The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘high-conversion’

Gyminee, a fitness-oriented social network that was part of the TechStars class of 2008, has closed a $525,000 seed funding round led by FF Angel LLC, with a number of angels including Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon) and Tim Ferriss also participating. Alongside the funding news, Gyminee is also announcing a total rebranding - the company will henceforth be called DailyBurn (which is significantly easier to spell), and the site has seen a complete redesign.

Gyminee first launched in late 2007, coming out of beta in January 2008 (the company had launched before it joined the TechStars program). Since then it has grown to 125,000 members, and while the site has to deal with some users dropping off as they get lazy and stop exercising, it reports that active users have managed to shed an average of 6.2 pounds of fat, or gain 5.75 pounds of muscle, depending on their goal.

The overall purpose of the site is to help you lose weight and gain muscle by tracking every aspect of the food you consume and your workouts, all presented in a very attractive interface. The site offers a database of thousands of foods, allowing you to quickly figure out how many calories you’ve eaten throughout the day. You can input stats from your daily exercise regime (number of miles run, bench-press weight, etc.), so you can track your progress over time on slick graphs. The site’s social features allow users to share exercise plans and try to motivate each other.

DailyBurn generates revenue by offering a set of premium features, which include a meal planner, more nutrition stats, and exercise plans created by fitness professionals, as opposed to other users. CEO Andy Smith says that the premium plan has been seeing a high conversion rate, which helped make the company appealing to investors. The company will soon be releasing a native iPhone application that will allow you to update your workout profile on the go, and will also be opening up its API to third parties.

Other fitness startups include Fitbit, ZodBod, and watchMEmelt.

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Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.com and will be focused on reporting news about the Obama Administration but will add “facts to the conversation.”

Implying that the Huffington Post’s coverage is biased, Carlson said that The DailyCaller will be dedicated to “telling the truth and be accurate.” The site’s reporters will share in the profits of the news site based on how much traffic reporters get for their stories. According to Carlson the site’s motto is “every seven minutes,” and will be speedier than its competitors, including HuffPo and The Drudge Report.

Carlson, an MSNBC campaign correspondent who is famous for his conservative spin and love for bowties, denies that the site will be a forum to discuss the future of the Republican party. Regardless of the spin, political news sites are aplenty and Carlson’s site will face stiff competition from HuffPo, the Politico and AOL’s new politics site, Politics Daily. Fellow MSNBC reporter Carlos Watson recently launched The Stimulist, which is focused on reporting long-form news for the Obama generation.

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For a service that is all about concise messaging, it’s humorous how the manner in which Twitter writes its blog posts is anything but. For the second time in as many days, we have yet another post today about the supposed Twitter TV show. This one is a clarification of the clarification from yesterday. It’s similar to how Twitter needed no less than 4 blog posts on one topic a few weeks ago to explain something (the changing of the @replies).

Here’s what the latest says: Twitter is not making a TV show. Instead, some “Hollywood folks” are, but Twitter has “little to do with their efforts but we wish them success,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarifies. Of course, this is exactly what he said yesterday, as I outlined, but he said it in a very indirect way. So now we get a second post. The problem is that a massive number of Twitter users are still tweeting out that Twitter is basically developing its own show. The power of the retweet is keeping this story going. And now even CNN is covering super-celeb-user Ashton Kutcher threatening to boycott if they go through with it.

So let’s be clear once again:

What Twitter is doing: Lending its support and probably branding to at least one television show produced by Reveille and Brillstein. Others are in the works as well.

What Twitter is not doing: Making its own show, starring anyone from Twitter, or really distracting it from anything else it’s working on.

Why this matters: First and foremost, this is a business deal. And Twitter will make money from this — though it doesn’t state that. Long term though, Twitter thinks its platform can be leveraged beyond web applications, and can be the backbone of entertainment experiences, among other things. Basically, Twitter is thinking of itself as a new communication medium (which has been noted several times in the past) and a TV show totally built around Twitter is an interesting step in proving/disproving that with the mainstream public.

That is all. At least until the inevitable post tomorrow further clarifying the situation.

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