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Gadgets, GPS, Networking Systems Make for Gold-Level Winter Games

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 03-01-10 | Comments

With the Winter Olympics in Vancouver a big success, Games officials can credit a wide variety of tech solutions for making it happen.

Thanks to a wealth of telecom, GPS, gadgets and other solutions, the just-completed Vancouver Winter Games may have been the most interactive and tech-savvy ever. If gold medals were to be handed out for IT performances, here are several solutions that may have been on the winner's stand:
- Telecommunications: Seoul, South Korea-based Samsung supplied 9,200 mobile phones for Olympics officials, and even came up with its own system called Wireless Olympic Works (WOW) for these Games. The WOW communications platform allowed for those running events to stay up-to-date with competition results, schedules, weather reports and other needed details. There's also a public WOW application that fans could download from Samsung's Website to select Samsung smartphones. Meanwhile, Maplewood, Minn.-based 3M provided the tech equipment needed to monitor all of the snow-buried cables used to flash event scoring updates for skiing, snowboarding and other events. If access to a particular cable was needed for the Games, 3M Locating and Marking balls buried within the cable allowed workers to pinpoint location immediately without digging up an entire venue's worth of the white, wet stuff.
- Logistics: Oklahoma City, Okla.-based U.S. Fleet Tracking products enabled security teams in Vancouver to use GPS systems with 52-inch LCD monitors to stay on top of the movement of athletes, buses, equipment bags and VIPs. It's the same kind of technology that's used every day to nab drug dealers and track corporate vehicles. The systems�using more than 800 mobile tracking devices no bigger than a BlackBerry on cars, drivers, equipment and athletes�provided updates 24/7 every few seconds and were usually accurate to within 8 inches of movement.
- Global broadcast: Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium was behind the effort to ensure that viewers worldwide could access coverage to the Games. Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds provided its Orion suite of network tools to allow broadcast administrators to get real-time views of critical systems, allowing a multihub network to be managed from a single point.
- Pure frivolous fun: More Cowbell? Yes, more Cowbell! As in Cowbell2010, the hottest-selling sports application for the Winter Games on iTunes. Developed by Boulder, Colo.-based Rage Digital, the app is a virtual cowbell customized with your country flag of choice. Fans have used it to keep a real-time medal count for their country and get live Twitter feeds from more than 200 Olympians, with full event schedules and live "wall" feeds sent to Twitter/Facebook. (Apolo Ohno actually tweeted about what he ate for breakfast.)