ink’s own Media Research Manager, Kelsey Barry, uses Endomondo to help her through the Boston Marathon.
Ask anyone about their exercise habits and they’ll most likely groan and say they are non-existent or severely lacking. Several studies show that most people would like to be more physically active than they are today. So why aren’t they? The answer is simple: motivation.
As someone who was recently training for a half marathon, I can definitely attest to that. It can be a bear to push and motivate yourself to get going when you’re facing a long run alone. This is why the Endomondo Sports Tracker has become my go-to app for running. It’s a new and easier way to stay active, while having fun all at the same time!
Endomondo is an application for your GPS-enabled Smartphone that allows you to work out while getting feedback so you know exactly how well you are performing. It’s like having your own personal trainer with you every step of the way!
Endomondo uses GPS to track your run, bike ride or any other distance-based sport, as well as calculate mileage and speed. With this high tech application, you can even view the most played songs that you listen to while working out and make the ultimate playlist.
Endomondo even allows friends to send personal messages of motivation while you are exercising. This is a particularly interesting characteristic because, as an athlete myself, I know how important it is to have optimistic friends cheering me on during athletic events or races.
While I run, I find it very convenient using Endomondo. While training for a half marathon, the GPS tracking helped me find new routes to run every day. In addition, Endomondo showed how fast I ran each mile and how I had improved over my previous workouts. It was really beneficial to my training and I honestly can’t see myself working out without it.
If you are a competitive athlete, Endomondo lets you compete against others while also providing the coaching to push you through it. You can choose a friend’s best performance on a given distance, and the audio coach will help you beat it! Or if you are familiar with a particular route, and prefer to run it often, you can compete with others on the same route.
These features of Endomondo Sports Tracker encourage you to exercise more often, and be excited to work out every day. With the motivating peptalk from friends, a coach to push you, and music to keep you going, you’d be crazy not to use Endomondo while exercising!
Tattletech Note: Go Kelsey!! We look forward to cheering for you on Marathon Monday!
Tags: Boston marathon, endomondo, fitness tracker, GPS, mobile apps, running
Posted by Tattletech on Sep 1, 2010 in
Mobile,
Mobile VoIP,
mobile social networking
Recently, Nimbuzz decided to run a blog series called “Demand more from your mobile”. And you know what? We actually didn’t realize how much you could do with your mobile phone with Nimbuzz. Sure, yea we knew you could chat and call – but then it struck us – that is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact is that today your mobile device is THE thing you use to connect to your network. We used to walk around with our ears to our mobiles, now we walk around with our precious thumbs or fingers glued to our mobiles. To us, this is why we believe that universal communications – now and in the future – will be via your mobile and via companies like Nimbuzz. In their kingdom, you have all of your “contacts” in one place and by “contacts” I mean those people you talk to, chat with across all the communications channels we use today – social communities, online communities, your mobile’s address book – yup that’s right – everything all together. I want everything all together. I want it all in one place, I want to be able to communicate with whoever I want, when I want, across any platform where my posse resides. Can your operator do that? I don’t think so. — JH
Tags: Address book, Business and Economy, Mobile, Mobile phone, Nimbuzz, Skype, Telecommunications, Virtual community
Way back at the beginning of 2009 at CES in Las Vegas, we had the great pleasure of meeting Claudio Schapsis. Claudio was deep into Location Based Services (LBS) and if and how they could make money. He was tracking all the 80+ start ups at that time that had entered the loosely defined space. We liked that about him. He was trying to get some perspective in place around a market segment that had sprung up quickly but had no definable borders. His blog is bdnooz and there he tackles the issues surrounding LBS, its future and it’s ability to generate revenue. You can also follow Claudio on Twitter @lbs_pro.
Tattletech: Location, location, location and yet no one can seem to get it quite right these days, what do you think is missing right now from all the location based services (LBS) out there?
Claudio Schapsis: We are witnessing a paradigm shift. Wireless carriers were used to provide services with 100% retained revenue. Then, products like the iPhone come to the market and revenues start to be shared; voice is declining and text and data based services are flourishing. Location based services complicate the equation even more, as in order to provide a LBS you need to divide the pie between more hungry diners. A simple Location Based Service require maps, development interfaces to access the maps, an app developer, a LB Service provider, location aggregators, AND the wireless carrier to transport the information. Suddenly the value chain changed and we are on the quest for the right business models that can serve everybody (see some of my articles about Value Chain here <http://bdnooz.com/2008/11/28/location-based-services-value-chain-part-2/> ).
The immediate consequences result on some of them crippling non PDA phones, taking away simple features like the capability to synchronize your contacts with your computer or in the case of location based services “hijacking” the GPS functionality to work with their own “pay more” applications. Can you think about having to pay an extra to use the digital camera of your phone and be allowed to do so only with the carrier own service? What’s the difference?
The difference is, as usual, money. ABI Research estimates that this year worldwide Location Services will grow 156% to 2.6 billion dollars and by the end of 2014 will surpass the 14 billions. The drive to control those features will only slow down the industry’s growing process. Instead of fighting for a larger slice we should be looking on how to make the pie bigger. And that’s possible, as the LBS market (for personal applications) is in his infancy.The right business models are missing for the industry in general, and also for those new Location Based application developers. Many companies try to migrate web applications to the mobile world without thinking through about the new value chain. Suddenly they discover that providing a free service is not free, that they need to develop in four or more different operating systems, that the threshold for privacy in mobile phones is different than your desktop PC.
I could answer your question with just three words – Right Business Models.
TT: You are speaking at a lot of LBS events and specifically on Latin America, what do you think the primary differences are in this market and the rest of the world?
CS: The penetration of mobiles phones in Latin America is around 80% and in some countries in the territory over 100%. The market is mostly dominated by two major regional players America Movil (Telmex) and Telefonica Movistar. They share more than 65% of the Latin American market and together with TIM they have around 75% market share. That means those three companies have more than 10% market share of the whole word mobile market. Their size and coverage allows them to take regional decisions, providing them a substantial leverage when negotiating with vendors and partners. On the other hand each country presents different user profiles in terms of usage and consuming behavior.
The usage of data is still low, but growing. And besides the traditional fleet management and AVL applications, we start seeing Location Based Services made in CALA i.e. Location Based Social Networks, Friend Finders, Bus routes notifications, and others. The difference is that in this market most of these services are provided in partnership with the same mobile providers.
But you start seeing the first movements in the market. This is the first year that Frecuencia Events organized LBS LATAM <http://www.lbslatam2009.frecuenciaevents.com/home/contenidos.php?id=34&identificaArticulo=26&idiomaRequerido=2> together with their traditional Mobile Content LATAM and Mobile Enterprise LATAM conferences in Miami. As chairman of the event I can say I was surprised by the response in terms of attendance from the region and vendors interested in this market. You can see companies like Tele Atlas, OpenWave, AnyData, Position Logic, Xtify, and many others coming to meet their prospect Latin American partners.
TT: Lat49, a Vancouver-based provider of a geo-contextual advertising network, raised $1.5 million in Series A funding which is a lot for an LBS company these days, what do you think it will take for VCs to fund LBS companies today?
CS: Investments in the LBS arena are not much different from other markets. I might sound repetitive, but the first thing I would like to see is a solid business model. You cannot start a company that your exit strategy is “we predict that xxx will buy us once we get to our 500,001 user”. I would check the company capability/record of delivering (execution), their uniqueness in the market, relevancy, and timing.
Nevertheless, when looking at LBS companies, you need to understand the specific LBS value chain, the nuances in each specific market, and the implementation feasibility. This is particularly true when the service is based on data collection/exchange with a mobile device. I can have the best LBS idea, but if the carriers block me from getting the information then where is the value? (Porter’s Supplier Power). I had the opportunity to work with many investors in evaluating different types of proposals. I personally look for core enabling technology that can be seamlessly implemented across different REAL WORLD applications. After reading many different proposals it becomes easier to see the pitfalls, multiply the opportunities, and find alternative cash-flow possibilities.
TT: On your blog write about the monetization of LBS when do you think that the LBS companies today will actually begin or be able to monetize? Will it be in their consumer app or will they turn them to B2B proposition?
CS: There are numerous companies in the LBS that are making money. Many of those provide infrastructure services like data aggregation and enabling technology, other are just emerging in the mobile marketing arena.
I personally prefer B2B propositions. For me Location Based Services are a company effort to transform geographical positioning information into valuable and relevant data for a customer, to make a profit which I find easier to implement that into a B2B environment.
TT: A lot of VCs today say a map is just a feature, nothing to build a whole application around, what do you think about that?
CS: Location is not just a feature. It changes everything. I can understand VCs that sees many propositions around web applications + location. LBS go beyond that. The real LBS applications are not something + location but the real effort to covert Location into Money. How? Send me an email with the specifics and let’s keep talking.
– JLH
Tags: Claudio Schapsis, Location-based service
In our ongoing search for dynamic and unique CEO’s we had the great pleasure of meeting Areti last December at the European Venture Summit in Dusseldorf. We got to juggle oranges with her and she and I raced together on the last day catch our trains out of Dusseldorf. We immediately were drawn to the way she commanded a room and how she got up in front of a panel of judges and said she wasn’t here to ask for any money right. We thought that was flat out the boldest move we had ever seen from an entrepreneur. We liked her unique approach to fundraising and views on how to play the start up game, we also liked her because she was one of the few women (the only Greek woman we know of) heading a tech company in the Euro start up scene. We know that you will be seeing more of her because she has the rare combination of a true leader and entrepreneur – guts and determination to win no matter what. In this interview, Areti talks about making a true mobile 3.0 environment, her work at the 2004 Olympics in Greece and her thoughts on being a female CEO. We give you Areti Kampyli, CEO, Yasmo Live.
Tattletech: We like the cool sound of Yasmo Live – we can see where the Live part comes in, but where did you get Yasmo from? Is that a childhood nickname perhaps, or something (or someone) completely different?
Arety Kampyli: Introducing our services, we welcome a new era in real world interactions through our mobile phones; we introduce a revolutionary marriage between our digital and physical entities! So we salute our revived mobile phones, we say hello mobile, only in Greek; yassou in Greek means hello and yassou+mobile makes our Yasmo. To sustain its Greek origin, we work hard for our Yasmo to be received by our international audience like anything associated with Greece, from the sun and the food to the everlasting cultural concepts.
TT: We think this is a REALLY cool service to be able to use, and one that is very useful. With your background in advertising and marketing, you must have attended more than your share of large meetings and conferences – did the idea for this spring from your own experiences looking for contacts in person at events?
AK: Well I have to be completely honest with you; the incident that initiated the idea was one of a quite ‘social nature’. I was walking on a rather empty street in London, one morning, when a guy across the street caught my eye. Our eyes met a couple of times in the beginning and then kept on exchanging looks until we were out of each other’s sight. Neither of us had the courage to introduce ourselves, possibly missing out on a great opportunity. Still on the same street, walking to the Tube station, I thought to myself ‘how would I ever be able to get hold of this person again? How could I receive a piece of information about him via a magic device that would be activated by the random incident of finding myself in his vicinity?’ And that was it; eureka! The answer was simple; this wicked device exists and it has undoubtedly become the digital extension of our existence; it is our mobile phone. And the hypothesis was obvious; ‘what if we used our mobile phones to receive information about people in our vicinity?’ The very next morning I went to a conference and the idea was officially formed. I always got frustrated at conferences where it was impossible to put faces to the endless attendee lists and ended up never finding the ones that I really wanted to meet.
Trying to resolve this problem and having had the revelation from the day before fresh in my mind, Yasmo Live- a birth child with no name at the time- was officially conceived. Yasmo Live is a mobile communications system that enables event attendees to locate the people they are eager to network with, around them, by seeing their picture-based profile on their mobile phone. Delegates will no longer need to exchange business cards, wonder about their fellow attendees prior to an event or remember what and who they have to follow up with after an event. Yasmo Live allows them to network with their fellow participants online prior to the event, view and search on their phones for anyone they wish to meet, as they physically walk through them, and take notes to follow up with after the event, which are automatically stored on their online account along with all of their activity during the event. Yasmo Live revolutionises real world interactions by extending ourselves through an omnipresent digital device and there is no better place to initiate such technology than professional gatherings.
TT: Being a female entrepreneur in a sea of men can be very challenging. Do you find that type of gender imbalance to be a problem or is it more of an advantage to you?
AK: Your question is absolutely spot-on! A few months back I was selected to present at one of the mini seedcamp conferences in Ljubljana. Prior to the event the organisers distributed an electronic ‘lookbook’ as they called it, which contained pictures of the presenters and a short description of their companies. There were 20 presenting companies with the majority of them managed by a team of three men and few of them by two. Not only was I the only woman, but I was on my own as well!
Yes, it was absolutely challenging and it is challenging every time, but not in an intimidating way, quite the opposite I would say; being one of few female entrepreneurs at conferences I feel that I represent the female sex and therefore act empowered by a silent undertaking to prove women’s exceptional capabilities to a world dominated by men. And it does work to my advantage in two ways: First of all, I bear the burden of proving myself to be equally good as men and in doing so I tend to stretch my entrepreneurial qualities to a higher level every time. Secondly, when you present to an audience that is ‘programmed’ to have low expectations of you and you manage to surprise them, you and therefore your company are automatically valued a million times higher than any man whose good performance is taken for granted. It is like betting very little on a horse that you consider to be weak and it manages to outdo the best bets. And this is exactly the ethos of the company; we don’t take anything for granted and we work hard to constantly optimise our product by listening to the needs of our target audience in a woman’s caring way.
TT: The success of Yasmo Live seems like it would depend very heavily on the number of people willing to volunteer their personal information and photos to help increase the usability of the application. How many users do you have currently, and what plans do you have to drive more people to use it?
AK: We are launching our free beta testing trials at conferences in September/October. Our website’s development will be fully completed by end of September, at which time the application testing will also be done. Nevertheless, we’ve had the pleasure to have a few subscribers since May and an interest to be partially bought by a company, who is the global market leader in the prepaid international calling card market. Being contacted with such an offer by a well established company in the mobile industry, even before launching, is undoubtedly a great omen for Yasmo Live’s future success!
The way our business model has been constructed gives a clear answer to your question; when an event attendee registers online for an event, he gets directed-right after registration- to yasmolive.com. He creates a short profile with a picture, his name, company and position (basically the information that he shared with the event organiser) and gets access to the profiles of his fellow registered participants with whom he can network prior to the event.
Yasmo Live is not targeting the end user directly but the event organisers whose aim-being affiliated with our company- is to make sure that all of their subscribed participants take advantage of our services prior to, during and after their events. Deploying Yasmo Live’s services, event organisers: (i) promote their forthcoming events to prospective delegates, (ii) offer them pre-networking services prior to every event, (iii) differentiate their events by offering a radically new and compelling method for targeted networking and (iv) extend their networking offering beyond the time limited experience of the conference; the delegates’ activity during an event is automatically stored on their account on yasmolive.com where they can follow up with all of their contacts. Event participants that are Yasmo Live users will be able to view only their fellow participants’ profiles rather than all of our subscribed users. Therefore, the information that they upload on our website is exactly what is shown at the event’s attendees list.
Our strategy is to provide Yasmo Live at conferences for free, for the first two months after our launch, in order to enable our product optimisation but most importantly to get event attendees ‘hooked on’ a revolutionary and most anticipated service so as to make Yasmo Live an inseparable offering provided to the delegates by the event organisers.
TT: It sounds like you were heavily involved with the broadcasting of the Athens Olympics in 2004. Did you have the chance to meet any of the competing athletes there, or was it work, work, work?
AK: Athens Olympics 2004 was by far one of the best experiences in my life. We had the most fulfilling fun; we worked 12 hours a day and then danced until dawn every night! Journalists, cameramen, athlete — everyone felt part of a race with no national origin, no borders, no distinctions; the Olympics were the festivity of a most unified world, who allowed every medal, every victory to be patriotic and international at the same time! Working at the aquatics I had the chance to meet Michael Phelps and see him win his six gold medals. And of course we lived the absolute moment of overflowing pride when our country-Greece- won the gold medal in synchronised diving.
The Olympics in Athens were the best team work that Greece can portray; it was a personal bet for each one of us that could only be won if the whole nation worked together. Every single one of us worshipped our mission as the creators of the Olympic idea, as the owners of the Olympic values. Creating the same ethos in our company is our goal and a defining factor for its success. Every single one of us, from the partners and the directors to the employees, will consider Yasmo Live to be their own birth child, they will consider themselves to be co-owners of the Yasmo idea and as such there will be no distinction between the company’s success and our personal one. No technology can work on its own, no Olympic stadium has any value without its athletes’ or its audience’s applause and Yasmo Live is and will be the passion and devotion of its people in exactly the same way!
TT: Yasmo Live sounds like the ultimate bridge between online contacts and real world interaction with those contacts. Where do you envision it going – what looks like success to you for Yasmo Live?
AK: Yasmo Live constitutes a long-anticipated networking solution in the conference and exhibition arena. The introduction of such a revolutionary solution epitomises exactly this; the convergence of our real and virtual worlds. It enables the formation of ‘digital entities’ in physical spaces! For the first time ever we are able to search for people as we physically walk through them.
We use a search engine that is still digital, only the keywords that activate it are the physical entities around us! As revolutionary as this may sound, we didn’t really re-invent the wheel, we just contributed to the natural progression towards a Mobile 3.0 environment. When we were first introduced to Web 1.0 we would just consume information from acknowledged electronic sources, then Web 2.0 gave us the power to act as one of them, generating content as well consuming user generated content respectively.
Our mobile phones also enable us to do the above with the advantage of both generating and consuming this type of content as it happens; we can be the first reporter at a demonstration just by uploading an amateur video, we can receive information on the nearest restaurant and the best offers at a supermarket, we can see where our friends are without the need of a post code. But mobile is not only local, it is first and foremost personal, it is the extension of ourselves, it is maybe the most important piece of garment we own as most of us ‘have felt absolutely naked’ when we had to live a day or two without our phone. We feel naked without our phone, or even without the internet, because we feel deprived of the ability to reach out to our friends, family or even an extended audience that is not in our vicinity.
But what if we reversed this model? What happens when we need to reach out to people nearby? What if we need to contact the people around us when we don’t know them? And this is where Yasmo Live comes in to initiate the concept that our mobiles do not substitute someone’s physical presence but rather enhance face to face interactions. This concept can be applied everywhere, to both professional and social gatherings.
Once Yasmo Live establishes a foothold in the conference and events market the company’s first level of success will be to scale up the product in the social networking market -airport and hotel lounges, universities, large businesses, concerts, festivals, cafeterias, clubs-. Yasmo Live’s ultimate success could be signified by the extension of the use of mobile profiling data for the detection of lost living beings and objects around us (as analysed in our patent) and the list is endless upon that. As long as Yasmo Live is firmly grounded upon an establishing ’mobile self’, success can come from an infinite number of applications. Taking this into consideration, I absolutely concur with Mc Luhan’s (a fixture in media discourse) theory that ‘the medium is the message’; if it wasn’t for the medium’s mobility-as its defining characteristic- the mobile phone would never constitute the ‘digital replica’ of our physical existence. It would have never introduced a previously unthinkable business and social lifestyle; it would have never given birth to Yasmo Live!
– JLH
Tags: Areti Kampyli, Conferences, Yasmo Live
Archemides Screw takes water from one place and moves it to another. The rotating motion with Archemides Screw represents change. Sometimes the benefit of change, the transfer of water from one place to another to nourish the newly planted field, isn’t noticiable right way. It may take time to move the water once the tip enters the body of water, but eventually the screw keeps turning and that water is moved to the top and change takes place.
This is what we see happening as the body of water that makes up the current Web begins to migrate to the future Web. In a recent article in Wired, they talk about the future of the Web and it’s location, location, location with an emphasis on mobile and tagging. Web-research firm Compete says one in three mobile-phone owners uses location-based tools, and the number of apps has exploded from 500 to 2,500 since last October.
We also see niche areas around location evolving in the areas of heathcare, education and online learning. We see both a broad and narrow casting application of location. We think that niche can survive but too many broad applications can not once Archemides Screw moves all the water to the new field.
Companies like Loopt, Foursquare, Graffito, Socialight mentioned in the article, have their eye on the future Web built on location and tagging. They have bet on the fact that mobile phones have changed how we connect to the world around us. The article puts the ultimate question out there – how is the return of geography going to change our lives? – JLH
Tags: Add new tag, Foursquare, Geo location, Geo tagging, Graffiti, Location Based Services, Loopt, mobile social networking, Sociallight
This week in a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes of MySpace, the writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said “Facebook can’t rule the world for ever. No one can.” We could not agree more – we believe social networking should represent a free exchange of personal data, contacts, photos, videos and any content the user want to share. Instead of a walled garden, we see a community garden that allows users interact, share, exchange, collaborate, and discuss whatever they want to. This raises a question around social networking in general – is it “platform agnostic” or not? Absent any substantial differences in quality, does it really matter whether you park your online persona at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other sites?
Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the future looks like – if any of our readers do, please e-mail us! But we do think that the future of social networking is not going to be about the providers/platforms per se, but about the larger community and how providers facilitate user interaction. Open standards or open social may be at the bedrock of this future networking, going hand in hand with the augmented reality demonstrated by LBS. Just a quick glance in the direction of Egypt in the past year or two, and more recently Iran, shows exactly what we are talking about: its back to the old saying that its the message (real time interaction) that counts, not the media (Facebook, Twitter, et al). – JLH
Tags: Facebook, Marshall Kirkpatrick, MySpace, Social network
Nimbuzz, the super fly mobile social messenger, just brought in a new CMO, Neal Fullman. Neal has chops. He is the former International Communications director at fring and is in charge of brand development, marketing and communications strategy for the ever expanding Nimbuzz.
It’s like someone added MiracleGrow to Nimbuzz and they are seeing unprecendeted growth with more than 25,000 new users joining every day. Plus, some very strategic global distribution deals which are not yet announced. (more on that later). – JLH
Tags: Neal Fullman, Nimbuzz
Posted by Tattletech on Feb 16, 2009 in
Ad revenue,
Emerging tech,
Entrepreneurs,
Location Based Services,
Mobile,
Mobile World Congress,
Presence based social networking,
Sexy tech guys,
mobile social networking,
social media
First, we woke dreading the crowds, the lines, the herds of people that would slow down my routes. Then we got to MWC and found no lines, no waiting and bocadillos to spare. And, taxis. Taxis everywhere! What was going on here? Was this MWC in Barcelona? It turns out, it was and is Barcelona – the lovely feel of Cannes in Barcelona. People were in a good moods, there were no annoying crowds and busines was being conducted.
Today on the list for cool things was a Dutch company called zCapes, which is making a mobile mini blog. We met them at the Mobile Monday Peer awards and they had just launched one day ago and as we move to more start ups that start with the letter Z – here is Zentym – a mobile TV advertising company based out of Madrid that we had previously met at the European Venture Summit – this time out of the gate with a powerful message and lots of operators nibbling at their toes.
One of our favorite companies from Sweden, JayCut was on of the hosts at the Sweden Mobile Association cocktail hour and proved their online video editing product has a B2B play. Another cool company from Sweden was TAT – The Astonishing Tribe. I think by far they have the coolest logo and they are 100% focused on delivering a god user interface for mobile — combining design and technology. Tattletech will post an interview with Charotta Taranger of TAT this week.
But the one thing that we believe is out of control is all the emphasis on mobile in terms of LBS. Yes we know it is a mobile show – but can we have a reality check? Forty mobile companies presented at the Mobile Monday Peer Awards today – 40! Lots of duplicates and clones and look alikes out there – the market will consolidate and in six months, many of those companies will be gone. In the long term, yes its true, all that we know and love will be on the mobile, but the Web will not go away. The lines will become blurred so this means that when we are talking about LBS – we should remember that there are more than 500 million users on Web based social networking sites and those users will want to evolve their social network.
According to Frank Schuil, CEO, IRL, the Web will not go away – the web is a natural extension of mobile and vice versa – they complete each other. Innovation will take place at the intersection of the web and mobile. The key will be to unlock the value of location for those 506 million online users and then bring them to the mobile.
On another note, there are less scantily clad women at this show – thank god for the recession. --JLH
Tags: Frank Schuil, IRL Connect, IRL Corporate, Mobile World Congress, Social network service
Congatulations to CEO Tommy Ahlers and his team from ZYB and our client. Yesterday, Vodafone Europe BV (which for those of you with find those letters confusing – it means the Netherlands) announced the purchase of the innovative company for 31 million Euros. Long live the Danes, still conquering the world, only this time through mobile social networking technology. This is also one of Mr. Lund’s investments. And the hits just keep on coming!
Tags: Morten Lund, social mobile networking, Tommy Ahlers, vodafone, zyb