motorcycles, technology, music, business

I am a member of the Boston Sport Bike Meetup.com Group. I have only been able to go on two rides so far but they have both been fun.

I have been “planning” on doing a New Hampshire trip on my own this summer. I even have the route all mapped out and loaded in my GPS. But I wasn’t getting out the door. I was unsure of whether to do it in one day or two and I wasn’t sure how much money it would cost and so on. It would have also been my longest ride to date and I may have been intimidated by the miles in my route.

One day I see a scheduled meetup to do a slightly shorter version of my planned trip. I decided that since I wasn’t able to motivate myself to go on my own, I would make myself go on this ride.

We met in the morning, north of the city. It took a bit of getting used to for me to adjust my timing to allow for many riders, up to 15 at one point. I normally ride solo, and as we all know traveling in groups can be a bit of a hurry up and wait situation. There was a bit more futzing around than I would have liked and lunch was much longer than I would have liked but I enjoyed riding with the group and therefore the slight inconveniences were worth it.

I used my Garmin 60CSx to map my route. At Lincoln, NH several of us decided to head home while the rest continued on a bit more.

My Route:

View Larger Map

For a graphic showing the approximate speed and elevation of the ride go to me Garmin Connect activity page.

The Kancamagus is a lot of fun. It is almost as good as so many roads in Northern California. If it weren’t for the cars it would be a fantastic road. I put together a shorter video of some of the twisties. Recorded using a U-bolt camera mount and a Flip Mino. The bike you see most of is Tim’s Ducati 848. I, of course, am on my 2006 Yamaha FZ1.

I hope to get up there on another ride this summer. Hopefully following the route I have mapped out. I would be more than happy to do a smaller group ride of maybe 4 to 6 people. It seams that the best size for motorcycle trips is also the best size for project teams.

Thanks for reading and happy riding.

Last Saturday I posted an experiment on Craigslist. For those of you who would rather not read my previous post about it I will recap:

-recap-
I have been day dreaming of riding and potentially owning a Triumph Daytona 675. I have never ridden a proper sport bike and the fact that I am interested in one is an interesting progression in my riding since I initially started down the Harley-Davidson cruiser path. There are no places to rent non-cruisers in New England and especially no places to rent the Daytona 675. The only place I found that does rent them is in Utah. I did price out my various options including flying to Utah and decided that I wasn’t ready to invest that much time and money just yet.
I awoke one morning with an interesting idea which I immediately put to digital ink. I would post on Craigslist a want ad for renting or borrowing a Daytona 675.
-/recap-

After posting my want ad to Craigslist I did not invest much hope that it would work out, but it couldn’t hurt, right? A day or so after the posting of said ad I received an email. Don’t get too excited, as this email was a tip to give a local Triumph dealer a call and ask for a test ride. I considered this option but it wasn’t ideal in that the test ride would probably be short and being a new bike it would not be able to be revved past 5K. That being said I put it on the back burner.

About the point that I had given up on the ad, it had been five or so days, I receive an email from a gentleman in Cambridge who is in the process of selling his 2006 Triumph Daytona 675. He offered to let me borrow it, for multiple days, only paying for the fuel that I use. How awesome is that?!! We have textually (via email) agreed and I should be able to borrow his bike, for probably just a day, in the first half of June. Perhaps even on my birthday!

I am surprised to say that my experiment seems to be producing a positive result. I will post an update once I am actually able to ride the bike and I will also be giving a ride report as a separate entry I am sure. After all my involvement in social media it may be actually paying dividends for me personally.

Needless to say I am very excited that it appears I have made a connection through Craigslist and that I will get to ride the bike which has been of so much interest to me.

thanks for reading and happy riding.

Garmin, is a diversified GPS giant. They seem to be everywhere but in a very conservative stand. What I mean by that is they make sure they are involved in a lot of different areas and segments but don’t jump head first (or wallet first) into a niche market.

My team did a in depth presentation and write up on Garmin. The presentation can be found on my Linkedin page.

The big recommendation – buy a map company. We think that Garmin will be leveraged out of the market if they do not buy a map company to increase their value added to potential partner companies.

The one place that Garmin seems to not be yet is healthcare. This was the most profitable recommendation of ours but not the most interesting to me.

The most interesting to me were the social network building suggestions we have for Garmin. I feel I can write about these outside of our paper because they were my ideas.

The main concept is to have Garmin provide a platform (including an SDK) to promote developer and user input and innovation. Garmin is coming out with the Nuvifone, their answer to the smartphone threat. Garmin offers great GPS services but they do not encourage same side network effects, which is what has made the iPhone such a hit. Same side network effect is when you have a product and it’s really cool and enables you to share stuff and do stuff with other people who have the same product. iPhone does this, Furby does this, Garmin does not do this. Same side network effects is what really drives user recommendations to friends. If I have a Garmin with its current functionality, I will say to a friend, “get a GPS, they are great.” If I have a Garmin with the ideas that I will introduce in a minute, I will say to a friend, “get a Garmin, then we can do all this cool stuff together.”

For the sake of space, I will be brief. Here are some of my ideas for Garmin (including the key slides from the presentation):

Shared Photo Navigation – currently Garmin lets you use your own photos for navigating but does not let you share those photos for others to use.

User Point of Interest Reviews – users could click on a “more info” button to see what others have said about a particular POI.

User Traffic Updates – hopefully this would be more of “two car accident @ exit 12″ rather than “this traffic bites.”

User Map Updates – Users can update the map and after a certain number of users verify that change by making the same update, the change will be incorporated into the main map.

Another idea is Garmin Caravan. This allows a group of Garmin users to sync their Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) before a trip and then have their maps synced as they drive. Users can suggest waypoints and send short messages via the PND and others can accept those waypoints. Ideally this data would travel over the cell tower network and since Garmin currently has 25 PNDs with MSN Direct capability this should be possible.

The last idea for this post is what I call Garmin Destinations. This would enable users to record their trip using an SD card and later upload their route to their computer so that it can be plotted on a pretty map. Users would also be able to add geo-tagged photos and messages to the map. This makes it an interactive travelogue. Users could then upload it to their blog and even better yet, upload it to Facebook. How great would it be to share your travel adventures with your family and friends using an interactive and attractive map. This is free advertising for Garmin. People will think, I could have that much fun and go on trips if I had a Garmin too.

In conclusion: Garmin needs to buy a map company, explore the healthcare market, and open up their platform.