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

Gym Hero: We are Jannik and Jannis, the founders of Big Mike Alright, the small but nice company behind Gym Hero. Gym Hero is currently a side project we are working on in addition to our day jobs and college. We both love sports but are especially addicted to kitesurfing!

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

Gym Hero is a gym workout tracking app that learns from you while staying out of your way as much as possible. The user interface is streamlined and optimized to be used while you work out, even with shaky hands. Workout routines are automatically learned as you go, so you never have to enter a weight or name twice. You are free to name your workouts and exercises however you like – full flexibility instead of endless searching and browsing in predefined, fixed lists. Each of your workouts gets its own webpage (if you want) with all the details, so you can share, compare and discuss with friends.

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

We both have been using Runkeeper tracking for our cardio activities for quite some time now. Being data and statistics junkies, our weight goes into the Health Graph via a Withings scale, and our blood pressure is monitored and sent to the Health Graph via a Withings blood pressure monitor. We track our runs and the bicycle commute to work with RunKeeper.

Because we also love to work out we wanted to add our gym workouts to our Runkeeper profile as well. When we heard about the Health Graph API we wanted to join. Quantify yourself!

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting Gym Hero and your users?

The Health Graph community is a place where sports enthusiasts of all types meet to motivate each other, exchange, discuss and most of all track and measure their performance. It’s a great place to collect all your sports and health related data. So obviously, we wanted to allow our community to join the Health Graph family and vice versa.

And for the programmers reading this: The Health Graph really is easy to use and embed into your applications. Go try it out!

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

Since Gym Hero focuses on doing one thing only, but doing it really well, we use the strength training portion of the Health Graph API. We feed full workouts including workout notes and exercise names into the Health Graph. We don’t track cardio or time based training (yet).

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

We love the idea behind the Health Graph. Bringing together such a great variety of health data is simply awesome. On top of that it’s a breeze to integrate into other applications. Just keep up the great work!

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

We would like to see a little more flexibility when it comes to defining muscle groups for each exercise. Our basic idea for Gym Hero is to give our users full freedom in naming their exercises/workouts. We would love for this to also be possible for muscle grouping.

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?

We’ve been updating every five to six weeks with new features and improvements, but there are a lot of updates still to come. We will extend the workout summary view for a better performance check, add data sync with iCloud and a workout timer to name only a few upcoming features.

Our users can also request and vote for new features. They can do this by clicking on the speech bubble in the app or by going here. Please help us build the finest workout app ever by making your requests. We love to hear from our users!

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

If you want to track your gym activities and are looking for a slick app which is not blown up with useless stuff check out Gym Hero. Never leave without flexing!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

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.

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.