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The Loppet Foundation :: News & Stories :: Agosto takes Loppet Office to the “Cloud”

Agosto takes Loppet Office to the “Cloud”

Instigator of Loppet Race Day personalized videos, Irfan Khan watches over one of his cameras

While this has not been the winter for snow, it hasn’t kept the the City of Lakes Loppet office from moving forward in spite of the weather. With the help of Agosto, an IT consulting firm specializing in taking companies to the Cloud, the Loppet has entered a new level of information sharing. Since November, Agosto has worked with the Nordic Ski Foundation to migrate the office email and document tools to Google Apps and to set up a new registration and bar code system to simplify registration at Loppet events. Agosto’s co-founder Irfan Khan has also delivered the personalized event participant videos through his media company QudUp for the past two years for the Loppet events.

The Nordic Ski Foundation has witnessed exponential growth in the past several years. With youth programs, trail work and Loppet events expanding rapidly, the office has a new level of communication needs.  “John Munger, the Director of the City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation, came to us and described the office’s technology challenges,” said Irfan Khan, co-founder of Agosto. “Google Apps is such a game changer for companies of almost any size. We could see a number of ways that a move to Google would help the Loppet run more efficiently and improve communications.”

In November, Khan and his team shifted the Loppet’s communication system to Google Apps. After that successful migration, Agosto was asked to solve another problem with the hopes to leverage the cloud again. This time, the Loppet faced some challenges regarding registration. “Registration day was complicated,” Khan explained. “We built a piece of custom software that pushed participants’ registration information to a custom URL. This put multiple entries purchased by a single individual in the same spot and greatly simplified the registration process.”  Watch how Agosto approached the registration challenges here.

There was no getting lost in the woods on Loppet Race Day!

Irfan Khan is also behind the RaceDay videos that have captured personalized footage of each racer in the Loppet for the past two years. “I do a lot of racing myself,” said Khan, who races mountain bikes and competes in triathlons. “And being a tech guy, when I was in the middle of the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race the thought came to me that it would be great for racers to have videos of themselves on the race course.”  To accomplish this, Khan set up static cameras that continuously record the event. As skiers approach the cameras, their time is matched to the exact time in the video making it possible to find an individual racer’s segment.

Khan is looking forward to perfecting his own skate skiing next year, perhaps getting caught on the videos he worked to develop.  Agosto is currently advising the Nordic Ski Foundation as it works on the next phase of information sharing, too. “Our mission is to help companies make high-level strategic decisions that deliver business impact, to be nimble and leverage the power of the Cloud to do significant work at lower costs and with little need for added infrastructure.”