Clarksons

Clarksons Shipping is the world’s leading provider of integrated shipping services, bringing connections and experience to an international client base.  They have 46 global offices including UK (St Katharine Docks, London), Houston, Dubai and New York to name a few.

Clarksons Shipping approached Xncreations, in collaboration with the events company, TEAMCycles (Watt Bikes) to help with delivery of the technical aspect associated with one of their key charity events of 2016. The company have a strong corporate social responsibility programme and their staff raise lots of funds for charity.

Our brief was to deliver a multi-site live challenge, where teams of employees would compete over 4 hours on a bike, aiming to cycle 120km.  The team to complete the distance first would be deemed the winner. 

Each site (a Clarksons office in UK and around the world) consisted of between 5-20 bikes.  Each bike belonged to a team of riders.  Clarksons wanted to provide a globally accessible website which clearly showed in real time how far teams were travelling in the form of a leader board.

Xncreations was responsible for:

1. Automatically gathering data from the bikes
2. Presenting real time data in the form of a leader board which was accessible via global locations

Our key challenge was providing the hardware and software at the various locations around the world simultaneously.  To ensure setup was as simple as a “plug and play” solution, the hardware of choice was a Raspberry Pi with our pre-configured ANT+ library which was used to gather data from the Watt Bikes.  Support was provided in the form of a remote interface which allowed us to control the devices from a central location.

In conjunction with the data capture software, we also built a JavaScript based website to visualise the leader board in real time.  This was displayed on various large scale monitors around the world.

Our bespoke software was used by more than 250 participants over 8 different timezones.  Clarksons Shipping employees and colleagues raised a substantial amount for their chosen charity at this event. Congratulations to all involved.   We could not be more pleased that the company decided to "ship in" Xncreation's expertise for this particular journey giving us the opportunity to deliver the goods on time!