while Mpetshi Perricard managed only a relatively tame maximum of 229km\/h in his first-round defeat to Yannick Hanfmann.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Appy tennis fans More than half a million spectators will pour through the turnstiles in south-west London this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-670305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}