Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Arel English: Fitness has always been a really important part of my life and is something I struggled with as a kid. In college, first as an athlete and later as a coach, I learned the importance of strength training for health and fitness and achieving meaningful results. The problem is that strength training is really complicated and intimidating, so we created Vitogo to make strength training easy and fun.

BD: What is the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use your app?

AE: Strength training is a really important part of a healthy lifestyle. Not only does it help you look better, it’s also an important part of weight loss, reducing your risk of injury, and increasing bone density. The problem is knowing how to strength train effectively. Vitogo makes it simple. Just like a personal trainer, Vitogo assesses your fitness level and goals to give you a tailored workout program that evolves with you. It coaches you through every step of your workout, tracks your progress, and keeps you motivated with the support of your friends, other users, and rewards.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

AE: As an avid RunKeeper user before the idea for Vitogo even existed, I used to complain that my strength training workouts didn’t count toward anything on my RunKeeper account, so when we decided to build Vitogo, the first thing we wanted to do was look into how we could have our workouts post to RunKeeper so we could get credit for all our hard work. At the time, the Health Graph API hadn’t been announced, so we were pretty excited to learn about it when we first reached out to RunKeeper about the possibility of integrating Vitogo.

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting your business?

AE: The Health Graph is a great way to aggregate everything active we’re doing online. Just like how Facebook made it easy for new services to seamlessly share information socially across the web, the Health Graph has made it really easy to seamlessly share healthy activity. Sharing healthy activity and being able to aggregate it and see the big picture makes Vitogo that much better a product, and is something we are really excited about!

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

AE: Right now we’re just publishing to the Fitness Feed and pulling Vitogo users’ RunKeeper activities. We want to quickly expand to sending calories burned and strength training statistics to the Health Graph so our users can get a more integrated experience.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

AE: Being able to fully integrate Vitogo, a heart rate monitor, a swimming tracker, and tons of other stuff that I use to track my activities is hugely powerful, that’s what I love about the Health Graph. I’m looking forward to being able to see exactly what each service is going to publish to RunKeeper, and pull from RunKeeper, so I know for example if Vitogo is going to update my total number of calories burned, and number of activities done that month.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

AE: Having the ability to control how individual apps post to the fitness feed would be an awesome extension of the Health Graph. We would like Vitogo to be able to post simple stories about a user’s strength training workout with the same type of control you have when deciding how your app posts to Facebook or Twitter.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your app? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about? Does the Health Graph play a role in that, and if so, how?

AE: We are really excited about getting users using Vitogo and giving us feedback on what they love, and what we can do better. We want to make sure that everyone using Vitogo feels confident and in control at the gym. We’re also going to continue to improve our Health Graph integration so our users get the best total picture of their fitness.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your application?

AE: Vitogo is an iPhone/ iPod Touch app and a website! Using Vitogo.com is as much a part of the experience as using the app!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Rick Wenner: My background is as a fitness educator and I have spent the last decade instructing thousands of fitness professionals and consumers on how to properly maintain a healthy lifestyle. I have always seen technology as a crucial tool in expanding the possibilities and opportunities within the fitness industry. I have dedicated much of my professional career to developing award winning fitness products. I am now the Category Manager for Health and Fitness at Scosche Industries where I focus on promoting and developing Scosche’s line of Health and Fitness products.

BD: What is the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use myTREK?

RW: The Scosche myTREK is a wireless pulse monitor that is worn on your forearm as opposed to a traditional chest strap. Paired with the Scosche myTREK app, you can manage your pulse, training type, calories burned, distance/speed/pace and more. Scosche myTREK also allows you to control your music while you work out with the integrated buttons on the armband; volume up/down, play/pause and previous/next track.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

RW: We realized that RunKeeper had a great platform for individuals tracking and sharing their health metrics with like-minded consumers. Once we launched we saw that quite a few of our users wanted to have the ability to share their myTREK workouts on RunKeeper’s Health Graph.

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting your business?

RW: Consumers began noticing our team’s posts during our beta testing and started asking how they could link their myTREK to the Health Graph. Since then, we have had great feedback from our existing customers, who were hoping that they would see this partnership. We are also seeing an increase in app downloads and myTREK purchases.

BD: Which portion of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

RW: We are currently using the Fitness Activities portion of the Health Graph API. We use this to allow users’ myTREK activities to be continually monitored.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph?

RW: The Health Graph is a great tool for enabling individuals to track their progress in one or more aspects of their fitness journey. This type of constant feedback shows the individual their end result; this can either be rewarding or show them that they need to modify their workouts to see the desired results.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

RW: The Scosche myTREK app allows users to name their workouts. It would be great if the Health Graph could recognize what the user named the workout and track it accordingly. Currently the only way to define the workout is via the notes section.

BD: Can you share any future plans for myTREK and related Scosche products? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about?

RW: Scosche has big plans for the Health and Fitness Category; however, we are not at liberty to divulge them at this time. What I can say is that we will be launching an Android app in the very near future.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you, Scosche, or myTREK?

RW: We are focused on creating a complete exercise experience; an experience which motivates, guides and entertains by seamlessly incorporating music, social media, and all that connects you to the world. Scosche’s award winning myTREK app and hardware are a glimpse of the great things that are still to come from the Scosche Health and Fitness Category.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Click here or watch the embedded video below.

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Benjamin Young: I’ve been managing and delivering business and information technology solutions for the last twelve years. I love working on things that allow me to blend my creativity and entrepreneurial passion. I’ve worked in software development, product management executive positions and co-founded C.Y. Strategy, a boutique strategy and management-consulting firm focused on providing advisory services to early and mid-stage ventures. I’ve also worked on voice application systems and managed research in unstructured data analytics.

My latest venture, Nexercise aims to tackle obesity in America by turning fitness into a fun and interactive game. I originally conceived of the idea from personal frustrations with maintaining my weight while simultaneously working, going to school, and raising two children. Since the beta launch of Nexercise in August, the game has already grown to over 35,000 users.

BD: What is the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use Nexercise?

BY: Nexercise makes fitness FUN. It’s a new and exciting way to get motivated, lose weight, and stay in shape. You can play with friends, earn rewards, defeat challenges, and track your progress on the largest fitness mobile interactive game of its kind.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

BY: We reached out to RunKeeper and you were extremely helpful. Your team pointed us to some great resources, including an open source iOS project in Github that enabled us to speed up our development time. [Editor's note: Our Health Graph libraries page links to that and other third party libraries, wrappers, and related tools.]

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting your business?

BY: The Health Graph adds a new level of analytics and tracking for our users. Nexercise is great at making a motivational game experience and collecting data from a user’s workouts. We did not, however, build out a set of tools to give the user detailed insight on more “quantified-self” metrics like the capabilities RunKeeper provides. The integration was a perfect fit on capabilities! We make fitness fun and RunKeeper makes fitness and health data insightful.

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

BY: Currently we allow users to link to the Health Graph and post their activities. This will enable them to get more insight into their fitness activities.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

BY: We like the simplicity and ease of use. We’d like to see a full iOS SDK to speed up integration.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

BY: We would love to see extended capabilities like interest discovery: You would recommend other users to connect, based on fitness level, location, interests, and activities.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your app? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about? Does the Health Graph play a role in that, and if so, how?

BY: We plan to expand functionality to provide Health Graph API users with additional customized game experiences based on their information. Additionally we will eventually allow users to get credit (experience points, virtual medals, and rewards) for activities not recorded using the Nexercise app.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your application?

BY: Yes. It’s currently available on the Apple App Store. We will be coming to Android soon, so if you have an Android phone please sign up for early access by clicking here.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Steve Chen: My company, SJC Global, is self owned and I am the sole employee. I do occasionally contract with other individuals as necessary, but the core of the product is all developed by myself. The company started in August 2010, and the company’s mission is to create great apps that enhance users lives. I hope to expand and grow the company’s products in the next year. My company is currently one of my many “hobbies”, as I am only able to work on it during my free time, since I also have a regular full-time job.

I have a Computer Science degree as well as an MBA and a great deal of experience working in the technology industry. I’ve worked at numerous companies throughout my career including small start-ups as well as large multi-billion dollar companies.

BD: What’s the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use your app?

SC: Fitness Tracker 90 CE is an app for your mobile device that allows you to record and monitor your workout progress. You no longer need to try and remember your workout schedule, since the app allows you to customize any routine to fit your needs. Use the app to track any 60 or 90 day workout or anything in between. Entering data is simple with the sleek user interface that is designed with speed of entry in mind. With Fitness Tracker 90 CE you know exactly how your workout is progressing given the detailed logs and elegant graphs that let you visualize your achievements. Get social with your workout by sharing your results on the RunKeeper service, or sharing your workouts on the user forums.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

SC: I felt that integrating with RunKeeper would benefit both my existing users as well as RunKeeper users not yet using Fitness Tracker 90 CE.

I started development using the Health Graph API by going through the documentation on the developer site. I also worked closely with the RunKeeper team initially on validating some of the API requirements to ensure that they would map to my needs as well as others.

BD: How has using the Health Graph benefited your business?

SC: Having the ability for users to post their results to the RunKeeper service has helped expand the reasons why someone would purchase my app. Users tend to see the integration with the RunKeeper service as a great benefit and I am thrilled that I am now able to offer that service to them in Fitness Tracker 90 CE. Traffic to my site has started to increase with little promotion thus far, and I hope to see the traffic continue to rise as more and more announcements are made.

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

SC: Fitness Tracker 90 CE currently utilizes the strength tracking and weight measurement features of the Health Graph API. The decision to use these Health Graph features was based on what Fitness Tracker 90 CE is designed to do, and that is to allow users to track and maintain their fitness.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

SC: The Health Graph makes it easy for any app to integrate with it through the use of the APIs. The one difficulty I found frustrating at times was that errors on the server often resulted in HTML pages coming back instead of a simple response with an error code and description. I could see the need for an HTML page result when the API is called from a web page itself, but when calling the APIs through a mobile app the result needs to be parsed out of all the HTML and it is unclear in the documentation what types of error conditions may arise.

BD: If you could request any crazy new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

SC: My first request would be a simple change to how fitness activities are recorded. Currently, there is a type “other” that may be used when defining a new fitness activity. I would like to see an optional field that would allow you to also specify the fitness activity name, as this option would allow my users to track activities such as cardio kickboxing or other workouts that don’t necessarily have individual exercises.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your app? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about? Does the Health Graph play a role in that, and if so, how?

SC: I can’t give away all my secrets, but I can say that I do plan on expanding my app to other devices in the future. The mobile industry is growing at an extraordinary rate and getting Fitness Tracker 90 CE on all mobile devices is one of my goals for 2012.

I am planning on integrating more workouts with the RunKeeper service as soon as the APIs are available that would allow me to do so. My goal is that every exercise, whether strength training related or not, that can be tracked in Fitness Tracker 90 CE should be integrated into RunKeeper.

There are also plans to add a stopwatch feature that will allow users to better monitor the time spent on fitness activities. This feature is already available through the RunKeeper API and would be something that users could look forward to seeing.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your application?

SC: If you are serious about working out and keeping track of your routine then definitely give Fitness Tracker 90 CE a try!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Fascinating morning keynotes

Android Open was jam packed with activities including a pre-conference day of workshops and then two days of main conference. Each morning of the regular conference began with a series of five to twenty minute long keynote talks and panels. You can see a complete listing of the speakers for both days in the conference schedule. You can also watch the keynote sessions via the Android Open 2011 Youtube video playlist (click here to access). I would encourage you to watch as many of the keynotes as possible; they contain a lot of interesting and inspirational material to get your Android juices flowing!

O’Reilly founder & CEO Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) kicked things off with his Day 1 opening keynote “What Android can learn from Steve Jobs“. Definitely an interesting choice of title for an Android conference! But Jobs’ passing the week before presented O’Reilly with an opportunity to discuss some of the key principles behind Apple’s success, especially the notion espoused by Jobs that a company needs to be “true to its soul”. O’Reilly examined Google’s “soul” at length, suggesting that it needs to never forget its original mission to help connect people to all the world’s information. Key takeaway for Android developers and businesses: Stay true to yourself and your mission while holding Google to its own high ideals, too.

The next keynote that caught my attention was a conversation between conference co-chair Marko Gargenta (@markogargenta) and Robert Stephens (@rstephens), CTO of Best Buy. Stephens is a pretty technical guy, even going so far as to say that Best Buy ought to get rid of their DVD section and replace it with an Arduino section! As you might imagine given the crowd, this was well received.

The thing that really stood out for me as a mobile payments developer, however, was Stephens’ discussion of the many issues with NFC deployment. He said Best Buy may bypass at least some NFC generations completely, going straight to purely cloud-based payments solutions. This joins the rising tide of anti-NFC sentiment and pragmatism that seems to be building, and echoes some of the many things PayPal has said publicly about NFC weaknesses in recent months. Takeaway: Watch major retailers such as Best Buy closely to pick up the beginnings of big shifts in mobile payments.

Day 2 saw a couple more morning keynotes that stood out for me. The first, “Android in Space” by Will Marshall (@wsm1) of NASA, dealt with building very cheap microsatellites based upon Android-based Nexus One smartphones, aka “phonesats“. “Very cheap” in this case means tens of thousands versus millions or billions of US dollars.

Marshall noted that because of the conservative nature of space flight, the CPU in phonesat Nexus Ones will actually be the fastest CPUs onboard a satellite to date when they’re launched into orbit later this year. He also asked the audience some provocative questions such as “What if we could each have personal satellites?” and “What if satellites became a software domain?”. Thing to note: Android software and off the shelf mobile phone hardware can reduce costs in some areas by two or more orders of magnitude versus traditional ways of doing things, and that could change everything in those areas.

You can read more about the phonesat project from this report from O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard (@digiphile). Among other things, Alex links to an excellent documentary on early phonesat rocket launch testing.

The final keynote that fascinated me was “The African Laptop Killer: Android and the Developing World” by Claire Hunsaker (@chunsaker). Hunsaker discussed the tremendous rise of mobile technology in Kenya and elsewhere and how that technology is revolutionizing lives and economies. Some of the statistics quoted include:

• 99% of Internet access in Kenya is via mobile device.
• Cheap Android phones have dropped Internet access in Kenya from 31% of an average worker’s annual income to about 5%.
• Fully 20% of Kenyan GDP runs through the mobile wallet (predominantly M-PESA).
• According to Hunsaker, “Facebook will have access to most (Kenyan) users before thy can even own a mobile handset themselves” via borrowed/shared mobile handsets.

Please watch Hunsaker’s talk. It may change your perspective on the power and importance of mobile techologies.

Session highlights

There were a lot of great sessions at Android Open. Here are some notes from my favorites:

• Aleksandar Gargenta (yes, Marko is his brother) presented an excellent “Securing Android” session discussing how security is enforced. He made a number of comparisons to Java ME and desktop Linux security, noting that “Anytime something is in RAM, there are ways of recovering it”. I’d recommend spending a little time reading through Aleksandar’s slides (click here).
• Eric Burke (@burke_eric) from Square gave a nice “Beautiful Android” talk. I’d been hoping for a few payments fireworks, but Burke stuck closely to how to build attractive and functional Android apps. Among the things he noted, Android clip paths don’t handle antialiasing. This leads to very ugly interfaces unless you use offscreen bitmaps.
• Nick Farina (@nfarina) spoke about the importance of using WebViews in “From iOS to Android” (also, XCode is painful).
• Sean Byrnes of Flurry knocked it out of the park with his “Android App Engagement by the Numbers” talk! In particular, he called out the importance of releasing early and quickly to your followers, as statistics show that on average, an Android developer loses 38% of their users on the day they install your app, 50% in one week.
• Jesse Vincent (@obra) talked in “Dancing App Stores” about the somewhat suprising fact that new app versions dramatically increase sales, even with minimal changes to the app itself. He also made some good suggestions on secondary and tertiary app markets besides Google’s Android Market; check out his slides for more details.

All in all, the sessions had enough code and technical details while still being able to spark ideas in a wide variety of attendees, some Android programmers, some not.

Additional coverage and news from the conference

Conference organizers made a number of other news and information sources available to attendees. You can search some of the best via these links:

• Read the round-up of news and coverage curated by O’Reilly.
• Access all of the speaker slides provided to the organizers.
• View official conference photos.

One more highly recommended resource: The online show “All About Android” (@androidshow) broadcast live from Android Open at the end of Day 1. The conference co-chairs along with several speakers including Tim O’Reilly make appearances on the show. It’s probably worth your time to watch and get their perspective on the major Android developments flowing out of the conference.

Did it blend?

I found this first ever Android Open to be a great mix of community and technology. It struck the right tone of openness and provided both developer how-to and business oriented material. If you are interested in Android and appreciate a balanced perspective of the entire ecosystem, I would recommend this conference as a good place to tap into all things Android.

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

I was recently privileged to attend both the O’Reilly Android Open and X.commerce Innovate conferences back-to-back in San Francisco. Both were mind and network expanding events, and I’d highly recommend either to developers and business colleagues considering attending next year.

I hope to write more about my key takeaways from Android Open at some point in the future. For this article, let’s focus on Innovate.

So much transpired in a few short days that it would be impossible to capture everything in one short article. I’ll do my best to give you the overall flavor and major highlights, then I’ll dive a bit deeper to discuss some of the particular technical “breakout” sessions I attended.

Ready? Let’s go!

Keynotes and major announcements

The conference began each morning with a series of general session keynotes. You can access the conference schedule to see a full list of speakers, or better still, watch the keynotes (as well as breakout sessions) from the Innovate 2011 video site (click here to access).

Watch the Day 1 keynotes for yourself below (click here if the embed doesn’t work below):

Naveed Anwar, head of X.commerce community, discussed many of the key Day 1 developments in his blog post here. Some of the big ticket items for developers and merchants included:

• Launch of the “X.commerce Fabric“, a message-broker based system allowing developers to integrate and use various commerce capabilities. The Fabric ties together various components from eBay, PayPal, Magento, and other eBay companies with capabilities built by third parties, large and small. Much more on this to come.
• PayPal debuted “PayPal Access“, a new online “commerce identity” comparable to social identity, but for making commerce transactions faster and easier for the consumer. Read more about PayPal Access from the Janrain blog; I’ll also have much more to say about PayPal Access in coming months.
• Magento launched much tighter integration with eBay, allowing merchants to push products from Magento into eBay with just a few short clicks. You can read a third party take on the many and central Magento-related announcements via AuctionBytes (click here).
• Facebook announced Open Graph integration with Magento and GSI Commerce enabling, among other things, “Want” and “Own” buttons analogous to the already ubiquitous “Like” button. You can read much more about the eBay-Facebook partnership in this ZDNet article.

With the major announcements out of the way, the Day 1 afternoon and Day 2 morning keynotes could focus on inspirational higher ordered bits. These sessions were great motivation for attendees to take advantage of all of the technical tools at their disposal to make the world a better place. Whether by building corporate giving into their fundamental commercial business model, or by thinking about the effects of the current recession and the innovation that could get us out of it, or by imbuing everything we do with thoughtful design, these sessions were all meant to light the creative spark.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Steven Cooper (@developersteve), whom I featured in an interview article for the X.com site last year, receive a community award at the beginning of the day 2 morning keynotes. You can watch the awards presentation and all of the Day 2 keynotes here:

If the embed fails to load, you can alternatively click here for the Day 2 morning general session.

Other things I found striking during the second morning’s general session:

• Marshal Cohen spoke at length about the current recession and what might need doing, especially in the United States, to innovate our way out of it. One item in particular stuck with me: He pointed out that while the current recession is not the longest in US history (yet), it is the deepest by job losses. I have to agree with his conclusion that a fundamental shift is underway and many of the lost jobs aren’t coming back, so it’s more important than ever to focus on new commerce opportunities. Build your business to take advantage of inevitable innovations and the sky’s the limit.
• X.commerce developer evangelist Praveen Alavilli (@ppalavilli) showed some live X.commerce code in front of thousands. Always a gutsy move! Access his demo code yourself from GitHub here. By the way, Praveen has written a great blog post about getting started with the Fabric since Innovate completed; click here to check it out.
• Hip-hop artist Chamillionaire (@chamillionaire) stole the show discussing how he used community and tech skills to build his fan base from the streets of Houston to the Grammys and beyond. What an amazing innovator! I’d highly recommend watching at least his portion of the day 2 keynote; prepare to be impressed and inspired.

I could write several more articles about the various keynote speakers and their stories. Instead, I’ll encourage you again to watch the videos for yourself.

Partner pavilion and a free O’Reilly book for you

There was a wide range of X.commerce partners showing their wares in the Partner Pavilion during and in between sessions. Somtimes I wondered just how they were packing so many thousands of attendees in such a small space! (The secret, of course, was lots of free coffee, snacks, and soda.)

Here’s a shot I took the first day of the X.commerce booth to give you a feel for the foot traffic:

One other cool thing going on in the Partner Pavilion, in my not so humble opinion, was that O’Reilly Media was giving away printed copies of the new book “Building eCommerce Applications”. This book is a collection of some of the most interesting and varied articles written by contributors to the X.commerce DevZone.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the conference, you can still download a free e-book copy from O’Reilly (click here to get your copy).

And yes, yours truly does have four articles included in the book, so I am a bit biased. Still, you can’t beat free, right?

Session highlights

I attended a number of interesting sessions at the conference. Rather than try to list them all, I thought I’d focus on the key points from the most interesting and useful for me.

• Two related sessions, “Introducing the X.commerce platform” and “From Code to Capability“, showed developers how to get started with the dive deep into the new X.commerce Fabric. I’d highly recommend clicking on the session titles and watching the sessions to get up to speed asap. You should also download the X.commerce Developer Package and the X.commerce Innovate demo code so you can try it out for yourself. Fabric will be a very important piece of the commerce development puzzle in the months to come.
• We all know mobile commerce is a BIG opportunity, right? What you might or might not know is how to take advantage of the various social, local, and mobile development strategies to capitalize upon it. “Commerce goes SoLoMo: Social, Local, Mobile” discusses what’s possible, focusing on Milo and Where.com (both eBay companies) in particular. I’d also recommend watching the “Mobile face-off: HTML5 vs. native apps vs. mobile platforms” panel to get a grip on the realities of native, HTML, and hybrid mobile development. I enjoyed both sessions and took away the point that we can do almost anything with today’s mobile technologies (boy have we come a long way since WAP and J2ME!).

Things to watch in the coming year

In summary, Innovate was crammed full of technologies to watch and good information on getting started with them. I’d recommend trying out Fabric and Access as soon as possible and paying attention to both as they roll out in the months ahead. There are also some very nice Magento and Facebook commerce opportunities coming; pay attention, and profit!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference, the news coming out of it, and the new commerce possibilities available as a result of those announcements. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think. And happy commerce hacking!

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

Bill Day: What do you do for Limeade?

Erick Rivas: I’m CTO and VP of Product Development at Limeade.

BD: How does your work at Limeade help corporations and their people?

ER: People spend a lot of time at work. And, habits at work — what you eat, how active you are, how you manage stress, etc. — have a huge effect on health and happiness. We help reinforce and change company culture in ways that promote health, happiness and productivity.

BD: That is a fantastic mission! How do you take advantage of the Health Graph API in your work?

ER: There is a lot of innovation going on in the area of fitness devices and apps. Users want to leverage best-in-class fitness devices and apps they already use and have that activity automatically count towards the rewards and incentives that are part of their company’s worksite wellness program.

For example, I took my daughter for a trick-or-treating “walk” of 3 miles around our neighborhood last night using RunKeeper and this morning, via our Health Graph integration, I automatically got 1 point for that as part of the walking challenge that I am participating in at Limeade. Employees can receive health insurance premium deductions, Amazon.com Gift Cards, be entered into a raffle for an iPad, and so on when certain points thresholds are met.

BD: How do you see this partnership with RunKeeper benefiting individual employees at the companies you’re working with?

ER: Our integration via the Health Graph API gives RunKeeper users a way to connect with others at their company in a social context. It gives Limeade users a fun way to track their physical activity using the fitness app or device of their choice.

BD: When a user starts using RunKeeper capabilities via the Health Graph integration in Limeade, what specifically happens behind the scenes?

ER: Upon authorization by the user (using OAuth), we are downloading/syncing with all Fitness Activity types and associated units (miles, calories, minutes) that are supported by the Health Graph API.

BD: Any thoughts on the overall strategy we’re taking with the Health Graph and the developer community?

ER: I really like the vision and direction of the Health Graph in providing an open way for users to store, manage and share historical health data from multiple providers.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

ER: I’d like to be able to distinguish between activities that were recorded by a device versus self-reported activities in the activity feed that is returned from the Health Graph API without having to parse through the GPS data.

Also, I’d like to be able know what the source of the device data is in cases where the user is not using the RunKeeper app (say they were using a partner device from Fitbit, Polar or Garmin). That way, we could not only show that you had (say) burned 10,000 calories in the last two weeks as part of your company’s Biggest Loser weight maintenance challenge, but also break that down by type of device.

BD: Thanks for the suggestions and requests, we appreciate them very much. What’s next for Limeade and your use of the Health Graph?

ER: We follow an Agile Development approach at Limeade and as a result we are deploying product improvements once a month.

In the near term, we will be improving the visualization of self-improvement information (activity, biometrics) and social features on the site.

Pulling additional data types that are stored in the Health Graph outside of physical/fitness activities (nutrition, weight, blood glucose levels, etc.) is something we will be supporting as well.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you and your customers’ use of Limeade?

ER: I trust that a lot of Limeade users will be excited about the integration with RunKeeper and the Health Graph API. And I look forward to feedback on ways that we can make it even better!

Cross-posted from RunKeeper‘s Health Graph developer blog.

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Geoff Pitfield: We’re currently an angel-backed team of two. I’ve been making mobile stuff since the days when that meant doing your own hardware, and have been working on Fleetly since early 2010. I’m a Product Design grad and MBA, but I’d never really coded so I taught myself in order to build Fleetly, which has certainly been interesting. Fleetly’s the first app that lets you check in on your fitness and evaluate your overall Fitness Level, based on all the exercise that you do, from weight training to long distance running. I got started on the app when I couldn’t find anything fun to use that supported the variety of activities I was doing to train for a triathlon.

BD: What’s the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use your app?

GP: It’s a fun, social way to stay motivated about your fitness *and* get meaningful insight into what you’re doing. When it clicks for people, they end up doing things like an extra 20 pushups or running another mile just to pass their friend on the leaderboard. That’s a great thing.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

GP: Our users started vigorously and repeatedly demanding RunKeeper integration!

BD: How will using the Health Graph benefit your business?

GP: We think it will both increase our user base and increase retention, because Health Graph integration makes it much easier for people to use – they no longer have to enter their data into multiple applications.

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

GP: We use the Fitness Activity API, because that’s the part that fits in with what we’re doing, as well as being what our users demanded. We might add weight tracking at some point as well.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

GP: It’s fairly easy to use and is comprehensive. It would benefit from better delete tracking, and should also support an identifier for originating source on entries. Otherwise, you run into problems if someone has cross-linked multiple services. For instance, we already integrate with Health Graph partner Withings (@withings). If someone’s linked their Withings account to the Health Graph, there really should be a way to tell that a given weight entry originated as Withings ID XYZ to avoid duplication. (Editor’s note: De-duplication today falls on the app developer.)

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

GP: Off the top of my head, I’d rather see continued focus on making the API as robust, useable, and open a platform as possible. I don’t have any blindingly great feature ideas, per se, other than what I mentioned above which I think is really important. A push update service would be nice to reduce the need for polling.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your app? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about? Does the Health Graph play a role in that, and if so, how?

GP: The really cool stuff has to remain secret. We’ll soon be introducing some new types of challenges that we think are going to be great, and very much focused on the same Fitness Activities we’re linking via the Health Graph. Also, we’ve always had our own little API but never done much to promote it, and we’re eager to help anyone who’s interested. The second most requested thing after RunKeeper is an Android app if anyone wants to play!

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your application?

GP: We’ve been doing a cool challenge with Lifehacker (click to access), and also have a badly under-promoted startup challenge (click here for startup challenge), both of which might be of interest. And the app’s available at www.fleetly.com/ios, so check it out!

Cross-posted from RunKeeper‘s Health Graph developer blog.

We’ve been hard at work adding features users have been requesting to the RunKeeper app!

Now available in both iPhone and Android versions:

• Auto pause – RunKeeper can automatically pause tracking when you stop moving
• Heart rate zone – RunKeeper can chart information from compatible heart rate monitors; can also provide audio cues to help you monitor which zone you’re in as you are exercising
• Improved GPS accuracy – We’ve refined our tracking performance and stability
• Photo and Workout Countdown Timer support – These great features are now available on Android, too (already supported for iPhone)

Please click here for iPhone or here for Android and let us know what you think!