Image via Wikipedia

Sam Curren, who works at Kynetx set a goal to ride his bike 1000 miles this summer. And because he's a geek, he instrumented the whole effort so that we could all follow his efforts. The way he created a dashboard of sorts for his riding using a combination of Google Docs and a Kynetx App.

Sam's first task was data collection. He uses a Android-powered G1 for his phone. He installed the My Tracks application to record the data for his ride and then uploaded the data to Google Spreadsheets.

Creating his "dashboard" involved using Yahoo! YQL to convert the data from CSV to JSON and then building a small application using KRL, the Kynetx Rule Language, to grab the JSON and display the results on his blog. He also has a card that will put the results in Google if you don't go to his blog all that often, but still want to keep up with his riding.

Sam's process is automated and once he's done with his ride the dashboard is updated with in a few hours (depending on the data caching). Not bad.

While the audience for data about how far Sam has riden his bike is probably pretty small, I like this application because it shows the use of KNS (Kynetx Network Services) to use data--even data from a phone--to augment and customize Web pages.

If you have an idea for a Kynetx App, you can get started now. It's free.