I recently came across an article based on one of my hobbies - cycling that involved an interesting bit of technology.  A cycling team in the US is using a system of devices aimed at providing as much data to their coaches as possible.  Each rider's training routes, power output and heart rates are recorded, are visible on their own handlebar-mounted display, and once the training ride is over, the coach can download all the data and analyse it.  This allows the coach to be able to pinpoint areas for improvement for each separate rider. 

Essentially, they are using existing technology in a variety of ways, specific to the situation. A business application of this might be that a taxi company uses sat nav to track the movements of their vehicles, combined with the modelling of the data of the various pickups and drop offs for that day, to more effectively plan their fleet management, during various times of the day, for each day of the week.  There are however, a couple of things to take into account in such a situation, primarily, invasion of privacy.  For instance, a courier company tracking the whereabouts of their employees by phone geo location is all well and good during the business day, however, applying that same tracking outside of hours, or during a sick day could overstep the boundary. 

During my university days I was doing a bit of research into the spread of this type of technology, which, at the time, was in its early days.  With the ever increasing types of mobile devices available now, including the recent development of smart phones, the possibilities have really opened up, and not just for commercial purposes.  I recently has a look through smart phone applications for running and cycling, and found a number that provide all the basics you'd expect (speed, distance, gps tracking), plus had integration with mapmyride.com / mapmyrun.com / dailymile.com and twitter.

It varies business to business in the way that this sort of implementation of technology can assist an organisation, but an efficient application, that is well developed, can be greatly beneficial, to both the company, and its end users.

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