Live Broadcasting GPS Track

Intro

Last week Greg Hendrickson of WatchMyRace, noticed from my twitter feed that I was running the Marin County half marathon on Sunday. After we exchanged greetings on twitter he asked me if I was going to broadcast my GPS live. This sounded like a fun technical challenge. I've used just about every web-based GPS track sharing service on the Internet, but I've never seen anybody broadcast their race live. There's nothing like a technology challenge to get me motivated. Here's a recap of the twitter conversation that got this started:

GregHendrickson r you carrying a GPS phone for live tracking on Sunday?
11:09 AM Apr 17th

gpsrunner I have an iPhone. I just signed up for your ning community. What else do I need?
11:33 AM Apr 17th

GregHendrickson thx for signing up! my email is greg@watchmyrace.com sign up at www.fireagle.com and www.blogloc.com w/iphone, then....
11:52 AM Apr 17th

This brief twitter dialog and a few emails we exchanged on Friday afternoon motivated me to find a way to broadcast my race in the Marin County half marathon live.

How to do it

I started out signing up for Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle, a Yahoo! service, allows you to post your current location. There are are number of applications that make this easy, including a browser interface and several mobile applications. There are also some services that can read your location from your Fire Eagle profile. It seems like a simple proposition to use this to broadcast a race. The idea is to:

1. Carry an iPhone or other GPS enabled smart phone on the race.
2. Use the GPS built into the iPhone to track position
3. Use one of the Fire Eagle applications to post my position on the race course to the Fire Eagle service
4. Use a blog widget to display my position on http://watchmyrace.ning.com/ and my blog.

I tried several free iPhone clients for Fire Eagle, including Fire Fone, Sparrow, and Yofe. They are all free and all posted position to Fire Eagle after I authorized the application to access my account.

Then I signed up for the Blog Loc service. After linking blogloc to my Fire Eagle account I was able to post my position from my iPhone and have it display in a map on my blog. This easy set-up was very promising. By Friday evening I knew that I'd have a working solution for Sunday's race.

There were three things I wasn't quite happy with.

Firstly, each of the iPhone apps require a keypress and considerable time to post a single waypoint. I wanted hands-free operation and an application that would update my position automatically as I ran the race.

Secondly, the accuracy of the location reported by the iPhone clients was low. If you have ever used the built in maps app's GPS feature you have probably seen the big blue circle that gets smaller as the iPhone locks in the GPS signal. I think that the fire eagle clients were not waiting for the GPS to lock in before they reported position. For the race broadcast to be interesting, the positional accuracy needed to be very high.

Thirdly, the blog loc standard service only shows one data point. I wanted to broadcast a GPS track that showed a trail of breadcrumbs of the race course. With three major shortcomings for this solution, it was clear that I needed to find another solution.

After a lot of Internet research I found the Instamapper service. InstaMapper is a free service that allows you to track a person or vehicle online in real time using a GPS-enabled cell phone. They have five very cool things:

1. Free software for iPhone and other GPS-enabled mobile phones
2. Phone-based clisnt software operates hands-free, sending position data to the web site automatically every minute or so
3. Very accurate position data. Their iPhone client knows how to lock onto the strong satellite signals
4. A widget for posting the GPS track (not just a single point) to a blog or web site
5. A facebook app that allows you to post your position to your facebook page.

Results

I was able to get the Instamapper service set up and test it out on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I turned on the Instamapper GPS Tracker application on my iPhone at the start line. The results were amazing. Greg broadcast to twitter as he watched my race unfold. I was very happy with this first experiment. There are a few observations I'd like to make:

1. It was easy and free to broadcast my race
2. The Instamapper iphone app did not drain the battery. I had decent battery life remaining after over two hours of broadcasting my position
3. This is begging for a social sharing platform. www.watchmyrace.com will become a very interesting destination for athletes and their families, friends, and fans
4. It would be nice to have some context for the event in the display, incuding the start and finish points, start time, and mile markers.
   

Next steps

Now it's time to get serious about the technology. We need a better platform for sharing. We need better mobile applications. We need social sharing. This could be an interesting business opportunity.

If you want to try broadcasting your race and need some help feel free to contact me by leaving a comment here.