Are the guys from TRAC here? It would be great to know more about it. I ran in college, my brother ran in college, my sister hopes to as well. I have always been frustrated that I couldn't follow along with those trackers online. We always resorted to trying to give play-by-play over the phone which isn't the most elegant solution. Definitely an area you could have a lot of impact on. Especially with the rise in popularity of marathons and other races.
So the entire idea was first inspired by timing athletes at trac practices. our coach would spend hours timing with 5+ stopwatches in hand, write everything on a clipboard, then type it into excel. He then would print it all out and give us a binder of numbers at the end of the year. We wanted to design a system that would be awesome for repeats on the track/xc course, and its slowly progressed into timing races.
That's awesome. All our splits were written down with pencil in our logs so I definitely felt that pain. I can definitely see a lot of places you could take it. Hope it all goes well!
Today is YC W16 Demo Day (so, by the way, brace yourselves for an onslaught of YC/startup stories), so the founders are probably occupied, but we'll ping them.
The key to this product, as I've always seen it, is to subvert all of the enterprise-style incumbent timing systems with a system that costs 80% less and is 200% easier to use. If you've seen any of the current stuff out there that's used at races, then you know that the latter requirement is, in fact, a low bar. TRAC looks to be satisfying both of these stipulations. I like their prospects.
Its insane. In college, I worked with a guy who owned an enterprise system and the software is very backwards. Everything has to be run on a windows machine, and every time windows updated, there were compatibility issues. We've tried to solve as much of that as possible, you can set up on browser, and then operate all the hardware off your smartphone when the race is going.
If people are looking for something similar without RFID tags, there are sites like http://chronograph.io. It synchronizes stopwatches and timers between anyone viewing the same session.
