Ways to stay tuned to FIFA World Cup on a busy day

Bangalore: The 2010 FIFA World Cup games kick off in South Africa, but depending on the location and time zone, it might be hard for the soccer fans to stay tuned and watch their favorite team(s) when working or traveling.

There are some helpful sites and ways to take advantage of so that you don't miss a second. Before you do anything, it would be best to know when games will be played according to your local time zone. For all game times and scores when posted, keep FIFA's match page bookmarked on the desktop, laptop, netbook, smartphone or whatever, according to a report by Rachel King zdnet.com.

ESPN has covered almost all medium to get started, whether it be text message alerts, streaming games on ESPN 360, or mobile apps for smartphonen. Not only is there an ESPN SportsCenter app for news coverage and stats, but you can also stream games and highlight clips viaESPN Mobile TV directly on the handset. ESPN has also launched a special ESPN World Cup 2010-edition app for the iPhone/iPod Touch, with a standard free version (includes scores, brackets and direct access to other social networking platforms) or a $7.99 upgrade that involves live radio streaming of all 64 matches.

Other apps for handsets include the Slingbox app for the iPhone (which now allows streaming over AT&T's 3G network), and Goal.com's free application, which is available foriPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile smartphones. It's not necessary to have a smartphone to keep yourself briefed on the latest news as many news sites do have text-only versions that you should be able to access even with the most basic mobile browser.

If you're more interested in sharing pride for your favorite team, you can display ittle flag at the end of your Tweets by adding a hash tag with a country code. For a listing of the codes plus seeing a live stream of tweets related to worldcup, visit Twitter's special World Cup page.