The latest from TechCrunch
- Fanvibe Signs A Letter Of Intent To Be Acquired By beRecruited
- RunKeeper Adds New Integration To Its Health Graph In Hopes Of Building 'The Facebook Of Fitness'
- OMG/JK: The iPhone Empire Strikes Back?
| Fanvibe Signs A Letter Of Intent To Be Acquired By beRecruited | Top |
| As popular as sports are, and as popular as the Internet is, it’s always been a bit odd to me that the two haven’t intertwined in a completely successful way just yet. That’s why it’s always nice to hear about mergers between the two sides. And that’s exactly what beRecruited and Fanvibe have apparently just completed. As of tomorrow, beRecruited will officially acquire Fanvibe, we’ve learned. With the deal, Fanvibe’s Vishwas Prabhakara will become the new CEO of beRecruited, and Art Chang and Joe Pestro will come over in the deal, we’re told. Prior to their current roles, Prabhakara was at ESPN and Digg, while both Chang and Pestro were at Yardbarker. BeRecruited is the web’s largest sports recruiting network, with some 81 percent of all U.S. high schools signed up on their network. They also count 68 percent of NCAA coaches among their ranks. Athletes pay a month subscription fee for premium features, which has led to seven-figure quarterly revenues, we’re told. “I’m excited to take on the CEO role at beRecruited, and Fanvibe co-founders Art Chang and Joe Pestro are pumped to be leading product and engineering for beRecruited. We’re big believers in using technology to improve people’s lives, and beRecruited is doing just that, helping millions of high school students pursue higher education. The traction, solid business model and great investors made our decision to lead beRecruited pretty easy,” Prabhakara says, in confirming the deal. He notes that Fanvibe (which was previously called Fanpulse ) will continue to operate with its roughly 100,000 users. “We also plan to leverage the Fanvibe platform to the extent we can in improving the beRecruited platform,” Prabhakara says, also noting that the impending NFL and NBA lockouts make things a bit cloudy at the moment. “beRecruited is far and away the largest recruiting network on the web — and it has consequently become a really great business. With the Fanvibe acquisition, we are thrilled to move headquarters to San Francisco and have Vish, Art and Joe lead the business into its next phase. They are perfect fits as they all have strong backgrounds in sports, product and social web,” beRecruited founder Ryan Spoon says. He currently works for Polaris Venture Partners, though they were not involved in the deal. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Prabhakara says that “we are very happy with the outcome for ourselves personally and for Fanvibe’s investors.” The service had previously raised money from individual investors as well as Y Combinator. CrunchBase Information Fanvibe beRecruited Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| RunKeeper Adds New Integration To Its Health Graph In Hopes Of Building 'The Facebook Of Fitness' | Top |
| 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. Over the years, the startup has integrated with various gadgets and accessories, like a WiFi body scale tracker, sleep monitoring devices, and heart rate transmitters — all as part of an effort to give people a unified resource to aggregate the various health and fitness services, devices, and apps they use on a daily basis — before blasting this information out to friends, family, and competitors over various social channels. All the while, the startup has quietly been building a “correlation engine”, because simply aggregating fitness and health data from a few devices wasn’t enough — RunKeeper users had been clamoring for a way to make sense of all the data integration from third parties. And so, the “Health Graph” was born to do just that. But what is this “Health Graph”, exactly? RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs wants you to “imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user's eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more”, that has the sole purpose of delivering an “ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user's own historical health and fitness data”. But what’s a good health graph without an open API, am I right? Two weeks ago, RunKeeper announced that it was opening up its health graph to third party developers, so that these outside parties can tap into users’ FitnessFeeds, which are basically akin to Facebook wall feeds, to build cool clients and apps, a la Facebook and Twitter clients. FourSquare, Zeo, Withings, Polar, Wahoo, and BodyMedia were among the early partners looking to take advantage of the new, open RunKeeper health graph, and this week RunKeeper has announced three additional partners: Swimsense , an advanced monitor that allows swimmers to track performance information, distance data, etc., Earndit , which lets users earn points and collect trophies during workouts that can be redeemed for rewards, and Runstar , an Android app that enables users to track their running progress and share results with friends. While it may seem counterintuitive for RunKeeper to be partnering with sites like Runstar, which ostensibly offers a competitive service, Jacobs said that the ultimate goal of building a robust and open framework for the fitness community is more important than nominal competition. Though RunKeeper has raised $1.5 million to date, Jacobs recently told Wired that the company hasn’t touched any of that money, focusing squarely on scaling. And scaling they have, as RunKeeper has more than doubled its user base since November. And though the app was originally selling for $10 on the app store, and selling quite well, Jacobs and team have declared that the RunKeeper app will be permanently free. Now, I may not be the fittest guy on the block — I prefer to get my heart rate up by thinking about when the next big IPO is coming and by consuming large quantities of coffee — but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good fitness idea when I see one. The ambitiousness of RunKeeper’s open Health graph and API, along with a free app, fitness feeds, and the ability to compare metrics in FitnessReports, share achievements with friends — and the fact that any time one uses an integrated device or app, the corresponding data posts both on the third party’s site and RunKeeper’s feeds — all makes for one terrific service. And, what’s more, with Google Health recently closing its doors , RunKeeper has one less Goliath to worry about during its quest to aggregate the world’s health information. Developers that would like to learn more about the Health Graph API should check out the landing page here . CrunchBase Information Runkeeper Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| OMG/JK: The iPhone Empire Strikes Back? | Top |
| and after a bit of a h I happened, including WWDC, a billion Facebook leaks,all this other stuff so let's dive into it. I wrote a post a few days ago talking about Android and iPhone sales. And basically why I believe the gisApple was letting Android win, and now it doesn't want to do that anymore. This was my post from a year ago, which was very popular and unpopular with some people. Like a tit 's polarizing. I basically, and this wasn't my idea alone. There was an Android developer actually who had written a post saying, "If Android whatsoever." This was a year ago when he said this. And so I wrote a post rhappens when, if and when, Verizon does get the iPhone. It wasn't a done dealSo, it happened a quarter has pass since the Verizon iPhone came out so we have some actual datI think that it's fair, I mean they sold something like 2.2 million over the first 2 months, something like that. But at the same time people were a little bit concerned about buying it because the anticipation was that the iPhone 5 would be coming out soon, because it's always come out in the summer. I mean, it's always been released in June or July, and that's not the case this year. But that was hard to know at the time, no one knew for sure, and Apple of course wouldn't give any guidance to that. So the point that's the point of view of your post. You can basically say that there have been, over the last month or two, a handafter the initial launch. There have been some market reports discussing the market share of Android versus the market share of iPhone, and Android. In the United States. In the United States. This is all about United States and that's actually one of the points of this segment. But in the United States, Android growth hasNo, no, no, it's not that high. Yes, it is. It depends on the report was doing really well and now the massive growth may have flight for a little while. So you think that this is because that the Verizon iPhone exists, that Android is ahead, I'm not a year ago. So this is why windows phone is signing off. Yeah. But windows phone sucks. No it doesn't. Yeah bdo better when thago the iPhone was on one carrier with basically two devices that you could buy. You could buy the new version or the older version for cheaper of the iPhone. Now, fast forward a year later, two carriers, the two biggest ones in the baiting that the new ones iPhone is coming up, and two phones are able to compete indicate that there has been some change in the last couple months that may or may not continue over the course of the nextnd the other thing, you talk a little bit about people holding off until the new iPhone they thought may have come out in June, like I was just But, there was also pent-up demand prior to the launch of the Verizon iPhone. Of course, of course. But, to your point, there's much more pent-up demand for the iphone and it's going to be on ATso excited right now, you don't understand it. I mean, it just... I'm a little nervous. ...want to say that I really do think that there's going to be a, like, The downfall of android, it's upon us. No, it's going to at least happen temporarily. The green robot is falling. I don't think you'll even dispute that, that when the iPhone 5 hits. I think you're absolutely, I think the Verizon iPhone, there's plenty of demand for it, and I do think that when the iPhone 5 comes out and it comes out and it's on VerizonAt the sSome Android users, definitely will. Some of them wish they wereas wendroid coming out, Android 4.0. Ice cream sandwich. Yeah. Ice cream sandwich which may or may not be good. I don't know. Well supposedly a little bit more like the Honeycombprobably not. If it doesn't, I think your argument is totally, really gone. You think people don't really care about 4G. People don't care about 4G because they haBroadband, because they are used to dial up. | |
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