Tearing through the terrain of...the skyways?

Last night I volunteered to help on the course at Red Bull SkyRide, their latest major original event to take place in Minnesota. SkyRide was a mountain bike race through the skyways of downtown St. Paul complete with stairs and many a hard corner. There were 50 racers (mostly from MN) and each racer got two runs through the time-trial course. The coolest thing about the event was the complete originality of the idea – the birth of MN Mountain Bike fanatic Adam Buck. He also happens to work for the company on the local field marketing team that I used to be a part of. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the event it wasn’t very spectator friendly. It should get a lot of press though. Here’s an article and an unedited video of the entire course via bike-cam from one of the local news stations.

Just another great example of Red Bull involving the brand within a core culture that it fits in a unique and authentic manner. Keeping with the brand personality, they threw a nice lil’ V.I.P. after party too.



More Awesomeness:
If you’re a Google mail user, like myself, you’ll probably dig their latest and greatest feature addition to your mailbox: Google chat. Yep, they went and embedded instant messaging right into the mailbox page. Apparently only a limited amount of users have the feature upgrade showing up right now but Google promises that everyone should have it within a few weeks. The one catch: the only “contacts” on your buddy list will be other Gmail users that you have sent or received e-mail from (but they’ll show up automatically). So whaddya waitin’ for friends? Go get a Gmail account!

CURRENT LISTENING: Birdmonster - EP