Gadgets, GPS, Networking Systems Make for Gold-Level Winter Games
Dennis McCafferty | Date: 03-01-10 | Comments: 1
- 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
