The Interbike International Bike Expo begins its final day Friday, and bloggers are filing fast and furious. Here are some of the highlights I've seen in the blogosphere.
Bike shop owners should print out and post in their shops the blog entry from Alan Snel — Bike Stories on “Treat Your Customers Right.” Alan attended a seminar on bicycle retail trends and the speaker offered some tips:
“He urged bike shops workers to stop selling products they like and to sell products that their customers want. He talked about giving them a chocolate chip cookie when they enter your bike store. Basically, treat your customers right.”
Amen to that.
Celebrity watch
Velogal is tearing through Interbike with her camera snapping pictures of celebrities. Her latest include David Zabriskie, Phil Liggett, George Hincapie, Mario Cippolini, and Freddie Rodriguez, tasting a margarita he created on a bicycle-powered blender.
Speaking of pictures, Zabriskie, Rodriguez, Kristin Armstrong and Christian Vandevelde posed for pictures and were interviewed for an upcoming issue of Road Magazine. The roughs of those shots are posted at editorial director Neal Browne's blog.
Tim Grahl at the Crooked Cog Podcast caught up with OLN's Bob Roll and asked him about mountain biking. Although he effuses endlessly about the road biking and the Tour de France for three weeks a year, Roll said he was a professional mountain biker full-time from 1993 through 1998.
Talking about how mountain biking got its start in the US, catching the Europeans by surprise, Roll said mountain biking is well-suited to America's rural landscape. “It gave people .. a chance to experience the trails and the natural backdrop in a much more intense and enjoyable and gorgeous way … that you can't do from a car.” A person could get the same pleasure from hiking, he said, “but at a much more slower pace.”
It's all about the bikes
Colorado Springs-based titanium fabricator Moots displayed a custom bike made for adventure cyclist Mike Curiak, who won the 350-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational on it last year. VeloNews, which has pictures, says the downtube is sealed to hold white gas; it can be pressured to run the stove right off the bike. The tires are Surley's Endomorph 3.7 on Remolino rims. This bike is very unique.
John Schubert of Adventure Cycling Association filed on the NuVinci continuously variable transmission for bicycles, electric assist bikes using Currie Technologies, and utility bicycles made for the US market by Batavus.
Singletrack magazine's blog posted numerous pictures of their ride on a prototype mountain bike manufactured by Cove. It looks like it just got welded the night before.
Brian Kendell's blog has a picture of an 11-pound bike made by Parlee Cycles. Then he found one that weighed 6 pounds. He thought that was curious since the UCI minimum weight is 16 pounds.
Although he's not in Las Vegas, James at Bicycle Design noted the continued emergence of curved top tubes on many road bicycles. “Sometimes they seem to be an integral part of the frame design and other times they appear to be a bit of a forced design element. It is sometimes hard to pinpoint why, but in many cases, the frame graphics can really help to unify the design.” He uses a photo of a Colnago to illustrate his point.
This Just In at Bicycling Magazine reports on the trend in women's and commuter bicycles at Interbike. Writer Loren Mooney says bike companies are including women in their high-tech innovations. She points to the Orbea Diva, the Scott Contessa CR1 carbon road bike, and Spark full-carbon mountain bike.
Another trend is using a bicycle for transportation (imagine that!). She writes up the Electra New Amsterdam and the return of the Specialized Globe city bike.
Mike Davis at Bike Magic has short write-ups on Merlin, Race Face cranks, Giant Glory and Reign X, a Minoura bicycle computer that uses e-paper, and bars and seatposts from Maxm.
Elsewhere, CyclingNews reviews Seven Cycles' line of carbon road bikes, and Mtbr.com covers just about everything else.
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