Quokka, Redux?
by Henning FischerJeff Veen has posted about the nifty race tracker that Adobe has developed for the Tour of California bicycle race. Its worth a look. Its also worth noting that Quokka Sports tried this kind of stuff back at the height of the boom, and failed spectacularly. We’ll see how it goes this time around.
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February 22nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Quokka failed because of bad business decisions (i.e. get all your money in large chunks from VCs and call it “event sponsorship”), not because of the interfaces we were making.
The company eventually had 300 people & offices all over the place; the lion’s share of the new race tracker (headed up by Michael Gough, former CCO at Quokka, not coincidentally) was built by five people in three weeks. My feeling (I was the art director) was always that we could have done much more and better work, and lasted alot longer, if we’d only had half the people
But those were the salad days, when companies were valued by how many people they had.
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Ah, the boom. You, of course, are absolutely right. Quokka failed, like so many others, due to the lack of a coherent business plan. Design was never really the question. Quokka was years ahead of most. However, I can’t help but wonder if things like the Tour tracker are still too far ahead of their time. As Jeff points out in his post, this is where television could go. Its certainly not there yet. Let’s hope that things like the Tour tracker push the entire industry in that direction. But I have doubts. If we can’t get it right with the granddaddy of stats sports, baseball, are marginal sports/points of entry our best option?
March 1st, 2007 at 11:30 am
So, I wrote the tracker and wanted add my 2 cents. One, the tracker was built in under 4 weeks by me and two part-time engineers, one on Flex Data Service back end and one coordinating with the video provider. Two, we were ahead of our time. The video/audio stream was off and on all day. The GPS information was being routed through phone services and then to a satelite and then to a CSC server and THEN to the application. And sadly, even the simple chore of clustering the main website hosting the application was often not running well. Thus the spotty coverage throughout the race… But, surely those are all solvable today? Add a bit of refinement on my 4-week effort and surely this could be a great addition to television and radio? Thoughts? Hit me at http://www.allanpadgett.com and let me know.