WalkingSpree.com inks pilot deal with Calgary hospital

WalkingSpree.com, a Calgary, Alberta based startup run by MeshEast editor Lisa has just signed a deal to run a pilot project in a major hospital

” . . .selected patients under the care of local Calgary West Central PCN family doctors will be given USB Pocket Pedometers from WalkingSpree.com to track and automatically upload their walking data to the WalkingSpree website. The patients can add other activities such as swimming or cycling to get a full picture of the calories burned. Patients can also track calories consumed with the online food and nutrition tracker to balance their daily “energy in-energy out” equation, thereby assisting with weight loss and weight-loss maintenance. These patients will receive support from WalkingSpree’s online Fitness and Nutritional Coaches.”

WalkingSpree provides a USB pedometer which can upload data to the WalkingSpree website, which provides coaching and tracking features. It seems to be a lot like NikePlus, but with more value added features (and I assume upsell opportunities).

Nice work on getting this pilot together, I am looking forward to hearing the results.

mesheast.com – East Coast Startup Blog

MeshEast is the latest entrant on to the Canadian Startup blog scene. I was excited to get an email from Lisa Rousseau, who is also working on her own startup, to see that the east coast would finally have a local startup blog. Lisa is going to have some work to do in finding and profiling those elusive east-coast startups, but my guess is that she will find more than enough to get started in her home province of New Brunswick.

So please, head over to MeshEast and subscribe. We have been covering some of the bigger happenings on the east coast, but there are always a lot of things we just can’t cover. We are working on our own profile of what is going on in Atlantic Canada, and so far I have been excited about what I have seen.

We have been trying to do as much as we can to encourage local blogs that will cover smaller regions in more detail. Montreal is the luckiest with MontrealTechWatch, which is run by Heri (who might be the hardest working blogger in Canada these days), and Ottawa has StartupOttawa, which is really starting to pick up steam. There are some gaps to fill, so if you are passionate about startups then it is time to get off your butt and step up to the place. I can think of dozens of local blogs I would love to see: Waterloo, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and the Prairies all come to mind as the biggest gaps out there.

So get started, and get in touch. We want to help!

Coast to Coast: Amateur Sports Teams 2.0

One of the first startups we profiled on StartupNorth was New Brunswick based Yourteamonline. Since then Yourteamonline has launched version 2.0 of their sports team management suite and added a slew of new features. In the meanwhile, Victoria based TeamPages has also risen in prominence.

Both TeamPages and YourTeamOnline provide player pages, statistics, team pages and league interaction. It seems like we have a coast to coast fight for the amateur sports team demographic.

The market for amateur sports related spending in North America alone is $111 billion. More than enough room for two leaders, and even better if they are both from Canada. The amount of targeted advertising dollars up for grabs is staggering. Add on the amount of money that changes hands for local team sponsorships every year, and things are looking up!

The first similarity I noticed was the abundant use of blue on both companies’ websites. The choice of colors is not where the similarities end however. And this is where I start to wonder a little.

Both YourTeamOnline and TeamPages are marketing themselves as a generalized sports team management toolkit. If I were calling the shots here (which I am not!), I would approach each sport differently. YourTeamOnline is starting down this path, they have customized versions for Hockey and Soccer, but their marketing is still focused at a general market, which is going to be tougher to capture. This is the same strategy that every other competitor in the marketplace is using and it is going to be tough to stand out, even with a much better than average offering.

YourTeamOnline and Teampages both focus on letting individuals, teams and leagues build social networks, and each have unique characteristics that, in my opinion, make them the two best team/league platforms out there. Where most competitive packages focus on the minutiae of managing a team, YourTeamOnline and TeamPages focus on the individual users, whether they are coaches, parents or players.

I am also impressed with the roadmaps that both companies allude to on their sites. YourTeamOnline has plans to launch youtube-like video uploading and a feature called “SportsWire” that helps get team statistics out to the public, newspapers, and other consumers of team data.

Is this a clash of the titans? A fight to the death? Jackie Chan vs. Chow Yun Fat? I think it is probably more the result of an overdue idea and a huge market, with scalable revenue opportunities. Will there be one winner, or two? We’ll be watching to find out.

YourTeamOnline and Teampages have each taken early-stage funding.