Our ambition with CloudTimer is to make race organisation/timing easy, but man, that’s hard! Last weekend we did the Holland Cup 2 at the Volmolence Kano Club in Waalre (Netherlands). With about 100 participants divided over the sprint, slalom and downriver it was again a nice step up from the last race.

The Holland Cup at ‘the Volmolen’ was again a race with typically late entries, a lot of categories, people starting randomly since they need to use each others boats, changing occupation of the judge sections, etc. This all asks great flexibility of the organisation and the timing system. Further we ran timing beams and Alge Timy clocks paralel to CloudTimer in order to compare the difference between the results of the two, but also adding to the organisational burden.

Running the timing & judging of the race was again very insightful as input for our development efforts. There is no better way to find out what to develop than to be in the field ourselves. We noticed amongst others some input errors since the validate button and the timing button are to close to each other. This can result in mis-clicking and overwriting a time. Still this week we expect to push a new version in which this will be solved.

Further, we are also working a lot on the online dashboard. Since during a race regularly scores need to be adjusted (due to transmission errors or protests) we made an interface to easily do this. Also uploading startlists is a new handy feature, and we now need to extend this to editing startlists since there are always changes to be made after a teamleader meeting.

All in all it was a challenging race to time with our app still being in a ‘beta’ phase. We are working on a lot of improvements for the next big release in two months from now. Maybe timing isn’t easy yet, but step by step we are getting closer to this ambition!

The result page can be found at: www.results.cloudtimer.nl/holland-cup-vkc.html