FLIRTing with the Crowds

This is a very intriguing one indeed. Traxmeet, a virtual training community was launched some weeks ago and I’ve been eager to blog about it since then. Been busy busy busy since then, but Sunday nights are always good for blogging.

What makes this sports community especially interesting is that it is owned by Elisa, a telecom operator (and yes, arch rival of my employer, TeliaSonera Finland). This goes only to show that telecom companies are ever more seriously taking heed to the notion that in a few years time, voice will be free and are now innovating on new business models that depend on mobile data but expand on this in order to offer true and unique value to their customers.

The idea is that people join Traxmeet’s virtual training community, pay a monthly fee for GPS and heart rate monitoring gear and off they go, whether its running, cycling or other sorts of sports where distance, time and location matter. The data on training sessions is stored to the service, can be shown on Google Maps based mapping service and is analyzed by state of the art analysis tools. Naturally, you also set up a profile and get all the basic social network functionalities. For an extra fee, you can choose to pick a personal trainer from a selection of renowned professionals and these people will be guiding you through the drills, whether you’re aiming for marathon or just beach abs.

However, if there is a killer app in Traxmeet, it is definitely the possibility to compete against your friends virtually. In the hectic times we live, it might be problematic to find a time for you and your buddies to take the morning run together. With Traxmeet, a person can pick a common route, see her latest run on map and compare this to a friend’s run as if watching simultaneous runs on a GPS map. A very cool feature indeed. Naturally time scale can be changed so you don’t have to watch one-hour runs in real time. This feature adds a kind of twist to the service seen previously in manager games, where the game is not shown with photorealistic graphics but instead as a data charts that develop as the game develops. Of course the map makes it a lot more visual and immersive and there are all kinds of gauges and meters on the dashboard that show your performance during different stages of the e.g. run.

While Finland has always been good at technical inventions, it’s good to see also market innovations sprouting up from the now frozen soil (summer fortunately is only four months away…). Traxmeet isn’t exactly crowdsourcing (or is it - do we yet know what that word means exactly?) , it is definitely a business model where the customer-participants comprise the very essence of the service, for which reason my FLIRT model largely applies. This is just a very quick one since this post is already longer than I like to make them:

Focus:

The focus clearly is content. People join the service in order to contribute their results, which of course are the main content on the site. The money is made through device rentals, personal training contracts as well as mobile data plans needed if uploading data on the fly is wanted.

Language:

The social objects are of course thrill of sports, competing against one’s peers and winning oneself. The interaction around these social focuses on sharing the results and comparing them. Because of this I would like to pose a question: should the 7 building blocks of the social web be expanded to 8 building blocks, with comparing as the 8th one? Of course this is broadly covered with sharing, but sharing here is different than in Flickr for example. Flickr is sharing for the joy of sharing; this is downright competition. I’m seriously thinking of adding this to the FLIRT model… Company presence on the site is limited to the trainers, which I think is a good approach; they matter more to the sports people than a telecoms representative.

Incentives

There are explicit competitions but at least so far no explicit rewards are offered on behalf of the company. Incentives are very strongly related to winning yourself (intrinsic incentive) and winning others (extrinsic subjective incentive).

Rules

Since this is not an idea building thing and the owning party doesn’t at present hold competitions, rules are scarce (and unnecessary). If you win your buddy, you win.

Tools

The service is primarily made using proprietary apps made to order by UOMA Rich Media. There’s also a hybrid approach with the Google Maps view, which works great. Unlike usually with online communities, there are also physical devices involved with Finnish FRWD’s heart rate and GPS gear. This is the weakest point here from the customer’s point of view. If they want also women in general to become device subscribers, they need something a bit more towards Nike+iPod, as FRWD’s device set is pretty heavy and techy looking in rough, all black plastic.