The growth and community that we have seen on DailyBurn has been amazing to watch. A few months ago, we set out to explore opportunities that could help us to continue to build a DailyBurn that our users would love and, ultimately, would improve lives. We have tons of great ideas for better products, more tools, more content – a better DailyBurn, and we needed to expand our team to do so…

Today we are very pleased to announce that we have joined forces with IAC to create a partnership that we believe will provide the resources needed to increase our position as the leading online destination for fitness. You can read more information about the announcement here and here.

What does this mean for you? You can expect to see new features and overall improvements to the complete suite of DailyBurn products. You can expect more content, more apps, more platforms, and more partners. You can expect a better experience and a toolset that will help you reach your health goals even faster. You can expect us to be around a long time and continue to be here to motivate you toward a long, healthy life.

Nothing is changing with our team or core product. But, what you have seen so far is just the beginning, and we are very excited for what is coming in the future.

Wishing you a long, healthy life,

- Andy, Stephen, Jeff, Paul, and Kate

That said, building the app is challenging, sometimes frustrating work. Things can get nutty when developers work day after day in these sorts of conditions. At some point recently these conditions spawned a conversation. The actual conversation has been lost to the ether, but it most likely went something like this between developers A, B, and C:

B: I just saw a commercial for what’s basically a vibrating brick.
B: They claim that you if you kick back and set your foot on it, you’ll lose weight.
C: That’s complete bogus.
A: Man, If those kinds of things actually worked, then there’d be a dozen of them on the App Store already.
B: Agreed. And people are willing to pay $80 bucks for the stupid thing.
C: You could get a cheap bike for $80 and be awesome.
A: Searching the App Store turns up nothing.
C: We should fix that.
B: Hah, that’d be funny.
A: It’d be so easy to make. A button, a description, then done!
C: I dare you to make it.
A: I will, I’ll totally make it. Watch.

Maybe a day passes…

A: Look at what I did last night. Here’s a screen shot.

B: Whoa

C: Nice. Let’s release it for real!

B: Hah, that’d be funny.
A: It’d be so easy to do.
C: I dare you!

Maybe a day passes…

A: Hey guys, I submitted Fatburner2k to the App Store
B: Hah!
C: Hah!

To make this short story less long, essentially FatBurner2k, our little joke to blow off steam, was actually published, and within a few days of the release made it on Fortune Magazine’s The 10 Dumbest iPhone Apps list.

Read the app description with the backstory in mind to get a sense for how funny it is to be acknowledged by Fortune Magazine at all:

We feel like we know you. You’d rather spend your time moving and
shaking where it counts in life, not at some expensive members only
gym where people just stand around drinking coffee trying to look hot
all day. Your tastes are similar to ours. You don’t like to waste
time. You enjoy the good life. You’re not some obsessed muscle bound
jerk, but you enjoy showing people who’s boss from time to time.

We designed this application for you.

With the FatBurner 2000 1.0 application, you can turn your iPhone into
the gym that works on your terms, and works places where those snooty
gyms might not be able to fit. FB2K1.0 can help your body consume fat
molecules using disharmonic, molecule to molecule, physical
oscillations, which is a sciency way of saying that FB2K1.0 shakes the
fat in your body until it gives up.

FB2K1.0 is super flexible, allowing a workout at anytime, anywhere. Use it …
* … while finding a parking spot
* … when waiting to order dinner
* … at the doctor’s office
* … while you nap
* … when watching professional sports, such as NASCAR, wrestling,
bass fishing, figure skating
* … while you talk on your land line
* … while getting a haircut
* … while smoking a filtered cigarette
* … while enjoying the good life
* … to put the fear of God into your fat molecules

FatBurner 2000 1.0 is the only application for the iPhone specifically
designed to vibrate fat molecules. In fact, the application is so
focused on shaking your fat molecules that it’s the only think it
does. Why would you need a bloated application with loads of useless
features when all you want to do is do it right?

FatBurner 2000 1.0. We designed it for you.

Good news for those who have been waiting anxiously for the DailyBurn iPhone app: Fatburner2k is not that app. Fatburner2k is excellent at making your phone vibrate and maybe getting a chuckle out of your friends. It, like the $80 vibrating brick, won’t help you lose weight.

Old timey wisdom would suggest that all good things require real effort. An $80 vibrating brick won’t help you lose weight. Fatburner2k won’t help you lose weight. There are no shortcuts.

The process of building the DailyBurn iPhone is one that requires iteratively applying consistent and real effort as we incorporate bug fixes and feature requests submitted by our fantastic team of beta testers.

News of the investment broke Tuesday on TechCrunch.  You can view the full article here: Feel The DailyBurn: Gyminee Gets A New Name, Raises $525K

We will be using the investment to build out our development team, do some marketing, and yes – to speed along the iPhone development.  We couldn’t be more excited.

Also, here is a recent interview I did discussing DailyBurn (cheesy music and all!).

You can see the full article by following this link: Six Best Exercise Planning and Tracking Tools.

As the year anniversary of “The Biggest Loser” Season 5 finale approached on April 15, I found it necessary to take a good hard look at the past 12 months of my life.  I moved to Boston, started working three jobs, made amazing new friends (while still holding on to my old ones), found a great trainer, had tons of fun…and gained 10 pounds!

How would I feel knowing that I put such incredible, intense effort into making myself a healthier person only to gain it all back?  I do not want to be one of those “Biggest Loser” contestants to gain their weight back.  I refuse.  Plus, losing 70 pounds in 6 months really showed me what I’m made of, showed me how strong I am, and showed me that it can be done.  When I saw that scale tipping more and more to the right, I just knew I had to make a change.

One of my best friends from San Francisco and I had discussed keeping ourselves accountable for working out, eating right, and losing weight before two of our other friends get married in July.  However, we had found it somewhat difficult with the 3 hour time difference to keep ourselves on track as much as we’d hoped.  This wedding is very important to a group of about 10 of my friends, since it is the first time we will all be together since we worked at a summer camp 2 years ago.  It is especially important to me because it will be the first time my friends are seeing me since I have lost my weight.

Since my Californian friend sent me the invite for Gyminee, we have been cheering one another on and making sure that we are staying true to our tasks.  It has been really fun keeping each other accountable even though we are a whole country apart.  Having gym buddies on Gyminee makes me feel like I am back on “The Biggest Loser” ranch.  I feel motivated through the support of others and hope that I can help my gym buddies feel the same way!

xoxo

Maggie

From Andy: We are really pleased that Maggie is doing a great job at tracking her workouts on Gyminee.  Maybe she will take advantage of the food options soon.   You can follow her progress or invite her to be your friend by visiting her locker room page.

Wouldn’t it be great to give a gift that could change that special someone’s life?  Well, here is one idea…

How about giving the ‘Gift of  Health’ ?  The timing is perfect and armed with our new 1 year Gyminee PRO Membership, he or she can start fresh and begin that ‘Life Change’ in 2009!  Subscribing to PRO workouts, setting some achievable fitness goals, and participating in a Challenge are just a few of the small steps that lead to significant change.

Now if you wanted to impress them even more, you could add a cool Gyminee T-shirt from our Gyminee Store with that membership!. If you have a humorous side, go a size or two up or down as an incentive for them to reach their goals.

Healthy holidays from the Gyminee Team.

The final round voting for the People’s Choice is still in progress.  You can vote for us once per day, per email address by using the following widget:

Voting closes this Sunday night at midnight!  Thanks for your support!

Here’s their synopsis about Gyminee:

“Weightloss webapp Gyminee takes your fitness goals to the cloud. Search for new workouts, nutritional information, join groups of like-minded exercisers, participate in challenges, and find “GymBuddies” to serve as accountability partners and morale boosters. The layout of the site is clean and the functions easy to access. The home base of your Gyminee experience is “My Locker Room” where you can track a variety of fitness goals from defaults like body weight, body fat, resting heart rate, and size measurements, to custom user-defined entries like mile times, lap speed, or any other fitness goal you want to track. The locker room also has charts to map out your progress, a journal for detailing your fitness transformation, and a section for progress pictures so everyone can see how you went from Cubicle Jockey to Jacked and Tan.”

We welcome any Lifehacker readers who want to give Gyminee a try! We believe you’ll find it to be the BEST place on the web for tracking your exercise and nutrition, bar none.

Meanwhile, we encourage Gyminee users to jump over to Lifehacker, check their site out and let their readers know what you like about Gyminee in the comments section of their article.

–JuryDuty

(Christopher Maselli at WritingMomentum.com)

Gyminee continues to get positive publicity. We were recently featured in several regional newspapers, including Montgomery, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Florence, and Gadsden.

The article explains the purpose of Gyminee and describes a group of friends using Gyminee for accountability. Click here to read the full article in The Montgomery Advertiser.