Michael Sheeley, the co-founder of super popular health and fitness analytics app RunKeeper, stepped down from his role as COO and Chief Product Officer at the company this week. He announced his departure in a post on his personal blog Thursday, and the news was first picked up by the Boston Business Journal.
Details around his abrupt departure from FitnessKeeper (RunKeeper’s parent company) are scant. In his blog post, Sheeley alluded to starting a new business, → Read More
The Quantified Self movement has produced a number of startups in that space, most notably fitness tracking apps such as Runkeeper, Edmondo or Fitbit. European sports tracking app Runtastic is one of them and just announced that they are moving into the hardware space with a manufacturing partner and are shipping their first products at the end of july.
The startup has silently built a team of 30+ people without any venture capital and is broadening its field of competitors towards established companies such as Garmin or Nike with their move. Among the first products the startup is shipping will be a GPS-enabled watch that is seemlessly connected to their web application and and a chest strap, connected to a dongle, which allows users to measure their heart rate while doing sports. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
You may have heard about the social graph and the interest graph, but what about the health graph? Thanks to RunKeeper, this term may soon become an oft-used part of your vocabulary. RunKeeper, for those unfamiliar, was founded three years ago as a simple iPhone app and a small online fitness community designed to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts employ smartphone technology to better track, measure, and improve their fitness. Since then, RunKeeper has expanded across mobile platforms, growing into a community of 6 million strong. → Read More
Sports tracking platform Runtastic has announced that it’s crossed the 2 million download mark for its mobile apps, while claiming 400,000 monthly active users in Europe. The Austrian company says that it is now also cashflow positive.
Based in Linz, Austria (near the offices of stealth payment startup Jumio), Runtastic is originally funded through a €150k public grant but has just closed an angel round from a group of undisclosed business angels. The new funding will primarily be used for expansion to the UK and the US. → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Jason Jacobs (@jjacobs22), the co-founder & CEO of RunKeeper, a mobile fitness platform for runners and other fitness enthusiasts.
People are leading busier lives than ever before – working longer, sleeping less, stressing more, working out less frequently, and eating the wrong foods. As a result, it’s gotten more difficult for an increasing number of people, myself included, to stay in shape. Unfortunately, there’s no pill you can take or button to push to ‘make it all better.’ Staying in shape requires developing healthy habits across a number of key areas over a sustained period of time (hopefully, a lifetime). → Read More
[Austria] runtastic, a mobile app for iPhones that connects sporty people among each other, just released their PRO Version (iTunes link), complimentary to their free version which has been available for some months.
Although apps for tracking personal fitness and health are relatively new, there are already some players in that space, such as Nike and more recently Runkeeper. Runkeeper’s success in the US has surely proven, that, with smartphones becoming more ubiquitious among runners or other amateur athletes, there’s a big market for these types of Apps. → Read More
I’ll let the video after the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry.
The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us. → Read More
We only just opened the MobileCrunch Tips Line, and the stories are already pouring in. Keep’em coming, guys.
According to a source close to the matter, popular iPhone fitness app RunKeeper will soon be seeing a rebranding and website overhaul. We’ve obtained a screenshot showing most of the major changes, all of which seem to be visual at this point – but if nothing else, at least it’ll look pretty while you’re trying to de-fat yourself. → Read More
RunKeeper is one of my favorite iPhone applications. It basically creates a little map of your last run and stores it for later uploading. It also keeps track of your pace and distance. It works well and was one of the first really useful work-out apps on the iPhone.
The folks at RunKeeper, namely Jason Jacobs, served about 140,000 copies of the program and now wants to change things up a little by selling a $9.99 “pro” version and a free ad-supported version. But here’s the rub: he’s stuck and has to give the application away for free today so that he can sell it tomorrow. → Read More
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