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February 23, 2012

Coachya connects coaches and athletes with the Health Graph

Avi Grabinsky (@avigrabinsky) is working to make sports coaching easier for both coaches and athletes. Read our profile of him and his Health Graph (@healthgraphapi) integrated application, Coachya (@coachya), for more on how he’s doing it.

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

Avi Grabinsky: My wife and I (pictured together below) founded Coachya as a bootstrap start-up. We came across the idea of creating a web platform for coaches after training for several triathlon teams.

It seemed odd that many coaches use spreadsheets to handout workout plans, email for feedback from athletes, and checks for billing. So we defined a solution to cover all that in a simple and friendly platform. Both of us are engineers (I’m an Electrical engineer and my wife is an Information Systems engineer). We greatly enjoy working on the site and watching our customers use it. I am mostly involved on the product aspects, while Michal, my wife, handles the marketing side.

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

Coaches use Coachya to easily coach, manage, and bill their sports teams and athletes online. Coachya puts multiple online activities which coaches use under “one roof” in an extremely easy to use web application.

Athletes can train with a team, a coach, or by themselves on Coachya and plan their future workouts, watch their stats, share workouts with teammates, and more.

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

AG: I’d heard about RunKeeper from friends, used it a couple of times, and come across the Health Graph API through blog posts. It struck me that it would be a great idea to me to connect Coachya to the Health Graph as it’s a win-win for both of us.

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

AG: The Health Graph API saves Coachya’s athletes the time of manually entering their workouts into the system. It also provides instantaneous feedback to the coach on his/her athlete’s workout.

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

AG: Coachya currently reads in workout data (mostly totals) and presents it to the athlete and his/her coach.

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

AG: Once I understood how to work with the API, it was very easy to query new node types. I think the API is very “clean” and nicely structured. It seems to work really well.

That said there are a few things I think could improve it even more. I’d like to see more examples provided in the major scripting languages (PHP, Ruby, .NET). It would also help if the FitnessFeed contained additional singular parameters such as Note and Climb. Not having those parameters forces me to fetch “Past Parameters” which is quite huge.

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

AG: Apart from the above, it might also be nice if there was some a push mode instead of the pull mode that is currently available.

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

AG: Coachya’s main value is its ease of use for both coaches and their athletes. We plan to make it even easier to use by adding functions such as the ability to search for library workouts, copy and paste workouts, and more.

Additionally coaches will soon be able to publish and sell their workout plans to athletes and we intend to do it differently than what’s available today on other sites. Athletes will also have more graph types available to them to track and analyze their past workouts.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

February 21, 2012

We're hacking the Health Graph, and you're invited!

Our team at RunKeeper is very excited to see all the wonderful things that developers are doing with the Health Graph! We want to help you make 2012 the year that you blow the doors off innovative Health Graph powered apps, services, and devices.

To that end, we’re sponsoring and participating in several hackathon and hands-on style, code-level events throughout the year. And you’re invited!

First up is a U.S. bi-coastal doozy: We’ll be onsite speaking about and helping developers use the Health Graph at AngelHack, the nationwide hackathon competition, March 3rd-5th. We’ll have people in both locations, San Francisco and Boston, to help you get up to speed and hack cool things together using the treasure trove of health and fitness data available from the Health Graph.

If you’re from the New York City area, we’ve got you covered too: We’re chartering a bus to drive developers up from NYC to participate in Boston, so NY hackers, come on up!

We’re so excited to see what you can do with the API, in fact, that we’re going to sweeten the usual pot of AngelHack prizes by offering a prize specifically for the best use of the Health Graph API: $500 USD plus promotion by us of your app, once it’s completed and deployed into the RunKeeper app directory, to our entire 8 million registered (and growing) users. We’ll feature you in a Health Graph blog partner profile and get out the word via our Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ channels.

We are also proud to sponsor and participate in the Health Hack Day hackathon weekend scheduled for May 18-20 in Stockholm, Sweden. We’ll be there speaking about the Health Graph and meeting developers from all over Europe interested in developing health and fitness related applications. Watch this space to learn more about Health Hack Day.

Are there other places you’d like to see us go this year? Please fill out the short form below to let us know. We hope to see you soon!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

February 19, 2012

Notes from the week of 2012-02-19

February 15, 2012

Sleepy brings Health Graph sleep tracking to Android

Italian developer Massimiliano Fanciulli (@fanciulli) is building his Sleepy Android app on top of the Health Graph (@healthgraphapi). Read our discussion below to learn more about this Health Graph partner and how he’s taking advantage of the Health Graph API to give people a free tool for tracking their sleep.

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

Massimiliano Fanciulli: I’m a Software Engineer and I work in Pisa, Italy, the city with the leaning tower. I like developing Android apps in my spare time and I’m the creator of the sleep tracking app Sleepy.

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

MF: Sleepy can be used to track your sleep cycle. I made it freely available and as simple to use as possible so that everyone could track their sleep easily.

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

MF: I started as a RunKeeper user. At first I simply needed to record physical activities and RunKeeper helped me track my running. It was very motivational. As soon as the Health Graph became available I started playing with it. Sleepy is my first app which uses it.

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

MF: I use the Sleep and the Profile portions of the Health Graph API. I use them to store new data and display related data about the user.

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

MF: The Health Graph is well structured and covers most of the data that describe your fitness and workouts. It is a powerful tool for building an app, letting you to focus on the logic and not on data storage and management.

I appreciate its attention to diabetic users. It would be great to have new portions of the Health Graph covering other physical aspects and conditions so that new applications could be built allowing users affected by other pathologies to track their workouts and optimize their health in the best way possible.

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

MF: Callbacks and push messages should be added to the Health Graph so that apps can be notified by the platform when updates occurs. With these, for example, a developer could build an app which notifies you in case one of your friends starts a running workout near you. Very useful! [Editor’s note: The Health Graph does support a authorization removal callback today, but does not currently provide push notifications of the kind Massimiliano mentions.]

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?

MF: I’m receiving great feedback from the Sleepy Google+ page. People seem to be very interested in the app and they’re joining the page and contributing. I’ll continue to develop some of the features those users are requesting. For instance, I added support for manual posting of data in a recent Sleepy update.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

February 14, 2012

Get more readers for your content with the Healthy button

RunKeeper has launched a new web-based plugin, the Healthy button.

The Healthy button enables Health Graph partners and content providers of all kinds to easily and quickly embed the button in websites and web applications, allowing people interested in fitness, nutrition, and related healthy content to share articles and websites through their RunKeeper FitnessFeed. You can see an example of the Healthy button in use by one of our partners, GE Healthymagination, below.

The Healthy button is important because it allows people to share health content selectively with their friends who also care about health content, rather than with their entire social graph.

The Healthy button also provides developers with a powerful (and free) way to reach a whole new audience that is interested in health and wellness, driving new visitors to health related blogs, sites, and other online resources.

Anyone interested in sharing healthy content can also add a Healthy bookmarklet to their browser and share anything healthy, anywhere they find it on the web, to their feed. Click here to read about the Healthy button, grab the bookmarklet, and visit some of the partners getting Healthy via the RunKeeper.com blog announcement.

Details for embedding the Healthy button in your content are available from the Healthy button partner page in the Health Graph developer site. Key bits:

  • Code for embedding the Healthy button is available here
  • There are some meta-tags available to provide more information when a user marks a piece of your content as healthy; get the details here

With millions of registered Health Graph users and a quick and easy integration, why not give it a try?

Please let us know what feedback you have as you try the Healthy button out yourself. Thanks, and happy healthy sharing!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

February 12, 2012

Notes from the week of 2012-02-12

February 5, 2012

Notes from the week of 2012-02-05

January 29, 2012

Notes from the week of 2012-01-29

January 26, 2012

Vitogo: A personal trainer in your pocket

We recently spoke with Arel English (@arelenglish), CEO and co-founder of Vitogo (@myvitogo), about their integration with the Health Graph (@healthgraphapi) and how being a Health Graph partner is benefiting their business. Read on to learn about how Vitogo recreates what a personal trainer does for you using your iOS device and the web.

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.

January 22, 2012

Notes from the week of 2012-01-22

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