August 12, 2010

Tweeting for a Cause

You never thought Twitter would be taken to a level where an inanimate object would be able to tweet to the world…until now. A bike names precious created by the company Breakfast has a mind of its own…well sort of. This bike was created to ride across the entire United States in three months, and tweets its status along the way. The rider, Janeen McCrae, is making this journey to help raise money for The Livestrong Challenge, the battle against cancer.

So how does Precious tweet exactly? Well, the inventors over at Breakfast designed the bike to have numerous sensors. these sensors can detect changes in temperature, speed, direction, location, pedal rotation, etc. Janeen McCrae had previously come up with a couple hundred tweets which are saved in the bike’s “brain.” each tweet is assigned a specific parameter of the sensors. For example, if the bike is going uphill for a long time, the tweet would read something like “Wow…will this hill ever end!?” The bike refreshes once and a while to send out a new tweet. Janeen can also hit a button on the bike which allows her to send her own tweet of the standard 140 characters. Precious and Janeen have been on the road for about two weeks now, currently in Kentucky, and has close to $2,000 raised!

Social media can be used in so many ways by anyone and anything. People who are interested in donating can do so on the main website, yesiamprecious.com where you can follow the tweeting bike along its journey

For more information, please visit http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/precious/

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