More Mobile Monday Boston Thoughts

I have written previous blog posts about a recent Mobile Monday Boston event (see “Mobile Monday Boston Event Focuses in Early Stage Mobile Companies” and “Mobile Monday Boston Event Keynote Offers Pragmatic Advice to Entrerpreneurs“). Today, as I got ready to go for a run, I couldn’t help but be reminded by one of the early stage, mobile companies that presented at Monday’s event – RunKeeper. RunKeeper was founded by cyclists and runners in May 2008. It launched its first downloadable GPS fitness tracking app on the iPhone in August, by September had made $87K and by by November it estimates that it will have been downloaded by 85K people. While that is nothing compared to today’s news that there were 400K MySpace downloads on BlackBerry within a week, RunKeeper is a premium fitness app ($9.99) targeted at a niche fighting discovery in the iPhone App Store. On its roadmap, RunKeeper plans to extend support to BlackBerry and Android, and add features/integrate with social media sites.

Now, as a runner, one of the things that perplexes me about the pitch and the app is the fact that it is being positioned as a much lower cost alternative without separate hardware to other GPS fitness tracking devices. While the Nike + iPod Sport Kit does not track location, it only costs $29.99 and does analyze importance performance (speed, distance, and calories burned) Comparatively, the Runkeeper iPhone app is $9.99. So, while I do give up on GPS feature functionality and connectedness, I don’t have the burden of extra hardware – the kit is small and my iPod Shuffle much smaller still than my iPhone, which I have to carry somehow if I am using Runkeeper. I guess that for the avid runner that needs to be connected and tracked and where GPS is important it may be worth the $9.99 price tag and the burden of carrying my iPhone. For me though, it just won’t work.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.