For the past two years, Garmin has been a sponsor at the Sea Otter Classic along with our MotionBased division (soon to be Garmin), which also sponsored in 2005 before joining the Garmin family. Come April 2008, we’ll be out in force once again, sporting our famous Garmin Jeep decked out with the latest GPS devices. We’ll also be showing off the latest in cycling devices, the Edge® 605 and 705. You been asking for maps in our cycle computers, and now we’ve delivered. The 605 and 705 feature built-in mapping, color display and an SD card slot for optional detailed maps. There’s a lot more to crave in the new Edge series — more on that in a future article.
As in years past, we’ll continue creating the maps for all of the Sea Otter events. Previously, we posted the course maps as soon as we finished them, which was months before Sea Otter commencement. However the Bureau of Land Management has requested that the maps only be posted one month prior to the start of the Sea Otter Classic in order to maintain the event’s environmentally friendly focus. Check back in March to see the new course maps.
Another thing to look for in the coming months is the makeover we’re giving our online training community. Garmin Connect™ is a community website where customers can store, view and share activities and locations recorded by Garmin fitness and recreational devices, including our Edge and Forerunner® series. Garmin Connect (found online at connect.garmin.com), is the evolution of MotionBased.com and will have a new look and feel, improved feature set and added compatibility with more operating systems and browsers. Everything you’ve come to know and love about MotionBased is still there—we’ve just made it better and changed the name. Current MotionBased users can expect that site to fade to black sometime between January 31 and February 15, 2008, with Garmin Connect taking the spotlight.
“The Garmin Connect team is excited to foster the community that is home to thousands of new activity postings each day, and we embrace the opportunity to further integrate with Garmin’s growing family of innovative products and passionate people,” said Aaron Roller, co-founder and CTO of MotionBased. All activities uploaded prior to the switch will be available as before.”
The first version of Garmin Connect launched in October 2007 to exclusively support the Forerunner 50—Garmin’s low-cost, non-GPS fitness watch—through automatic wireless downloads. The second release of Garmin Connect is scheduled to launch in January 2008 and will add GPS support for use with other Garmin products. At this time, the MotionBased customer and activity database will migrate to Garmin Connect. This database currently stores more than 1.5 million public activities and is growing at a rate of 3,500 per day.
Here’s how you’ll tap into the online training community via Garmin Connect: once you’ve completed your ride or another activity using a Garmin device, you can upload the data and personalize and categorize each activity. Garmin Connect takes the data already received by your device and calculates measurements such as time, distance, speed, elevation and heart rate. The site displays this information through charts, illustrations, reports and a variety of maps—street, photo, topographic and elevation maps. It can also display your ride or activity on the popular Google Earth application, helping you to visualize the entire activity. You can replay your workout using media controls and watch as you move along the mapped route coupled with an elevation profile. This feature is invaluable for training, allowing you to go back and pinpoint any part of your workout to see how you performed. That’s the beauty of having GPS location data coupled with a fitness device such as the Edge bike computer.
Each activity stored in a personal online digest and marked as “public” may be accessed by anyone visiting the Garmin Connect site. Activities marked “private” can only be accessed by the user. Visitors have access to all of the activities at no cost, and they may search activities by keyword and location to find popular running or cycling routes while traveling or to engage in “virtual races” with other Garmin Connect members. Garmin Connect is free for all customers who want to store and access all of their activities uploaded to the site. Garmin Connect will still maintain a paid-subscription service, Garmin Connect Plus, which enables advanced features. Existing MotionBased customers with annual paid subscriptions will be grandfathered into Garmin Connect Plus.
Garmin Connect will support a variety of operating systems (Windows 2000/XP/Vista; Mac OS X by the end of 2007) and browsers (Internet Explorer 6+; Firefox 2+; Safari 2+). We look forward to sharing more details about Garmin Connect and our new Edge series.
“The Sea Otter Classic is our kind of event. Great riding, festive expo and passionate cyclists are the quintessential elements to a successful bike event, and Sea Otter has ‘em all. It’s the perfect venue to showcase the new lineup. The new Edge 605/705 will be on stage as well as the transformed MotionBased, now Garmin Connect,” said Mike Maxson, MotionBased Marketing Manager.
In the months leading up to the Sea Otter Classic, we’ll be providing training tips to help you have the best race possible. So stay tuned—there’s a lot of cool stuff you won’t want to miss!
