Mountain biking

I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, but we’re not there yet.

This morning I took a mountain bike ride on the Walker Ranch trail near Bouldler (CO), and I had TrailGuru.com’s iPhone application track the route. The software worked well, and when finished I uploaded the track to the TrailGuru website. Here’s it is:

Steve and Pete’s slow tour of Walker Ranch

There are several problems with the track:

1. Maximum speed: 46mph (umm, no; 20mph hour would be more like it).
2. Total ascent: 4268ft (that would have been a great workout, but the actual trail ascent is around 1750ft).
3. Distance: 8.15mi (my bike odometer and the trail map agree that it’s really 7.5mi).
4. A chunk of the map route shows as blank; that section is in the trees, where GPS didn’t work.

Also, the battery on my iPhone was nearly dead at the end of the trail.

My trusty Garmin GPS unit would have done a much better job — more accurate, and the batteries would last for a much longer ride.

It’s exciting that we’re starting to see smart phones that can work as GPS devices. But at this point the hardware isn’t up to the task even for the short ride that I did this morning, though the software is already getting pretty good.

I especially like TrailGuru, since its website collects tracks from the iPhone as well as tracks uploaded from traditional GPS units. I may still track some short rides with the iPhone, but for long ones I’ll use the Garmin. With TrailGuru, I can store everything in one place.

I’ve also tested RunKeeper, which is similar but not as full-featured as TrailGuru. RunKeeper’s big drawback is that it doesn’t track elevation gain/loss; for me that’s an essential thing. Its developers say they’ll add that soon.

It’s no fault of those app developers, but the other thing that’s a pain is that the application must be running to collect GPS data, so you can’t use the iPhone for anything else (other than to answer a call, which puts the apps on hold while you talk; and you can listen to music using the phone’s iPod functionality, as long as you launch iPod before starting the trail app). The iPhone will work better as a GPS at the point the iPhone operating system supports running more than one application at a time.

The guys over at Evomo must be ecstatic about this. They make stylish mountain biking apparel (including some branded t-shirts commissioned by my former company, the Enthusiast Group), and one of their fans asked if he could get a tattoo using Evomo’s “Braincase” design. The answer from Evomo head honcho Bryan Thombs: “Hell-yeeeaaaah!”

So here’s the pic. The crazy mountain biker didn’t go so far as to brand Evomo’s name on his skin, but that’s still a pretty nice bit of free customer marketing for the company. He’s a walking billboard for Evomo, since everyone’s going to ask him about it.

That is a pretty cool design. If I were younger, I might wear that t-shirt; it doesn’t really fit my 51-year-old sensibilities. Tattoo? Probably not.

I don’t usually blog gadgets, but as an outdoors and gadget lover, I’ve gotta share this. It’s the Spot Satellite Messenger.

What this thing does is give you a way to be rescued no matter where you are. Press the emergency button and the gizmo sends out a distress call that includes your GPS coordinates. You can also use it to check in with family or friends, so they can see where you are on a long backpacking, mountaineering or bike trip.

As a mountain biker, I appreciate what this thing can do. Of course, it’d be nice if cell phones would do the same thing so you don’t have to carry multiple gadgets. I expect one day they will. Meantime, a phone won’t do you much good when you ride your bike off a cliff 10 miles from the nearest road and out of cell coverage.

Donna Bogatin over at ZDNet noticed the beta launch of YourMTB.com (my company’s debut website and online community), and took note of our strategy of using incentives to promote user submissions of content. She points to a UC Berkeley study (PDF document) that comes to similar conclusions as we did when building YourMTB.com:

A peer-to-peer (P2P) system will starve from resources if every user is a freeloader who only takes resources from the system but never contributes any. It is useful to develop a scheme that can incentivize users to contribute resources such as content, CPU, storage and network bandwidth.

We’ll be experimenting with YourMTB.com to see what works best at encouraging content submissions by mountain biking enthusiasts. We’re starting with some prize giveaways, and also trying an altruistic “contest” where entrants submit content to trigger a donation by us to the main mountain biking advocacy organization. We’ll see what works best, and try different things. Stay tuned.

It’s another of those small milestones for my company today. For our first website, YourMTB.com, we pumped out our first press release announcing beta release of the site. It has been operating in alpha testing mode (open to the public but still buggy) with only a few friends using it. Now we begin to seek real users in earnest. … A step at a time.

Meanwhile, two other sites covering climbing and running are in the works. They should go alpha sometime next month, I hope. Editors (we call them enthusiasts-in-chief) for those sites are lined up.

If you’re a mountain biker, come check out YourMTB.com. And if that’s you, you’ll want to support IMBA, the International Mountain Biking Association (the folks who lobby to keep trails open to bikers and work to open up more trails). We’ve got a promotion going where for the first 50 people who submit a photo of themselves (biking theme) to our MTB People gallery we’ll donate $5 each to IMBA. (YourMTB.com also is a corporate member of IMBA.)

I’m off to Moab for a couple days of mountain biking, so no blogging till the end of the weekend at least. It’s a business trip. No, really. I publish a website on mountain biking now (among other topics), so clearly this is work, right? … I love my new job.

Lots of folks squawked about Galker Stalker, the celebrity sightings on a Google Map feature from Nick Denton’s Gawker blog. Next comes something considerably more benign from Microsoft: Celebfavorites.com, which identifies celebrities’ favorite hangouts and adds them to Microsoft’s new mapping website, Windows Live Local. No real-time celeb spotting, just a list of places where they like to hang out.

As the Washington Post reports, the celebs are in on the game; they agree to list their favorite haunts in exchange for a donation by Microsoft to their favorite charities. It’s not quite as edgy as Gawker Stalker, to be sure. But it does seem to indicate a trend.

My company, in a more modest way, is tapping the trend. With our YourMTB.com site, we’ve created a map showing where enthusiast-in-chief Walker Thompson is riding: Where in the world is Walker MTBing? It uses the service Platial.com for the mapping.

I don’t think anyone will be stalking Walker on his rides with this, but perhaps a few mountain bikers will know to watch for him and say hi when he’s on their favorite trail.

My company’s (Enthusiast Group) first website has opened the gates: YourMTB.com, an online community for mountain bikers that’s based on some of the principles of citizen media.

This is a soft launch. We’re issuing no press releases or otherwise trying to make a big fuss. The site has basic functionality, but is still missing a few features that are close to being done but not ready to make live, plus some that are a bit further out. I’d love to get feedback, and if you see something broken, please let me know.

Got an idea of stuff we should do that’s not there? I’m all ears. (Some obvious stuff is still being coded; it’s missing “Report Misconduct” links, for example.)

Are you a mountain biking enthusiast like me? Perhaps you’d like to submit some content — photos, a story about an adventure, MTB news. (MTB-related prizes for best content.)

One thing you’ll notice is the presence of Walker Thompson, who we call the site’s Enthusiast-in-Chief. A pro bike racer and blogger from Durango, he’s being doing a nice job blogging and podcasting, and soon will publish video from his recently acquired (and very tiny) helmet video camera. Walker’s presence demonstrates my belief that a successful citizen-media operation needs a strong personality guiding it and serving as chief evangelist.

My mountain-biking group here in Bouder had a get-together last night — a potluck dinner followed by a biking movie (“Earthed3: Europa“: lots of nice MTB action but weak on plot or character development!). One of our members has turned a basement family room into a home theater, complete with two rows of real theater seats and risers so the folks in the back row can see well.

Here’s the part I found interesting: The set-up was all found and purchased via Craiglist. (The theater seats originally came from a theater in Los Angeles; a guy in Denver advertised them via Craig.) I hear this sort of thing so often from people I know. How did we ever survive before Craigslist came to town? … Oh, yeah, newspaper classifieds.

(And if you want to see a decent movie about mountain biking, I highly recommend “Off Road to Athens.” It actually has some personality and pathos. My wife, a non-MTBer, even enjoyed it.)