Athletic apparel company ASICS today acquired popular running app Runkeeper for an undisclosed amount of money. Runkeeper founder Jason Jacobs announced the news in a blog post on Medium, in which he promised that the merger of a "digital fitness platform and world class physical products" will be one that should benefit fans of both companies.
Runkeeper offers a free experience, but power users can spend $9.95 on a more premium version of the service. Last summer, Runkeeper announced that it cut 30 percent of its staff to shift focus "from purely attracting lots of users to wringing more revenue from those users," which ASICS' acquisition should help contribute to as well.
Fitness clothing companies have been making acquisitions in the digital space for a while now, in the last year alone Under Armour purchased MyFitnessPal and Adidas purchased Runtastic. One of the first technical integrations of digital fitness into a wearable was the Nike+ step counter, which you could insert into a tennis shoe to sync with the company's running app.
Runkeeper is available to download from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Partnering with ASICS to fulfill this vision together makes a ton of sense. We both have deep roots in and focus on running as a core component of the fitness experience. There is strong alignment between our brands and core values. And from people using our Shoe Tracker feature in the app, we know that ASICS shoes are by far the ones that Runkeeper users run in the most!Jacobs promised that Runkeeper users won't see many changes to the core app experience due to the acquisition, but thanks to ASICS' resources, the app should be able to expand and grow at a faster rate. The specifics of the integration into physical products for the two companies has not yet been disclosed, but an automatic run-tracking shoe seems to be in the cards with Runkeeper's mentioning of the popularity of ASICS shoes among its users.
Runkeeper offers a free experience, but power users can spend $9.95 on a more premium version of the service. Last summer, Runkeeper announced that it cut 30 percent of its staff to shift focus "from purely attracting lots of users to wringing more revenue from those users," which ASICS' acquisition should help contribute to as well.
Fitness clothing companies have been making acquisitions in the digital space for a while now, in the last year alone Under Armour purchased MyFitnessPal and Adidas purchased Runtastic. One of the first technical integrations of digital fitness into a wearable was the Nike+ step counter, which you could insert into a tennis shoe to sync with the company's running app.
Runkeeper is available to download from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
12 comments
The United States Senate today voted almost unanimously to approve an anti-robocalling bill that would cut down on the number of illegal robocalls that people receive.
The TRACED Act (Telephone...
Some employees of Snap have access to internal tools that allow them to access Snapchat user data and have in the past abused those tools to spy on Snapchat users, reports Motherboard.
According...
The new high-end 8-core 15-inch MacBook Pro that was announced on Tuesday offers significant performance improvements over the previous high-end 6-core MacBook Pro from 2018, according to new...
Samsung is in talks with Apple about supplying OLED displays for a 16-inch MacBook Pro and future iPad Pro models, according to Korean site The Elec, which does not have a proven track record in...
Students pursuing higher education prefer to use Macs over PCs, according to new data shared today by Apple device management company Jamf.
71 percent of students surveyed said they would either...
A Chinese man on Wednesday pleaded guilty in Oregon to one count of trafficking in counterfeit goods, after he managed to trick Apple into replacing hundreds of fake iPhones with authentic handsets...
Apple has registered eleven unreleased iPhone models in the Eurasian Economic Commission database this week, including models A2111, A2160, A2161, A2215, A2216, A2217, A2218, A2219, A2220, A2221, and...
Apple this week began stocking a new 4K 23.7-inch LG UltraFine Display, which replaces the original 21.5-inch 4K LG UltraFine Display that was pulled from retail stores and the online Apple Store...
