“Toby started the Nile challenge yesterday evening at Virgin Active in Mill Hill (we’re down in London for the weekend) and was super motivated. He swam the best we’ve ever seen him by a country mile and completed 16 lengths of an 11 metre pool – he was very chuffed to see he’s 20% through the challenge already”

- Jamie, a Splashpath User.

We love this kind of feedback. That’s why we’re working on Splashpath Badges you can order and sew on your trunks ^_^

(design still in development!.. yes we know it has the distance twice )

Taking a short break from working on the website we’ve produced some promotional materials for participating sites to use. We’re gonna run off about 500 of each to send to the early Splashpath adopters..

Oh and if you’re looking for some marketing assets we’ve put together a chunk of goodness here

Proposed design for the Wobbler.

What is a wobbler?

Proposed design for the A3 Poster:

We’re getting really really close to launching the Splashpath iPhone app and thought it was time we shared some screenshots with y’all. We’re also looking for some testers so email: danmorgz[at]gmail.com if you’re interested in helping us squash some bugs.

So.. we super excited to announce that Splashpath is through the finals of the Go London NHS Competition. The competition has been delayed until early May so hopefully a little more time to choose what to wear…

You can see the press release here

We’ve also been busy bee’s.. working in the gorgeous sun…

What have we been making? .. well we’ve almost put the finishing touches to an automated process of pulling in Pool times from .csv files. What does this mean? – Well for a start a pool operator can export their existing timetable from excel and load it straight into Splashpath. We’ve just done this for Everyone Active. It’s a great way to hit the ground running. The Operator still needs to login to do a bit of customisation. You can see the timetable below doesn’t yet have descriptions..

Oh and last weekend I had a BIG reminder why swimming is so awesome. On what seemed like the sunniest weekend of the year I had a couple of amazing days at London Fields Lido, followed by drinks and a picnic with friends. Even managed to get a tan by the poolside. Started this week feeling so relaxed.. thanks GLL!

We’ve entered Splashpath into the NHS Go London Competition.

It was quite refreshing to sharpen some rusty research skills, looking through NHS strategy documents and doing some homework on where similar IT systems to Splashpath have had positive impacts on other Industries.

Have a peek here

A great designer and good friend, Adam Evans is currently thrashing out some possible logo designs. http://www.ordinarydesigns.com/blog/

Blogging is difficult! This takes more dedication than I originally thought so apologies for the lack of communication.

We were invited today to a forum organized by the FIA (Fitness Industry Association) Another one of these fantastic not-for-profit organizations that’s primary role is to get more people, more active, more often.

Today was a day focused on tech/social media innovations to encourage participation. Even though I’ve done the Splashpath presentation about a million times now I’m still trying to perfect my Steve Jobs esque delivery. Ironically for a tech focused meeting we spent the first 10 minutes struggling to get the projector to work I had a very exciting conversation with Rach from SLM (Everyone Active) about the integration of profile tracking into their website and the use of some kind of underwater/bluetooth/nike+ tracking system. All fantasy at the moment but this kind of tech is the ultimate end goal and swimmers dream.. I’ve since emailed a whole host of hardware manufacturers proposing we meet to combine forces and take over the world… Oh and the meeting was in a particularly nice venue! Yes thats the Thames.

So presentation went well, business cards were exchanged and nice sandwiches were consumed. (a lot left over though!) The student in me wanted a doggy bag…

So where are we at with Splashpath? Currently tweaking the system based on some feedback from the initial operators we’ve let loose into the system. IE6 is still trying to rear it’s ugly head in every possible place it can but we’re getting there

Normal Version:

And it works!!! hurrah!!! That timetable is only term time so don’t believe the hype just yet.

Small Version:

And a version that matches what (I think) are Aquaterra’s branding colors:

So, what’s happened in SplashLand this week?

Mon

- Met with our database partners on the progress so far and potential sponsorship opportunities. We’re starting to look at the tech we’re making and considering how it can port into other sports. We’re vary grateful for the faith our database partners have shown in us up to now, it’s their data that really gives us the starting block from which to build our platform. One thing I’ve learned is if this product is going to be a success it’s not just about building relationships, but building relationships that are mutually beneficial.

- Code/Code/Code.

Tues

- Interesting consultation with a non-exec of my business partner’s other business. Much talk about future revenue streams and how we will create a sustainable future for Splashpath. Seeing as we’re 4IP funded it’s been easy to ignore some of these questions, in fact in our pitch, 4IP asked us to remove some revenue streams. “This must be focused on getting more people fit and healthy!” While this rules out certain business models, EG. A paid iPhone app, it’s pushed us to think creatively about where our revenue will be derived from. I’m happy that we have a few ideas that are a win win situation for Swimming Pool Operators and swimmers.

- Had a meeting with Swimathon after Duncan Goodhew saw (and loved) the Splashpath presentation. While we develop our Nike+ aspects of Splashpath we’re going to be working closely with Swimathon to see how we can integrate their brand and experience. As it stands they have a database of other 70,000 swimmers… A very interesting marketing opportunity!

Weds

- Finally I got a full day to code! There’s only so much of shuttling around London I can take before I start to miss the satisfaction of putting pen to eeerr.. paper. Nothing beats a good breakfast, followed by a solid days coding sitting around in my pants and watching the snow fall outside. Today was a day for scraping our database of 3800+ Sites. I get a feeling I should have done this earlier.. interesting to see our empty interface fully populated. A few changes will now need to be made! Used a great plugin for RoR called fasterCSV to scrape the data. It turns the CSV into an array of hash-like records. I’m going to work on PDF generation so we can get a nice display of the results of each scrape, including any problem records that didn’t behave so well.

Thurs

- An earlier start than usual, I was up at 7AM to visit a digital/sponsorship agency called ‘Carat’ with Tom. Carat are responsible for British Gas’ sponsorship in Swimming. British Gas are doing so many great things for swimming right now.. Great Swims, Swimfit, Free Swimming, Duel in the Pool, GB Swim Team etc. We seem to have similar ambitions and vision for how swimming is perceived & consumed on the web so hopefully the future will see us working together!

- Now.. back to coding (with a little bit of cashflow planning thrown in to spoil my fun)