By All you bikers out there will no doubt be interested to hear this news (that’s if you follow the Tour de France): My Tracks will soon be updated to provide real-time data for the big spoked-wheel racing event. Google and High Road Sports in collaboration with HTC and SRM will enable those who follow Team HTC-Columbia to get real-time stats on every rider at every moment. You’ll not only get the basics of where your favorite rider is at any given time, but you can even be updated on their power output and their heart rate.
Maps, My Tracks, Earth, and Street View are amongst the key ingredients to bringing you the most comprehensive coverage you’ll probably get outside of the radio or TV, and Android will be right there to help serve all of that goodness to you while you’re on the go yourself. Google’s even provided an API to access the data so you can serve up your own unique offerings to the masses.
“I’m thrilled about the opportunity to leverage Google’s My Tracks application to deliver real-time racing information to fans watching the Tour de France,” said Dylan Casey, Product Manager at Google and former professional cyclist with the US Postal Service team. “This is a unique, engaging way to help cycling fans all around the world get a sense of what the riders go through during each stage of the race and follow the performance of the world-class riders on Team HTC-Columbia. We’re fortunate to work with such great partners – High Road Sports, HTC, SRM, and ANT+ – to make this possible.”
“Professional cycling is such an advanced technical sport and we’re excited for Team HTC-Columbia to be embracing innovative wireless and location-based technologies like Google’s My Tracks and HTC smartphones to deliver unprecedented rider data to the team, media and cycling fans around the world,” said John Wang, chief marketing officer, HTC Corporation.
“Google and HTC are ideal partners to further develop the sport of cycling and present it to a worldwide audience in an engaging way,” says Owner of HTC-Columbia Bob Stapleton. “The interest of such innovative partners is very encouraging and we look forward to continuing to develop this project in the future.”
After reading the HTC-Columbia news release, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be delivering real-time data to Android handsets via MyTracks – it looks like they’re using MyTracks and some custom hardware to collect the data, but the article doesn’t really give any indication of how it will be consumed… I hope it’ll be possible to follow the Tour from my Droid this year, and it’ll be even better if in real time, but I’m not holding my breath for delivery through MyTracks.
Well it is a step in the right direction, and better than nothing.
They are using HTC phones running android and My Tracks to collect the data from various sensors on the bike and the riders. The data is available here:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/mytrackstour/