RaceJoy is an open mobile platform. This follows the open approach RunSignUp has taken from the beginning. Our goal is to give runners and races plenty of choice when using RaceJoy for their race. This is probably best explained by the type of partners we will be looking to work with over the coming year. We encourage you to reach out to us and have a conversation about how we can collaborate.
Registration Providers
We want RaceJoy to be available to every race, and that means working with lots of registration providers. We expect all of these to be free services we provide to registration providers that expand their capabilities and broaden the use of RaceJoy. There are several specific integration points we will be bringing out before the summer of 2015:
- RaceJoy Race List. An upcoming release of RaceJoy will have a list of races that we will aggregate from multiple registration sources. If your registration system has a clean API, especially one that mimics the RunSignUp API, we can pull races and present them.
- RaceJoy Race Registration. If your registration system has a responsive design, then we can link the race listing right to your registration page.
- RaceJoy Enable Races. For RaceJoy to work really well for your races, a map needs to be loaded into the system. We accept images as well as GPX and KML formatted digital maps from systems like MapMyRun and Google Pedometer. We will also be releasing an iframe based tool that you can bundle to allow race directors to define their maps and timing points. We are looking for partners who will make it easy and free for races to “RaceJoy Enable” their races.
Race Specific Apps, App Content Management System Builders
Over time, we intend to build a couple of mechanisms that allow other mobile apps to include the key RaceJoy functionality of GPS Race Tracking and GPS Timing Points. This is very difficult technology to build correctly and to scale, so it will be our specialty. We will not go into the market of building race specific apps. We feel there are a growing number of app builders on the market that will handle most of those needs and the combination of embedding responsive designed web apps is very appropriate and relatively low cost solution for races and race series that want their own app.
The timing on exact packaging of this is still to be determined at this point. We are likely to introduce capabilities by the Fall of 2015. The likely approach will be providing a library that can be packaged with your mobile app, and can be an embedded part of content building tools (hopefully tools like Crowdtorch for example). We may also offer lighter weight models that make it simple to call our app from your app.
From a pricing and packaging perspective, this is still under discussion. Our preference is to keep our In App purchase mechanism and pricing of 99 cents coming to us with no cost to your app. This may shift as we learn more and run into limitations on the Apple and Google store models.
Results & Notification Systems
The GPS Timing Points is a powerful new capability that fits in perfectly with standard gun and chip time results systems. RunSignUp’s RD Go will be offering integrated GPS timing point splits, as well RunScore Results.
We want to make this data available via an Open API to other result and notification systems as well. This is currently not available, but plans are to put it in place in 2015.
Summary
We are looking for feedback on these and other interesting partnership opportunities with this unique and powerful technology.
