Pittsburgh companies team up with Lance’s Livestrong campaign at the Tour de France

Pittsburgh based tech company, Deeplocal, has now expanded the bicycle component of their company to the Tour de France.  You may know them as the company that designed our popular Pittsburgh Bike Map, both the paper and online versions.  In their latest venture, Deeplocal and Pittsburgh based Standardrobot, teamed up with Livestrong (Lance Armstrong’s foundation to raise money for cancer research) to develop Chalkbot.

The idea behind Chalkbot is simple.  Anyone  in the world can send a text message to the robot, and it will spray the message in yellow on the course of the Tour de France.  Since it’s part of Livestrong’s “It’s About You” awareness campaign, the messages are supposed to be for hope and inspiration to riders and survivors of cancer.

Nathan Martin, CEO of Deeplocal and proud Pittsburgher, never halts at promoting his hometown.  Even Chalkbot’s euro license plate says “made in pittsburgh.”

This also marks our second connection to Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France.  Mike Pfaltzgraff, who now works for Trek Bicycles, designed Lance’s TDF jersey and bicycle.  He also designed the artwork for BikeFest 2006, our annual celebration of all things cycling.

SEND A MESSAGE: Click here to send messages to the riders

VIDEO: Check out the KDKA story about Chalkbot

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