Transporter takes podium place as Olympian’s favourite tech

With seven World Cup podiums, three winter Olympic Games and many multi-national titles to her name, Zoe is GB’s most successful SBX athlete of all time. She is currently training for her 4th Olympic Games in PyeongChang in 2018.

Challenge
Olympic athletes usually have to supplement any funding the government gives them to pay for coaches, equipment and a life on tour. But as the only UK snowboarder in her field, Zoe does not get any government funding at all. She has to pay all travel, equipment and training costs herself. In order to survive as a professional snowboarder, she has to find ways to save and earn money without compromising her training regime.

Training is costly. Zoe has a strength and conditioning coach in the UK and a snowboard coach in Canada. As Zoe can be anywhere around the world, she usually has to fly her coaches to wherever she happens to be several times a year. This means paying for expensive return flights, accommodation and car hire.

To save money Zoe has started to use technology to get long distance coaching. With the help of a helmet camera and a robotic cameraman, she can send her coaches videos of her training. They can use an app called Coach’s Eye to comment on the videos, pausing or slowing them down, even circling on the screen to provide direction, advice and feedback.

Zoe was using the public cloud service provider, Dropbox, to share the videos with her coaches but found the monthly fees were too expensive, the download/upload process was taking too long and her laptop was rapidly running out of space to store all the media files she needed. She was also concerned over the privacy and security of her files.

Solution
Zoe decided to look for an alternative to Dropbox that was cost effective, secure, fast and simple.

“If you want a decent amount of space on Dropbox you have to pay a recurring monthly fee, which is pretty expensive,” she says. “And I didn’t like the idea of my files being stored on an unknown server in the US somewhere, where I didn’t have control of it. I thought, there must be something else, where you can own the hard drive, so I did some googling and came across the Transporter.”

The Transporter offers all the key benefits of a public cloud platform, without any of the privacy or security concerns. The appliance is privately owned so users have 100% total ownership and control over their data for a one-off fee.

Being able to facilitate long distance training through the security of the Transporter means Zoe’s snowboard coach no longer has to travel as frequently as he used to. He now only takes two return flights from Canada instead of the usual seven. Zoe estimates that she will save £15,000 a year. The money saved can be used to buy new equipment and prepare for the 2018 Olympics.

Discovery of the Transporter has also saved Zoe a lot of time and frustration.

“Before using the Transporter I had to upload my training videos to YouTube which would take ages, or fail half way through. It was slow and annoying. There was a lot of back and forth of emails, between my coaches and I, as each one made edits. Basically, it was a big hassle.” Zoe explains. “With the Transporter, I don’t have to do any of that. I can tell my coach to look in a folder for a new video and that’s it. I can get almost instant feedback. What took an hour, now takes ten minutes.”

In addition to sharing videos for instant feedback from her coaches, Zoe also uses the videos to rehearse. Like her fellow competitors, she only gets a limited amount of training time on each course. But, using videos stored on the Transporter, Zoe can rehearse, off the slopes. By watching a video shot from her helmet camera she can physically run through the course, mimicking where to bend or lean, reminding herself of the difficulties of a particular course, or watch footage of how her competitors handled it. The Transporter can provision up to 24TB of cloud accessible storage per unit, so Zoe can save as many files as she likes.

“My favourite feature is the library feature. It’s great to have files available (in my case videos) but not actually stored on my computer,” Zoe says. “I have over 2TB of data. My computer isn’t big enough to store everything I want on it. To be able to have access to all my videos wherever I am is amazing. It’s like having a magic suitcase that holds more than it should do. Like Mary Poppins’s magic bag. That’s what the Transporter is like, a magic computer that holds everything.”

Zoe also uses her Transporter to store everything she might ever need whilst away from home; her passport details, her hotel bookings, marriage certificate and driving licence are all on there.

“The amount of times I log onto my Transporter to get my passport number is insane. I am always booking travel, so I am logging onto Transporter on at least a weekly basis for travel purposes alone!,” Zoe explains. “If I lose my phone or laptop, I can access all of my important documents, wherever I am in the world, which is fabulous. I’ve got every single file and photo I own backed-up on the Transporter

On one occasion, half of Zoe’s team got lost when travelling to a small town in Italy. Unfortunately, the lost half of her party had the hotel booking confirmation with them. By using the Transporter app on her phone, Zoe was able to access the booking details. By the time the lost party found the hotel, Zoe had checked-in, showered and had dinner: “Waiting out in the snow, and missing an early night before a race day – that would have been far from ideal!” Zoe says.

Zoe helps to fund her snowboarding with an online business. But, running a business from a variety of locations is a challenge. She can be on the Alps one minute and at the Queen’s Garden Party the next. To sustain her online business projects, Zoe needs secure file access from wherever she happens to be and the Transporter offers this.

“I also use my Transporter for the various people involved in my online business; one is in London, one down South, one in Leeds and then I am wherever I am in the entire world,” Zoe explains. “With the Transporter for Business we can share documents and communicate easily. That is imperative in making the business work and I need the business to work to make the snowboarding possible, so it’s all interlinked.”