A team recently set a new world record by driving from the northernmost point of Europe – Nordkapp, Norway – to the southernmost point of Africa – Cape Agulhas – 19,000 kilometers in nine days as part of the Cape to Cape race. The team crossed Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, Ethopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Temperatures went from freezing in Norway to 48 degrees Celsius in Sudan. With extreme temperature and road condition changes there was a great deal of vehicle performance data to gather.
Three drivers worked around the clock to make the drive in a Volkswagen Touareg V6 TDI: team leader Rainer Zietlow, Marius Biela and Matthias Prillwitz.
Hewlett-Packard was one of the sponsors of the trip and gathered data from vehicle sensors in addition to audio, video, social media and GPS information. This big data was collected and stored in the cloud and is set to be used to help prepare the team for their next trip on this route planned for June. In the upcoming trip, biometric data will be added to the range of information being gathered.
HP talks about the information they gathered as tangible IT that shows how the combination of big data, mobility, secure transmission and storage along with the cloud makes these technologies more tangible to business discussions. This information is helping to build use cases to show how data and the “Internet of Things” can be used in a socio-economic fashion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW9VE8VKxKc
And, it’s all for a good cause. SOS Children’s Villages along with Food and Trees for Africa both received donations from the team.
And never forget, things are closer than they appear in the side mirror.
Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career the telecom, IT and security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
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