Sportlyzer, a newcomer in sports web applications working on an intelligent online fitness instructor, closed venture capital investment from Estonian Development Fund and a private angel investor Rein Lemberpuu. Sportlyzer has made its goal to become the leading online fitness advising artificial intelligence in the world.
In August 2010 Estonian Development Fund and private angel investor Rein Lemberpuu made a seed capital investment into a sports technology company Sportlyzer that is developing a social web application for workout tracking and consulting. Sportlyzer’s uniqueness stands in workout and motivation management algorithms that give birth to a digital online fitness instructor. Rein Lemberpuu, former CEO of Playtech Estonia, head of Supervisory board at Sportlyzer, explains his investment into Sportlyzer: “I invested into Sportlyzer because I find its idea contributing to community and the team has potential to build a major leader in the area of fitness-management applications.”
Investor of Sportlyzer, Rein Lemberpuu
Sportlyzer focuses on fitness level exercisers with sedentary work style. Online application helps to find workout buddies, manages exertion and motivation if needed. As Kristjan Port, the director of the Institute of Health Sciences and Sports of Tallinn University and the author of Sportlyzer’s workout management algorithms, states: “There are huge crowds of health level exercisers working out and taking part in sports events. Isn’t it surprising and paradoxical, that still they are so alone in their workout management. At the same time our team has the ability to support them with useful technology for that. I find it really inspiring and contributing to solve such a challenge.”
The first target markets of Sportlyzer are UK and USA. “There are many reasons for that: there are well developed fitness infrastructures, our target customer proportion in both populations is high, we are familiar to their cultural background, and of course, English is the No 1 language in the Internet,” says Tõnis Saag, the founder and teamleader of Sportlyzer. “It takes a little time until public launch, but it is already possible to subscribe to private bet at www.sportlyzer.com.”
Sportlyzer was founded by Tõnis Saag and an internet entrepreneur Jüri Kaljundi (CV-Online, Nagi, Emp.ly, Talentag) in July 2009. Soon the team was joined by Kristjan Port and a well-known sports psychologist Aave Hannus. The project was funded by Enterprise Estonia to develop the algorithms and in August 2010 Sportlyzer raised seed capital. Tõnis Saag is the manager of the company and the supervisory board consists of Margus Uudam from Ambient Sound Investments, Rain Rannu from Fortumo,Andrus Oks from Estonian Development Fund, Rein Lemberpuu and Jüri Kaljundi.
Our virtual coach character contest had a lot of entries. To pick up a winner we asked our customers for their opinion.
The favourite of customers and the overall winner is the coach character by Mr Kusumah from Indonesia.
Sportlyzer’s coach will be the user-interface of our unique algorithms for workout management. So he’s already really smart and has good looks, but lacks a name. So, please SUGGEST a NAME for our COACH that you think suits him best.
What a startup definitely needs is a WHITEBOARD. It supports your brainstorming and keeps important things always in sight of the team.
Thus, the very moment we moved into our office, we started looking for a whiteboard. In a stationery shop we could get a small metal plate for a lot of money . And that was definitely not something we were looking for, because we had imagined a huge whiteboard for a little money.
So we decided to do a whiteboard ourselves. On our request guys from a printing company kindly tried a whiteboard marker on their vinyl material they use for making banners. And for our delight the response was that it was possible to wipe the marker off. We bought 5 meters of vinyl material for 15 Euros, borrowed an electric drill and screwed the vinyl on our office wall. It was a real dream come true – almost the whole wall was now our whiteboard.
Vinyl roll-material as whiteboard.
We did our first brainstorming on Sportlyzer design and guess what – our great new whiteboard was a total FAIL. Whiteboard marker came of only with white spirit and the next day it didn’t come off at all.
But we didn’t give up and started looking for an alternative. Our UI designer Kalmer said, they had a kapaplast whiteboard at his last workplace. Quick enquiry showed that 3×1,5m sheet of coplast is remarkably more expensive (81 Euros) than vinyl, but still cheaper than the small whiteboard in the shop.
This time we did a preliminary study and took a small piece of coplast for testing. Test was successful and we bought it. Transport and montage took us 1 hour and voila – our whiteboard is up and IT WORKS.
Coplast whiteboard.
If you’ve got a better version/idea about how to make a cheap startup whiteboard, would you please SHARE IT WITH US?
How to make a startup whiteboard?
What a startup definitely needs is a WHITEBOARD. It supports your brainstorming and keeps important things always in sight of the team.
Thus, the very moment we moved into our office, we started looking for a whiteboard. In a stationery shop we could get a small metal plate for a lot of money . And that was definitely not something we were looking for, because we had imagined a huge whiteboard for a little money.
So we decided to do a whiteboard ourselves. On our request guys from a printing company kindly tried a whiteboard marker on their vinyl material they use for making banners. And for our delight the response was that it was possible to wipe the marker off. We bought 5 meters of vinyl material for 15 Euros, borrowed an electric drill and screwed the vinyl on our office wall. It was a real dream come true – almost the whole wall was now our whiteboard.
Photo
We did our first brainstorming on design and guess what – our great new whiteboard was a total FAIL. Whiteboard marker came of only with white spirit and the next day it didn’t come off at all.
But we didn’t give up and started looking for an alternative. Our UI designer Kalmer said, they had a kapaplast whiteboard at his last workplace. Quick enquiry showed that 3×1,5m sheet of coplast is remarkably more expensive (81 Euros) than vinyl, but still cheaper than the small whiteboard in the shop.
This time we did a preliminary study and took a small piece of coplast for testing. Test was successful and we bought it. Transport and montage took us 1 hour and voila – our whiteboard is up and IT WORKS.
Photo
If you’ve got a better version/idea about how to make a cheap startup whiteboard, would you please share it with us?
To make Sportlyzer technology more human, we need a trustworthy Coach character to consult our customers’ workouts. Our dream-coach is respected and loved, but all human – a little weird and gossiped :).
If you are good at drawing characters and impressions, you are welcome to join our contest at 99designs.com.
