Mark poked around with the tongs as he carefully analyzed the salad. He saw some baby tomatoes and found a chunk of blue cheese underneath the lettuce. He knew that cheese would make a big difference, and factoring in the vinaigrette dressing, he made his guess: “110?” Shaking her head, Jane exclaimed, “Nope, only 75!” Salad was always tricky, but with all of this practice, he was much getting better at it.

Counting calories is a task that’s usually associated with people who obsessively keep track of everything they eat to shed a few more pounds. For the rest of us, we’re aware of calories, but we know very little about the calorie content in the food we eat. It’s no surprise that eating well and maintaining a healthy weight are two of the most important steps we can take to live longer, healthier lives. But knowing this, how does the vague notion of “eating well” actually translate into our day-to-day eating habits? What should we be eating, and where do our calories come from?

At every meal in the office during the week, we’ve been taking turns guessing how many calories are in a single serving of each dish. Our food is prepared by our talented chef, and each of her recipes is saved online with service called DailyBurn that automatically breaks down the number of calories per serving, as well as lots of information about the nutritional value about the dish. You can see a sample meal listed here: WorkSmart Labs lunch 2/2/10.

And just because we’re eating healthy food doesn’t mean that the meals aren’t delicious. Our chef has done a wonderful job filling every meal with color, variety and taste. Browse through the photos below to see what we’ve been eating.

As a company, our mission has always been to make wellness a seamlessly enjoyable part of everyday life. But if we expect our users to be eating healthy, then we had better put our money food where our mouth is. We sympathize with anyone who has found that recording everything they eat throughout the day is a difficult and frustrating task. However, counting calories is one of the best ways to start taking control of one’s eating habits, and that’s exactly why we’re doing it: we want to understand this challenge better so we can find ways to make it easier. Our little ”calorie guessing game” is just an example of how we approach these kinds of problems before trying to solve them. Whether it be nutrition or fitness, we want to exemplify the healthy lifestyle that we are promoting through our products and technology.

We are excited to announce that we have just released CardioTrainer v2.1! Here is an overview of what’s new:

Automatic Crash Recovery
We know how frustrating it is when CardioTrainer closes during a workout. This is a complex issue because sometimes Android simply *has* to close one of the apps if you have many running at once. With this update, CardioTrainer will automatically restore your track if the application is closed by the system, or if your phone turns off while recording a workout (if it’s out of battery, for example). For those of you who saw CardioTrainer crashing because of memory problems, we hope that the fix will help with this problem. This is our first attempt at a complex solution, so we would love to hear how well we did.

Graphical History
We’ve overhauled the the look and feel of the the workout history screen. All of your stats are now arranged for easy comparison, along with a visualization of how many calories were burned in each workout. You can still select and individual workouts to see the map and other statistics. We have also introduced a long click (press and hold) to delete and resend individual tracks. Please let us know how you like it.

New Splash Screen
When you open CardioTrainer after installing the update, you’ll be greeted by our new welcome screen with a quick overview of how to use CardioTrainer and a list of features. You’ll only see this the first time you open the application, and it will hopefully give our first time users a better idea of how to use CardioTrainer. If anything looks incorrect or unclear, please let us know.

We really want to know what you think of these changes, so as always, please share any questions or comments with us.

Happy exercising!
The WorkSmart Labs family

Hey CardioTrainees,

Welcome to 2010! If you’ve been using CardioTrainer for the past two weeks, you will have noticed that we recently rolled out our first social feature, High Scores. High Scores lets you see how the rest of the world is working out, be it running, biking, horseback riding, or whatever else! Everyone gets to register with an optional nickname and comment, and then see their rank by both total distance and distance in the last 7 days. This gives you a glimpse of the amazing international diversity of CardioTrainer users. Please check it out by clicking on the “See High Scores” button on the first page.

Hey CardioTrainees!

You’re probably wondering why you haven’t heard from us in a while, but it’s been a really busy few months and we’ve been hard at work. Since our last post, we’ve rolled out five new versions of the CardioTrainer app, and we’re happy to share a few more exciting pieces of news.

Official CardioTrainer User Group
We’ve created an official user group for all of your CardioTraining needs. You can get help, discuss ideas, and share your workout experiences with other users. We really encourage everyone to get involved as ask for help if you need it. Check it out here: CardioTrainer User Group

Updated Frequently Asked Questions
Our support team has been busy assembling a list of the most commonly asked questions and problems that we get from our users on a day-to-day basis. Along with the forum, this is the place to go if you got questions and need answers. Check it out here: CardioTrainer FAQ

Holiday Surprises
Be on the lookout for a little holiday surprise from the WorkSmart Labs family coming very soon!

Happy training!

The WorkSmart Labs family

We’ve built an excellent foundation for a fitness technology start-up, and now we are looking for amazing and driven engineers to help us grow faster and share the rewards. We are looking for full-time engineers for our New York office. Please e-mail me at jobs@worksmartlabs.com or pass this on to friends who might be interested.

About our start-up

The WorkSmart Labs mission is to use technology to make fitness more fun and effective. Existing fitness companies have dropped the ball on this (ever have a blast on a treadmill?), and technology companies with top talent have largely ignored the area. We are building WorkSmart Labs to fill the gap.

For example, imagine a video version of Google Street View, but on a treadmill and with image analysis that allows you to embed virtual opponents and motivational mileposts. Then instead of watching CNN, users can run through the streets of Paris or the Alps, while we optimize their workout for maximum fat-burn or endurance. Imagine also the gym of the future, where every exercise you do is monitored by a mobile cyber trainer, virtually following and instructing you. And if you don’t do what you should, it can post this fact on your Facebook feed, or even donate money to an organization you dislike. These are the types of ideas that drive us, and we are building and testing many of these and other ideas.

What makes us different

1. We are small and early-stage! We have many helpers and advisers, but we still have just 6 full-time employees. Additionally, we’ve prudently kept costs low and financed our company with our own and angel funds, not taking VC money, which means we’ve kept a lot of equity to share with highly-talented early employees (that’s you!). If you join, I guarantee you will have a big impact and will be generously rewarded for it with equity.
2. We are changing and improving the world! We’re focusing on the largely unexplored area of “fitness and wellness technology”, where improvements can have a big and hugely beneficial impact. Unlike say .com’s, not enough smart people are looking at this problem — and we can change that together. We already get many e-mails from users thanking us for helping them lose weight or exercise. Imagine doing that on a global scale.
3. We make decisions together! Whether its how much to pay an advisor, what features to add, how to negotiate an investment, or even if we should get a new couch. You will be an equal partner in these discussions, and you will learn how to make such decisions (in a data-driven way and beyond!). Instead of working on just one area, we believe that every employee should be able to think like a CEO. The biggest thing I underestimated in joining a start-up is how much I would learn from this process: every day something different comes up, and every time it’s a life-long lesson for business and life.
4. We are building the kind of company we want to work for! We’ve worked for and admire great engineering companies (such as Fog Creek and Google), and are obsessed with creating a great work environment and a rewarding atmosphere. No obstacle is too great on this quest, and you will be able to help us improve it. We’ve had an amazing chef from day one (we love her!) and a fun office with frequent visitors.
5. We build amazing & diverse technologies! At our core, we are a team of great engineers. As such, right from the beginning, we have worked hard to build a great engineering environment — with code reviews, automatic unit tests, bug reports, the works. We take great pride in our tools and our code, and this lets us build cool stuff quickly. We build everything from Android mobile software, to C++ image analysis, to web UI, to pedometer data analysis. Because we are small, you will become skilled in many more technologies, and build more diverse ones.
6. We are multi-disciplinary! We see fitness technology as multi-disciplinary at its core — we need the input of fitness advisors, designers, doctors, psychologists, and researchers. Already, we have trainers and researchers (who’d normally not cross paths!) that advise us on these subjects, and we dream of a day when we have all of these people working together in one place, having fun, and then going down to our own demo gym to use our own products! From the start, we’ve also built this company to attract a great variety of people, so you will get to interact with a much more diverse set of people than in a typical engineering company.
7. We are making great progress! Our business accomplishments so far include releasing the most popular dedicated fitness application on the Android Market (CardioTrainer), securing angel capital from Korea as well as from a senior Google Product Manager, winning a technology development grant from the Korean Ministry of Knowledge, and most importantly, building an amazing foundation for our company and finding an awesome team.

Candidates
We are looking for excellent engineers that are smart and get things done. This means of course great software design skills, a lot of software engineering experience (5 years minimum, and we don’t care if it was at Apple or in your mom’s basement), excellent communication skills, and a driven personality. We will compensate with a base salary combined with generous equity, so you need to be interested in future growth rather than immediate riches. You know who you are.

Contact Information
We have a jobs@worksmartlabs.com e-mail and this goes directly to me (and only to me), so it’s completely confidential. You can use this to ask questions or send your resume. Fancy resumes are not required!

Artem Petakov,
Co-Founder/CTO of WorkSmart Labs

With your constant encouragement and support, we’ve been working very hard these past few months, and I wanted to share the results of our efforts with you.

Summary of this update:

1. CardioTrainer 1.0.1 and the “Race Against Yourself” Premium Feature for $2.99. Please try it out, it’s refundable within 24 hrs.

2. The first CardioTrainer User Survey. Take it here.

3. Future developments

Just a few weeks ago, we released a new version of CardioTrainer with many many new features. We also launched our first premium feature “Race Against Yourself” — it makes exercising a lot more fun by allowing you to race against your previously recorded tracks. Not only does it simulate a full virtual race, it also speaks to you and tells you exactly how far behind or ahead you are throughout the race. We’ve been running and biking with this feature for the past 2 months, and we have all improved our times a lot. It’s incredibly motivating — sometimes almost too much so, so please use it wisely!

To get the feature, you start CardioTrainer (version 1.0 or above), and then click on Start > Race Against Yourself. You will then see a screen that tells you about the feature and allows you to buy it for $2.99 (see the screenshots above). Once you click on the “Buy” button below, it will forward you to the Android Market, where you pay for it. Once you install the feature, you can go back to CardioTrainer and Race, Race, Race!

We would really appreciate it if you can try it out for $2.99 and then tell us if everything works for you, and how you like it. All purchases have a 24-hour refund policy, so feel free to refund it if you don’t like it — our main goal is always to have happy users and to experiment with this business model early on, before we commit to it. So we would appreciate any feedback. Is it too annoying or confusing to buy separate features? Would you prefer a single premium version instead? Or would you prefer some other business model entirely? Does it feel strange to spend the $2.99 for a feature inside the program? Any other feedback? Please write us and tell us (or tells us in the user survey below). And tell your friends to do the same. It will help make CardioTrainer even better.

Besides racing, we’ve also added:

• Calorie counting (based on weight  & activity type you can choose in the settings)
• Pace voice output
• Improved climb calculations
• Tons of other small fixes
• CardioTrainer website updates: elevation graph and information about your total mileage.

2. CardioTrainer User Survey

We receive many e-mails from users every day asking for new features, reporting bugs, or just simply telling us they love CardioTrainer. We absolutely love it, so keep it coming! As you can imagine, our to-do list is now full of hundreds of great ideas, and it’s getting a bit hard to prioritize them all. That’s why we have decided to do the first CardioTrainer user survey. Please help us by completing it — this is your chance to give us detailed feedback, and it will certainly determine the future direction of the product. In addition, if you have any friends who are current (or potential exercisers!), but don’t use CardioTrainer, please ask them to take this survey as well.

Take the survey!

3. Future Developments

We’re already hard at work on the next version of CardioTrainer (Yes, we do sleep. Sometimes.). In this version, we’re focusing on improving the tracking experience. As many of you have reported, the G1 GPS is really buggy,  and CardioTrainer is unfortunately at the mercy of the GPS signals and hardware. Google has acknowledged the problem, so we know we are not alone. But we don’t give up easily. We are taking some very innovative steps to best cope with these hardware glitches, as well as improve the tracking accuracy. We’re also working on adding new website features, so keep your eyes open for these.

We finally have a real corporate website! Don’t worry, we’re still the same friendly
family, but now you can learn a little bit about our team & vision.

Check it out and tell us what you think: contact@worksmartlabs.com

With your terrific support, CardioTrainer is slowly growing up. This means ever more users, more features, and an ever-growing responsibility to reliability from us. I’d like to share an important lesson we received recently, and what we learned from it.

An Important Lesson & CardioTrainer version 0.9.3

On January 26th, we updated the CardioTrainer website to include several new features: remembering your access code (a long-time request!), a CardioTrainer Help/Tutorial page, and many other fixes. Please check out the improved website.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, because of an error in the Website update process, there was a temporary problem uploading tracks to the website between Jan 26 16:50:26 EST and Jan 27 13:30 EST (18 hours). The G1 believed it was uploading the tracks, but the website had a problem receiving them. At our scale, this meant missing some 4000 miles of tracks from our users, a very serious problem! Read on, all is not lost!

Once we learned about the problem, the whole team took emergency measures: working around the clock, we released CardioTrainer 0.9.3, just 20 hours later. This release includes code to auto-retransmit the tracks that were not sent successfully, as well as code that lets you manually retransmit any track from the history. This version also includes some other bug fixes, so there is an upside for you as well.

For the best experience, please head over to the Market and install the latest version, CardioTrainer 0.9.3. All of your data will be saved. If you have any problems, please write back to us.

Since then, we have done a lot to make sure this kind of error will not happen again: improved our server stability, created many additional automatic notifications systems, and new diagnostic and repair tools. We are very sorry for the inconvenience to you, but are also very happy to learn such a valuable lesson. Thank you for your patience, and for continuing to support us on this journey.

The features ahead

We are working very hard to add new features to CardioTrainer. They include simple things like calorie counting, pace measurement, and website improvements, but we are also working on some much bigger ideas. We’d like to keep them a surprise, but we have a feeling you will like them.

We need your help!

We are spending all of our resources on features, so we are really counting on you to get the word out. CardioTrainer is already getting some press coverage. We think we can do much better — if you have any time, please post about us to your favorite blog, or tell that tech columnist friend of yours about CardioTrainer. If you’d like to help even more, please get in touch with us and tell us your ideas.

On behalf of the whole WorkSmart Labs family, I would like to wish you a very Happy New Year!
We’ve been keeping very busy, and I wanted to update you briefly on the Christmas presents we have gotten you.

As some of you already noticed, on Christmas day we posted a new version of CardioTrainer - v0.9.2. Because of a small bug in the way it was uploaded, the Market still says v0.9.1, but it is indeed a new version. If you haven’t tried it yet, check it out — it adds: (drumroll please)

• Voice Output — CardioTrainer now has a voice! It can tell you how far you’ve gone, and how long it took to get there. In the settings screen, you can customize how often you get notified — either based on distance or time, or even completely disable it if you’d rather tune out and enjoy your music. For those of you that exercise with music, CardioTrainer will turn down the music when it talks to you, and then turn it back up when it’s done. A lot more exciting developments coming for this feature!
• Statistics Screen — you can access this either by going to the Statistics menu when you are exercising or by simply clicking on the map. We are going to add more here soon. Look for calories and pace information in the next update!
• Advanced GPS Settings — some of you exercise in areas with dense vegetation or skyscrapers, where the GPS sensitivity level prevents you from getting any GPS points. If so, head over to the Advanced GPS settings screen (reachable from the Settings screen) and adjust the filter level there. Or maybe you’d like to save power for those 20-hour hikes you do. We have a setting for you as well.

We have also fixed a few bugs on the website — KML/GPX export should now export correct timestamps and elevations, and you can now zoom in all the way on your track without it disappearing. We also have a lot more features planned for the website.

Please try them out, let us know what you think of the new features, and if you have a second, jot down a comment in the Market.

We can’t thank you enough for your continued support of CardioTrainer. Your feedback, ideas, comments is what keeps us motivated and allows us to build an amazing product. We are always listening. And we will keep listening in 2009 and beyond.

I am VERY happy to announce that the CardioTrainer website now allows you to export individual tracks in KML and GPX formats.

Since this was one of the top web feature requests, I wanted to make sure all of you found out about it as soon as possible, and gave us any feedback that you have, or tell us about any problems you encounter.

To see the feature, just log-in on the website and select a track. In the top-right corner, right next to delete, you should see an export to KML and GPX links. If you don’t see them or something doesn’t work, tell us please!

Rest assured, this is only one of many steps on the way to sharing your data with the rest of the world. We are listening very carefully to your feedback, and you have given us great ideas and I am sure will give us many more! At WorkSmart, we never believe in restricting users and their data, or in any other kind of vendor lock-in. We will always be dedicated to being the best, and we hope to earn your trust, but we will make it as easy as possible to export to any platform or program of your choice. Viva the data! 

Happy running, biking, walking, and whatever else makes you happier and more fit!