The Amgen Tour of California is an eight-day race (ending today!!) that covers between 650-700 miles throughout California. The race annually starts in San Francisco Bay Area, then travels through the California redwoods, wine country and the Pacific Coast.
In 2008, Computer Sciences Corporation launched its new global Location Object Field Tracking (LOFT) solution to give fans a unique “bird’s eye view” of the race by tracking all of the riders and teams online. This year, they have taken their race tracker to a whole new level: http://tracker.amgentourofcalifornia.com/
Bike enthusiasts can follow the race using multiple video feeds and chat with other fans. The video feeds boost 4 times the resolution of last year. And If you sign up, you can customize your feed to track the GPS of certain riders. But there are still a few features that are lacking.
Conor Brady, avid cyclist, said “one thing I would love to see was if they’d give you a live feed of rider stats (power, speed, HR…)”, which is exactly what Polar did at the Tour de France last year.
Karri Ojanen from Organic Toronto also thought that “one exceptional element missing: social tools or graph-portability.”
It reminded Patrick Dunphy of the Amgen Tour Experience, a Flex based app using GPS tracked cyclists and lots of video to document the 2007 cycling tour.
Thanks to Evan Cordes for the link.
Marta Strickland