HeiaHeia has had a relatively high share of female users ever since our launch in Christmas 2009. We think that being appealing to both genders is a key proof point of our idea: bringing positive motivation for keeping fit.

This positive motivation is driven by cheering each other and sharing positive feelings. We didn’t want to be driven e.g. by guilt or by technology, two classic drivers of fitness products and services (also many very popular services – these drivers obviously work, we just thought there would be room also for something else in the market. ; )

During the last 30 days, the gender equal trend has taken over HeiaHeia: 51% of new registered users in August were women! Big thumbs up for all of you!!! And for the men as well. ; )

Another insipiring piece of news: yesterday was our busiest day ever in terms of new user registrations, beating the old record by a clear margin.

Life’s good, HeiaHeia!

For those who want to do this manually, we now support uploading GPX files with entries (you’ll find this option under “Show more” in relevant activities). One practical tip: if you leave the distance and duration fields empty, they’ll be auto-filled with data from the GPX file.

Comments or feedback on this? Please let us know!

After numerous phone calls, faxes, and emails from the White House and the Buckingham Palace, we’ve finally come about to support the “imperial system” or the “American system”, whichever term you prefer. You can now choose to use the metric system (km-m-kg-Celsius) or the American system (mi-ft-lb-Fahrenheit) in your HeiaHeia entries! You can switch the system used from the settings.

If you switch your units, all your old entries will be shown according to your current setting.

You’ll see your friends’ entries in the system their where made in (to give some cross-cultural flavour), but all the summaries etc will be made based on your own measurement units.

Anything missing or not working the way you’d want to? Please let us know!

This news piece is einfach super - we now support German, the most widely spoken first language in the European Union!

If you spot any problems with the translation: typos, funny expressions, grammar mistakes – please let us know!

Big thanks to Päivi for helping us out with this! We’re working on a couple other new languages (e.g. Italian, Estonian, Norwegian) – if you’d like to help us with some other language, don’t hesitate to contact us.

PS. All kinds of cool new stuff is in the making, please keep on sending requests for new features & comments on old ones.

Addressing the first issue, here’s how it works: we’re calculating a score on your general activity in HeiaHeia with our secret formula (TM). Sources close to the matter say that at least your exercises logged, number of friends, profile completeness, cheering and commenting activity, as well as usage of more or less all other features in the service, have an effect on the score. Each level you earn gives you more special icons to cheer your friends with.

To address the other points, we’ve done a couple of changes to the system: We dropped the levels a bit. As a result, the creme de la creme will reach a completely new level: diamond! Also, as we say in Finland, “saavutetuista eduista ei tingitä”, i.e. you get to keep the levels you reach, we’re not dropping you back anymore.

New sport types added today:

Freediving, Streetball, Roller derby, Springboard diving, Infrared sauna, Wheelchair curling, Simplefit, Swamp walking, Swamp running, Swamp football, Car washing, Suburi, Water skiing, Trikke, Mölkky, MBT-walking, Kundalini yoga, Line dancing, Belly dancing, Back exercises, Rug washing, Rescue dog activity, Spear fishing, Bailing hay, Baby swimming, Croquet, Bodyharmony, Moonwalk, Parallel bars, Bandy, Painting, Synchronized skating, SHAPE, Wife carrying,  Flexi-bar, Deep stretching, Ab wheel, P90X, Diabolo, Motorcycle trials, Open water swimming, Trail running,  Aviation, Stable work, Touch rugby, Kung fu, Canine freestyle, Skike, Irish dancing, Afro, Motocross, Canyoning, Miniature golf, Oriental dance. Huh! ; )

If there are issues with terminology or translations in any of the sports, please let us know!

A special request to our users: as you may have noticed, our sport icon creation is sometimes lagging a bit behind and we use our generic H! icon for some sports. If you have the required Photoshopping skills, we can share our sport icon PSD templates with you, so that you can create an icon for your favourite sport (either creating a new icon or to fix an existing one).

The service outage was caused by a hardware failure at our hosting provider (the company from whom we rent virtual servers to run HeiaHeia.com). It took about three hours for them to get the system up and running again, after which the rest of the evening was spent by us repairing the database that got corrupted due to the hardware failure. This was a rather typical case: in the real world, sometimes something like this just happens. For this kind of occasions, we keep a double set of back-ups in different locations, but in this case we didn’t have to resort to them.

Thank you for your patience with the situation & please let us know, if there’s something weird in HeiaHeia after the crash!

You can now define the privacy settings separately for maps attached to training log entries. Maps can be shared with 1) nobody 2) your HeiaHeia friends 3) all HeiaHeia members 4) 1-3 and external services like Facebook.

If a map is shared on Facebook, it’ll look like the attached screenshot with a couple of cool old-timers discussing their activities.

Based on popular demand, we’ll also be adding “upload GPX” among “Show all options” in new entry creation. This one is not yet done, but coming soon.

A couple of fun media stories from this week:

YleX, a nation-wide youth focused radio station from Finland, covered us in their Surffilauta show. The story is in Finnish, but there’s a hilarious Heia-Heia song (at 2:34) which translates universally. ; )

Eesti Päevaleht, a leading newspaper in Estonia, covered us in a story referring to Digitark, a technology blog. Digitark’s story on HeiaHeia is very thorough and positive! (Tip: Google Translate will help.)