Virtual Earth Innovation at Harley-Davidson

Hopefully, by now you are all aware of the Great Roads application which Harley-Davidson rolled out in late 2006. It was a sleek interface with brand retention and allowed us to demonstrate some strong evidence of how powerful VE integration can be in the enterprise. Additionally, it provided an example of cross brand pollination and monetization opportunities by showing Best Western hotels on their Great Roads application – a practical service for their riders providing them with hotel information when the routes were too long to complete in a single day.

Well, H-D continues to be a showcase as they recently launched their new applications…yes, as in two new applications. This time around the Great Roads application has been morphed into a social application – allowing users to submit routes which appear on their Great Roads site. The routes are submitted through their Ride Planner application.

Here’s a quick list of high level Ride Planner features:

· User can submit origin information in 3 ways (1) submit address, place name, postal code, etc., (2) right click on the map, click any point of interest or existing road and build it from that.

· You can continue to add waypoints and locations to the route

· You can MOVE THE ROUTE by clicking and dragging the route and it will change the route

· Once you create your route, you can submit it to H-D and it will be reviewed and posted on the Great Roads application.

· Below is a shot of how I drew a route on the map by right clicking and selecting locations and waypoints, then dragged the middle of the end of the route to regenerate the route.

Here’s a quick list of high level Great Road features:

· Great Roads – Enables routes from ByWays.org (H-D controlled)

· Rider Submitted Roads – Enables routes submitted by users. This is truly viral and has huge social networking implications.

· Dealers – Enables H-D dealers on the map

· Events – Dealer submitted events. This brings the franchisee into the mix allow them to highlight their events which drive traffic to their stores. Great local information.

· The UI is very user friendly, providing tabular columns to organize search results and filter queries.

· Clicking on any one of these provides TONS of information about each of the respective item.

CP