Thanks to the GPS functionality built into today’s smartphones, app developers have been able to come up with a bunch of ways for you to measure and record your sporting activity. Apps like Strava allow cyclists and runners to figure out exactly how far and fast they’re travelling and to compare those stats to their mates’ tackling the same routes.

Of course, there are already apps that provide similar functionality for winter sports. AlpineReplay is one such app and records your max speed, vertical distance, distance traveled, Calories, number of jumps, and airtime.

However, ActiveReplay, the guys behind the app, have realised that there is far more data to be harvested from action sports than just the basic ones mentioned above. How rad would it be if your app could measure how many you times you did a 360/backflip or how many runs you completed in a day and display those runs back to you on a map?

‘Trace’ is the new innovation that the guys are hoping to bring to market and have built a neat little mountable water/shockproof GPS device (with the help of token rocket scientist and CEO Anatole Lokshin) that measures all of this information and uses clever algorithms based on athlete testing to identify landed tricks. Even more ambitiously, the device is being built to work with skateboarders and surfers, where the motion involved in tricks is arguably much more complicated – skaters will be able to attach the the Trace pod to their skateboard and have it count how many 360 flips they land for example.

After your session you simply connect the pod to your phone via Bluetooth and the data is sent to the ActiveReplay servers for processing. Within seconds that data is then displayed back to you within the app and can be shared on the various social media platforms allowing you to brag to your buddies about the kicker in the XL park that you overshot.

We reckon this could actually be a really popular little gadget and think the guys have done a fantastic job of presenting it too.

Although we try and act otherwise, we’ve all got an inner geek hiding somewhere inside us – y’know, a miniature Mark Zuckerberg sitting in a corner of our brains telling us to analyse the percentage increase of our Facebook friends year on year… oh, just us?

ActiveReplay are looking to raise $150,000 on Kickstarter to bring Trace to market and after only 5 days, are already almost a third of the way there – seems like other people think that this idea could have legs.

Could you ever see yourself using this or is it one extra piece of quantification that we don’t need in snowboarding?