About

What?

MTBGuru is for people who like to ride, hike, run – yes those types that can’t seem to stay in the house and sit still.

You can upload and share your GPS data and photos taken during your outdoor adventures to the site. In case you don’t have a GPS unit… those things make a great birthday or Christmas present, politely suggest it to your loved ones!

You can browse around and see what your friends and other people are up to. We’ve focused on mountain biking to date, but it really works as well for any activity where you’re outside and moving around.

You can relive those epic trips and impress friends and co-workers with your exploits.

And the best part: it’s all free and you have full control over your data and any information that you enter on the site. We’ve put some ads here and there and we may put more in the future, as web hosting costs money. But we built this site in the first place because we’re passionate about mountain biking and the outdoors ourselves, and felt it as an itch that needed scratching. We took it on us to make it as simple, intuitive and hassle-free as possible.

Why?

Because we got frustrated by the familiar routine: looking up directions to the trailhead; figuring out again where exactly the fun trails are; doing extensive searches on the Web when we want to try out some new locations; messing around with GPS data in the proprietary-format tools that usually come with it; forgetting which folder we stored our pictures in; and so on.

Sure, there are places on the Web and tools out there that can do all we want: but they’re scattered around, and we’d need to put time, effort or money in it; and most importantly: many sites and software tools are so bloated, user-unfriendly and annoying that we’d get in a bad mood in no time.

Since we didn’t really find what we were looking for, we decided to create it ourselves and so we built this web app.

How?

Check out our FAQ. This is the short version: the site consists of a directory of ‘trips’. You can search them, create new ones, share them with friends or the public at large. You can upload your GPS data and pictures and things will be automatically processed and visualized for you. You can comment on trips, leave feedback on other people’s rides. All data you enter belongs to you: you can easily get a hold of it through RSS. You can download GPS files of trips other users choose to share.

Who?

MTBGuru was founded by two Belgo-Californians:

Dirk De Bruyker lives in Palo Alto, loves to ride all kinds of bikes and is fond of various electronic gadgets that make life more quantifiable. In another life, he is a researcher at PARC, where he started working after obtaining a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the K.U.Leuven. At MTBGuru, he works on design, interfaces and content. He keeps a blog, where you can find photos, bike talk and stories for the folks back home. His favorite quote is Einstein’s ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’

Tom lives in Santa Clara, where he works as integrated circuit designer. Soon after he discovered the beauty of Ruby on Rails, a supremely elegant web development program, he started looking for a problem waiting for a solution to try it out: this website is the result. He used to be an avid hiker, but mostly switched to mountain biking early 2005 after the bike store in front of his permanent storage place was closing up shop. He has no patience or mercy for slow and bloated software.