As my Facebook friends and coworkers are tired of hearing, I’ve been on a serious fitness kick over the past year and a half, having lost 83 pounds. But I now have a new problem, and I admit it’s a pretty good one to have: My current set of fitness apps, geared around watching calories and tracking workouts, don’t seem ready to take me to the next level.

That’s why I was pretty pumped to hear about Gain Fitness, a new workout-recommendation site from former Google and YouTube employee Nick Gammell. Currently, the site offers randomized but scientific workouts that you can customize based on your experience level and available equipment.

The fitness industry is a $120 billion-a-year business. So there’s money to be made in the margins by making it more efficient, social, and data-driven. Gain’s service is aimed at regular exercisers who already hit the gym two to five times a week, but get frustrated at their lack of progress and the time it takes to both plan and track workouts. The notion of the site’s Quick Workout is that Gain Fitness can take out the time it takes to think through and plan a workout, while using principles of exercise science to design a sensible routine. Gammell estimates this demographic includes 50- 60 million people in the United States alone.

I certainly fit in that group: I’ve taught myself a fair bit about exercise and work out with a personal trainer but don’t consider myself an expert. When I clicked through Gain’s Quick Workout generator to show a workout I could do at home, what I saw both felt familiar and in my range of capabilities, yet seemed appropriately challenging — decline pushups, bodyweight squats, planks, and so on. (Gammell’s cofounder, Sam Morrell, is a certified personal trainer, while Gammell is a former college football player.)

There’s a host of fitness apps and websites out there, from DailyBurn and LoseIt to two personal favorites, MyFitnessPal and GymGoal. But Gammell hopes to harness his quantitative background — he was a financial data analyst at Google — and today’s sophisticated social networks to take online fitness to the next level. His plans for the site include public profiles, workout sharing, and social challenges. (Another site I’ve started using recently, Social Workout, already lets people create and join challenges and share them on Facebook, but doesn’t have Gain’s workout-generating function.)

What I’d really like to see is a way to tie more of these sites together. Just as location-based services have started to cooperate on place databases and check-in data, fitness sites should be able to share food diaries, calorie expenditures, and workout plans among themselves. Gammell agrees and said he’d like to be part of that move.

Gain Fitness, formerly known as eFitPlan, has raised $80,000 from friends and family members. Google executive Ben Ling, who’s well-known inside the tech business for his brutal workout regime, is an advisor to the company.

Gammell’s not just CEO of the company, he also uses the product — and offered this before-and-after photo as proof. As I joked with him, most people would consider themselves lucky if his before was their after, but it shows there’s an opportunity for fitness apps that go beyond the basics.

And here’s a presentation Morrell and Gammell gave at the Quantified Self, a workshop for fitness-tracking aficionados:

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Tumblr Is Sending A Bunch Of Bloggers To Fashion Week

by Justin Fenner | 12:58 pm, January 6th, 2011

As fashion bloggers, we tend to brake for other fashion bloggers, especially because we know how hard it can be to 1) get started, 2) build an audience 3) make people think and 4) cover fashion week, a task to which we could devote entire terrabytes of information. But this morning’s news that Tumblr, the photocentric blogging platform beloved by people everywhere, is sending 20 fashion bloggers to New York Fashion Week has us scratching our heads. Also puzzling: to manage it all, the company has recently hired a fashion director.

Fashionista reports that Richard Tong will oversee the coverage, which will be generated by eight New York-based bloggers and 12 from other areas of the country. What I Wore, Peace Love Chanel and SaraZucker.com (helmed by a blogger who’s helped us here at Styleite with some awesome fashion DIYs) are among the representatives. It’s not clear yet which shows they’ll attend, but they’re getting a pretty lush deal in exchange for the hard work they’ll have to do at Lincoln Center:

They’ll receive complimentary flights, accommodation, and will be whisked off to lunches, dinners, and cocktails with a roster of to-be-confirmed brands and designers.

But Tumblr isn’t just showering the bloggers with money and expecting for the reblogs to just happen. They’re also going to set up a live feed of the group’s content at tumblr.com/nyfw. That, of course, will be mixed in with stuff from a select group of media partners.

All of which are good things — it’s great to see hardworking bloggers get a little corporate love. We just hope that corporate love doesn’t turn into a bunch of sponsored content aimed at exposing brands that wouldn’t normally merit coverage on the beauty-obsessed blogs that are going to cover fashion week.

Other than that, it certainly sounds like a good idea — one more step in the democratization of fashion! Zucker herself once said the front row of fashion shows is where bloggers belong. We just hope this experiment is more about giving these bloggers an opportunity they wouldn’t have otherwise than it is about making paper.

Tumblr is Sending 20+ Bloggers to New York Fashion Week [Fashionista]

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Thursday, January 6, 2011

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Tumblr Is Sending A Bunch Of Bloggers To Fashion Week

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