Not that our MyWireless.org team would ever be distracted from our mission of representing you and the hundreds of millions of other U.S. wireless consumers, but I have to admit there is a college basketball junkie or two among us. While we’re in a full-court press to get the ‘Wireless Tax Fairness Act’ passed in the Senate, this month we occasionally find our attention shifting a bit to keep an eye on the NCAA Tournament.

So being the mobile minds that we all are, how do we do that? Well, these days it’s never been easier, thanks to all of the great new apps as well as the old standbys that let you follow the show, while you’re on the go.

First, to the brackets – I surveyed our office and can pass along that either we or our friends are using bracket products offered up by ESPN.com, CBSSports.com, and Yahoo!, and I’m even seeing a couple of diehards with the old hand-printed originals. A lot of folks access those sites through a PC or laptop, but I wondered how easy it was to view and use them on a wireless device. As it turns out, all three have nifty wireless applications where you can track all the games, get live real-time scoring, and then of course keep up with all your latest bracket picks. Then once your team comfortably moves on to the next round, you can use your mobile to access Facebook to join your team’s online community, and Twitter to do a little friendly trash-talking to let the opposition know that you’re coming. More importantly, March Madness apps aren’t discriminating in the least: do you shop at the iTunes store? You’re covered. Same thing with Android.

But what about video – I’m not sitting at my desk (sorry, boss!) and I’m not home, so can I grab the game’s live video feed while I’m on the go? You bet. The official ‘NCAA March Madness Live’ app does just that, where for just $3.99 on your smartphone or tablet, you could get all of the 4 concurrently-played early round games from CBS, TNT, TBS and TRUtv. In fact, you can watch every one of the big dance’s 67 games live on your mobile device – now how great is that? There’s still a lot more to pick from, and you can read about them here in this GigaOM piece on the 4 mobile apps for March that they recommend, and this article from ReadWriteWeb where they highlighted 8 apps that they use.

Now to the real business, which is our on-court rooting interests. Here on our own team, we have an always-proud West Virginia Mountaineer, a been-there-done-that Michigan State Spartan, a new-to-the-show but super enthusiastic Missouri Tiger, and a barely-can-contain-himself Kentucky Wildcat. And to top that off, an ‘almost’ MyWireless.org family member with whom we work on a lot of our wireless consumer projects ACTUALLY WAS THE Syracuse Orangeman himself (no, really) while in college. So, after the first weekend we’ve had our fair share of disappointments (okay, with Missouri that would be a MAJOR disappointment) and success. And while we might take a few friendly shots at each others’ teams, at the end of the day when we’re all sitting down to talk about the tournament, we all show up with three things: our bracket, the right school colors, and our wireless device full of March Madness apps.

Best of luck to all of you and yours this March. Let me know how your mobile device is coming in handy to keep up with the tournament, and how your brackets are shaping up. I’ll be honest now….it doesn’t matter what device I use to look at mine, they ALL end with Kentucky on top.

Wait, before you go – I just wouldn’t be myself here at MyWireless.org if I didn’t take a moment to give you a little work plug. One thing to think about when you’re buying all those apps, is that states and localities can still place multiple tax hits on consumers for their digital purchases. Thankfully, Congress is looking to put a stop to that with the bipartisan ‘Digital Goods and Services Tax Fairness Act,’ (S. 971 and H.R. 1860) – so don’t forget to contact your Representative and Senators today.

(Photo credit:Murray State, Creative Commons license.)