With rakkup it’s so easy to keep guidebooks up to date! Wolverine Publishing has added the latest new route, “Sausage Boy”, to their Rifle Mountain Park guidebook. Thanks to Jay Brown for the nice new line. What’s your Rifle project this summer?
We’re proud to announce the release of New River Gorge Volumes 1 & 2 by Mike Williams, published by Wolverine Publishing. Mikey did a nice post about his guides and rakkup here and nailed just how we feel about the importance of both print and digital climbing guidebooks.
These New River Gorge books are the largest guides we’ve released to date. To get ready to show off all of Mikey’s great content we had to add a bunch of new features to rakkup this winter.
It became obvious as soon as we started this project that the rakkup of 2013 just wouldn’t do to properly showcase NRG. Endless Wall alone has over 500 climbs, bigger than lots of entire guidebooks! We had to add the ability to move up and down easily through a book’s “sectors” so a climber could easily browse the Endless Wall’s many sub-walls. We also added histograms to every wall, great charts that help you tell at a glance whether an area has trad, sport or bouldering in the difficulty range you’re looking for. In order to enable a climber to find the best routes from among over 1800 climbs, we added super fast searching and filtering. It now takes literally one second and a few taps to identify the two four star 5.8 sport climbs that are in the shade at NRG using rakkup’s new filter features, and see them on a map as well as in a sorted list. (Hint: They’re both at Bubba City.)
One more second, tap the “Go” button, and rakkup navigates you to those two sweet climbs, turn by turn. Best of all, every time you get a guide update icon (a small cloud) next to your NRG guide, you know that you’re a tap away from getting more great content from a trusted professional and Outdoor Research sponsored athlete, Mike Williams.
Thanks Mike and Wolverine Publishing. You guys helped us demonstrate what we mean when we call rakkup “Climbing guides, reinvented.”
rakkup app brings climbing guidebooks into the digital age
Innovative smartphone app melds print guidebook accuracy with turn-by-turn GPS navigation to accurately locate climbing routes.
SEATTLE, Wash. (April 2, 2013) – The crux of a lot of rock climbs may not necessarily be the technical crux. It may be getting yourself to the base of the intended route in the first place.
To address that problem, as well as provide an easy-to-use, accurate rock-climbing guidebook solution for the digital age, the climbing guidebook app rakkup is being released this week, coinciding with the annual Red Rock Rendezvous climbing festival. The Red Rocks Climbing guidebook will be the first guidebook available in the free app, made possible through a partnership with the print guidebook publisher SuperTopo. Other guidebooks for additional climbing areas will follow.
rakkup, created by Outdoor Geeks LLC and sponsored by the apparel and gear manufacturer Outdoor Research, was developed by two climbers with a combined quarter century in software development, and improves on the digital guidebook format in a number of ways:
“We’ve been waiting for years to find the right partners for getting SuperTopos on smart phones,” said Chris McNamara, SuperTopo founder and owner. “When we saw rakkup, it blew us away. The turn-by-turn navigation on approaches alone is a game changer. The fact the app also is packed with beta, climb selection tools, photos and topos makes this by far the ultimate climbing app.”
rakkup was developed by Rob Price and Todd Kutzke, both climbers and former Microsoft employees with a collective 25 years of experience in software development. Price also used 10 years of experience in developing GPS navigation tools for aviation situations to help create the navigation capabilities in rakkup.
“The goal here was to create a marketplace for professionally produced climbing guidebooks in a digital format, so that climbers can access this content in an easy-to-use format and at a fraction of the cost of a printed guidebook, while guidebook authors and publishers can see return on their intellectual property,” Price said. “Beyond that, we wanted to improve on the guidebook experience, given today’s capabilities of smartphones. We feel like our GPS-based navigation, along with the BelayView, will help cut down on confusion associated with finding your way to a route you want to climb and put the adventure where it’s supposed to be.”
rakkup and Outdoor Research will support the release of the app at the Red Rocks Rendezvous by holding a scavenger hunt that attendees can complete by using the navigation tools that rakkup offers. People can tackle the scavenger hunt any time during the Rendezvous by stopping by the Outdoor Research booth for instructions. The fastest time will win a climbing-focused apparel and accessory kit from OR. Attendees at Red Rocks who are interested in more information on rakkup can also stop by the Outdoor Research booth.
The rakkup app is currently available via Apple’s App Store.
For more information on rakkup, visit rakkup.com.
About Outdoor Geeks, LLC
Outdoor Geeks brings technology to your outdoor recreation experience to help you maximize fun and minimize epics. Inspired by long days at Red Rocks, Nevada, and in Yosemite Valley, which were made longer by the lack of better information resources, its founders decided to apply their extensive knowledge of software and navigation technologies to the climbing world. Our mission with rakkup is to grow and sustain the marketplace for professionally produced climbing guides by providing tools to the experts who’ve dedicated thousands of hours to assembling the finest information climbers could want. With rakkup, we open a door for authors and publishers to easily produce, market, sell, and distribute professionally-produced guidebooks and compete in a digital world based on the quality of their climbing knowledge, without having to become programmers or undertake costly software development. Founded in 2011, Outdoor Geeks is based in Seattle, Wash.
About Outdoor Research
Outdoor Research® is Designed by Adventure®. We provide Innovation and Inspiration for the Relentless Adventurer. Based in Seattle – with in-house manufacturing and prototyping capabilities at our company headquarters – Outdoor Research was founded in 1981 after a failed piece of gear on an Alaskan climbing expedition inspired ideas for a better design. Ever since that first product, the X-Gaiter, put Outdoor Research on the map, we have been dedicated to building better outdoor apparel, gloves, hats and an array of other outdoor accessories informed by real-world testing. We develop innovative, functional, bomb-proof products that are beautiful in their simplicity. Design abides by the maxim ‘make it better, not just new or different,’ and our gear is backed by our Infinite Guarantee®. We listen, value and empower each other and our fellow adventurers – we invite input from our customers, athlete ambassadors and the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations Test Team. We’re independent, letting us strive to provide the best value to our customers, not shareholders. We are committed to our core sports: alpinism, rock and ice climbing, hiking, backpacking, paddling, trail running, and backcountry and sidecountry skiing. We’re growing, as a company and as individuals. And we’re having fun along the way.
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