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The Next Generation of Adventure Racing
Live Coverage
Is Coming
From the crew that brought you the Atomic Adventure Race comes
an all-new unified race tracking system capable of producing real results in
real time, supporting any format race, any discipline, any bonus/penalty
system, and accessible anywhere there is an internet connection--over a
desktop, laptop, or cell phone.
For far too long, friends, family, and fans of
adventure racers interested in the plight of the racers through the arduous
courses have had little insight into the flow of the race and the fight for the
lead. No more! RDBoard.com will bring the updates to the fans.
Past
 It
started as an idea a couple of years ago.
Time and again we would go through the process of telling an exciting
story of the race in which our team competed the previous weekend, only to end
on the anti-climatic note of not knowing what our final ranking was. The question of when the results would come
out was an inevitability, and the answer was always
the same—in about a week or so.
After the inaugural Atomic Adventure Race, we saw all the
challenges from race management’s perspective.
We had a dedicated media team pushing out updates as quickly and
accurately as possible, yet we still had a significant delay to get the initial
set of results out. We also realized
that there was significant overlap between live coverage and the final result
calculation.
We came to the conclusion.
We had to create a live race coverage system that would generate rock
solid results real time and get it to as many race directors as possible.
Present
 While
the large races have the budget to roll their own, the adventure racing
community at large has been without a sufficient unified solution for live race
coverage for far too long. As such, many
race directors’ only option has been to resort to using third party programs as
the entirety of their race coverage. We
have learned, though, that tools like Twitter and SPOT, while useful components
of race coverage, are inadequate by themselves.
So we have spent the last three months building the platform
for this all-new live race coverage system, which will be RDBoard.com. Here are just a few of the features:
- Leaderboard supporting the following ranking methods:
- time-based
- CP-based
- mandatory-optional CP-based
- score-o/weighted cp-based
- mandatory-optional grouping or partial grouping CP-based
- least skipped CP
- least skipped score-o/weighted based
- and more!
- Leaderboard that factors in team status, cutoffs, penalties,
bonuses, stage race modifiers, and more.
 Race
updates delivered to fans: Screaming fast performance. Know it as soon as it happens.- 3rd
Party Integration: YouTube, Twitter, Flickr,
Photobucket, Blogger, integration.
- Access
anywhere anyhow: Mobile,
desktop, and embeddable versions for each and every component.
- Completely
customizable look and feel:
Each function independently embeddable in Race Director's official race
website or served all together at RDBoard.com.
- Extremely
good error checking. Catching
bad data at the time of typo—before it causes problems.
- Intuitive
form pre-population: RDBoard will fill out as much as possible for you—the
race staff’s job just got easier.
- Robust permissioning:
ability to delegate live coverage to one or more people and keep them from
messing with anything else.
- Detailed
results: exportable to a variety
of formats (PDF, XLS, TXT). We are talking head-to-head comparisons,
leg splits, all kinds of stuff.
Future
We are not the first to want to do this, and we will
probably not be the last, but we cannot sit by and wait for things to get
better by themselves. We have taken the
first steps and are well on our way. And
we are not alone. Others are stepping up
to change the world of adventure racing as well. And it is our full intent to reach out and
partner with them in this effort to revamp our sport and launch it into 2010. Our motivator in all this is that it will
serve as a huge benefit to the adventure racing community, and so we are
equally excited about partnering with folks that will further enable this
vision.
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