There’s only five more sleeps until the Australian snow season kicks off, and even though a quick check of the NSW resort’s snow cams shows that there isn’t too much of the powdery white stuff on the ground at the moment, it’s still shaping up to be an awesome year in the “alps”. Why, you ask? Because this year, there’s an awesome new gadget to track your runs using a combination of GPS and GPRS technology.
It’s called Flaik, and last Friday it walked away with the top prize at the Australian International Design Awards.
Flaik consists of two main components. The first is the tag, a stylish red pod that straps to your arm. Inside there’s a GPS chip that accurately tacks your movement around the ski resort, measuring speed, distance, altitude and airtime. The unit transmits this information every few seconds to its servers, which you can then review at your leisure either via mobile phone or online.
And that’s the second component – Flaik isn’t just a gadget, it’s a community. You can pair the Flaik with your mobile phone and use it to track your mates on the slopes, send your own location to friends and receive detailed analysis of your runs.
There’s even a safety element involved – it can warn you via SMS when you go out of the resort’s boundaries. And because it’s a GPS tracking device, if you do happen to get lost, your location can be tracked by the authorities, meaning a swift rescue and ongoing ridicule from your mates.
The Flaik is designed to withstand temperatures up to -60 degrees celcius, and has a 15 hour battery life in GPS mode. It has an impact resistant design that can withstand the bumps and knocks you get from falling down the slopes, crashing into people and trees and falling over at the end of a long night’s drinking.
Hopefully we’ll see it rolled out to all the Australian resorts this year. For more info, hit up the Flaik website.