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One of the hottest new tech sectors is what people are calling "the internet of everything", which included such devices as smart-watches, smart-thermostats for your house and everything in between. Riding in on that wave is a whole slew of new devices for action-sport lovers – from goggles with built-in sensors and displays to devices that measure and analyze your every movement. At the top of that head is Trace, a new device that just recently successfully completed it's $150,000 kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.
According to Trace themselves, the goals of the device is to make "action sports measurable, sharable, and comparable. Track, compete, and share." Attach one of these sweet looking puppies to your skate deck, surf board or snowboard, turn it on and ride away. Use your smartphone to check live stats between runs, like how fast your went or how high you ollied, and then at the end of the day you can check out the stats for the whole session and share how awesome you are with the whole world.
My first reaction to Trace, after getting over the cool tech factor, was a mix of disgust and horror. I mean, isn't the whole point of our sports pretty much that they can't be measured in any sort of meaningful way. Other than halfpipe, big-air and racing – all event that just focus on one small part of the sport – the part about snowboarding (and this goes for skating and surfing too) is that the biggest deciding factor in how well your day went isn't how many rotations you got in or how many stairs you ollied (although there's nothing wrong with being proud of a good accomplishment), rather how much fun you and your crew had. How many high-fives were thrown and how many laughs were heard.
Obviously not everyone agrees with me though, and that's fine. In fact Trace was able to raise close to $20k more than they were asking for on Kickstarter, which shows there is obviously a market for these types of devices. But again, should there be? If someone wants to measure their day, shouldn't they be allowed to? Well, of course … but then what is stopping our sport from becoming like tennis or baseball. What will separate us from the norm?
David Lokshin: Trace is the product that I've always wanted. I grew up surfing, skating, and snowboarding in Southern California and I've always been curious about how many waves I was catching, whether or not I was progressing in the park, how long my rides were, and so on. When snowboarding I'd tuck to get as much speed coming down to the lift as possible, and it felt like I was going pretty fast (the feeling of, "Whoa … I'm way out of my comfort zone. If I eat it, I'm done") but I never knew how fast. Turns out I was going way faster than the posted speed limit in a residential zone!
The reception has been great. We've had pros contact us that they've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Kids just learning to skate are looking forward to tracking their progress and keep tabs on their local park when they can't make it there on a given day. We've raised more than $125,000 on Kickstarter with almost 900 backers. The reception has been awesome. One of the things that we've found is a lot of people want to be able to Track pros and see how much they skate, how many tricks they're doing, and connect with them on a more athletic level.
The goals with Trace are two-sided. For athletes who like action sports, our goal is to give them a tool that makes their activity measurable and sharable. A surfer should be able to know how many waves he's caught this month or what his stats were the last time a swell like this rolled through. If you've just caught the longest left of your life, it would be pretty awesome to know that. If you're a skater, it'd be great to know that you're progressing on a trick, landing it cleaner, going higher. All of the same goes for skiing and snowboarding. We had one guy last year log more than 4 Million feet of vertical in a season. That's just insane! Props to him.
We also take the view from a spectator's perspective. When you watch the XGames, Street League, or the Quiky Pro, you should have the stats live right on the screen. Just like it is in Football or Nascar. I want to know how fast Kelly is going at Chopes. Or how high Shawn White is off the ground in the pipe. All of that is possible and we're working on building it.
To me, one of the most appealing parts of snow/skate/surfing is the fact that in fact you cannot measure anything meaningfully and thus, the real deciding factor into how good a day you had was how much fun you had on the slopes … yet your product seems to aim to take away this exact part of the lifestyle. Are you just trying to make snowboarding (and surfing and skateboarding) another measurable thing that can then be sold to the masses as the next basketball or tennis?
Just because you can measure something doesn't mean that it can't be fun. I think the reverse is actually true. Another aspect of that is that a lot of people like to set mini goals for themselves. For example, when I was just learning to skate, jumping over 3 stacked boards was a very big deal for me. We use "stairs" and "boards" as measurements for how high we can ollie because we don't have anything else. It would have been really cool to be able to say, "I can ollie over anything 3.2 feet high." Little things like that.
But seriously … why would anyone need to know exactly how many ollies they popped that day. When I was a kid all that mattered was the feeling of pure satisfaction I was left with after an afternoon skating … and I sucked!
I think I kind of answer this in 4. Just basic curiosity and a way to measure your progress. Measuring something doesn't take away the fun. We're actually already measuring, just in a different set of units. What's the difference between saying you heel flipped off of a 5 stair vs you heel flipped and dropped 4.3 feet. It's just a different unit of measurement. And saying you heel flipped a 5 stair doesn't give you other interesting information like how far you traveled. Were they wide small steps or really tall steps. Some of the guys who are helping us test are jumping the equivalent of two body lengths. That's kind of ridiculous.
Gopro on the head ala teletubby … Trace on your board … what's next for the lift line techno gorb?
That's not a question that I can answer! I'm just focused on Trace.
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Find out tons more info about Trace on their Kickstarter page – the campaign is over but there is still all the info you could want over there.
