High Road Sports announced a new technology and marketing collaboration with Google Inc. today, that aims to bring the Tour de France closer to cycling fans unable to attend the sport's biggest event. The initiative brings together Internet giant Google, the team's sponsor HTC and SRM to provide data from the HTC-Columbia riders during this year's Grande Boucle.
The technology partnership will allow fans and viewers to follow the HTC-Columbia riders in real time during this year's race to track speed, heart rate, power output and other data provided by the SRM power meter. The experience will be presented and enhanced by applications developed by the California company including Google Maps, Street View, Google Earth, Android, and My Tracks.
"Google and HTC are ideal partners to further develop the sport of cycling and present it to a worldwide audience in an engaging way," explained team owner Bob Stapleton. "The interest of such innovative partners is very encouraging and we look forward to continuing to develop this project in the future."
HTC worked closely with SRM, Google and High Road's technical team to develop HTC Legend smartphones that operate with HTC Sense with Android™ 2.1. The smartphones will now collect real time racing and location information so it can then be transmitted wirelessly to Google's servers. The phones will be running Google's mobile application 'My Tracks', which reads the racing data directly from the SRM sensors on the bike. The data will then be available to users via API's made available by Google.
"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," explained former pro cyclist Dylan Casey, who is now a Product Manager at Google. "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."
HTC has been rolling out their phones with Google's mobile operating system, so it made sense for the team, who is already known for embracing technology, to find creative ways to promote their title sponsor's devices to cyclists.
"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," added the HTC Corporation's chief marketing officer John Wang.