Is a Personal Training App Worth Your Money? We Tried It—Here’s What We Learned

I’m not a fitness junkie. I haven’t taken a fitness class in more than four years. I don’t run. I don’t lift weights in the gym or at home. I don’t sweat it out in hot yoga. My idea of “working out” is taking my dog for a walk longer than 20 minutes.

All of that is why I was both eager and hesitant to try the new personal training platform Livekick. Founded by entrepreneur Yarden Tadmor and fitness expert Shayna Schmidt, Livekick isn’t your typical personal training app. Instead of leading you through either a live group class or letting you select pre-recorded training sequences for streaming, the easy-to-use service connects you to one-on-one sessions with a private trainer who crafts a 30-minute workout specifically for you. So, I gave it a go—and here’s what happened.

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Financial Incentives, Daily Pay Identified as Key to Fighting Staffing Shortages

While the in-home care industry faces a number of challenges, staffing still looms largest for providers. The workforce shortage can hinder everything from business growth and compliance to patient outcomes and bottom lines — but financial incentives like daily pay could help fix the problem. 

That’s according to the results of a recent staffing survey from Home Health Care News and Axxess, who recently collaborated to examine which areas of the in-home health care business are impacted most by workforce challenges. 

The online survey polled more than 400 industry professionals and HHCN readers about how staffing shortages are affecting their business and how they’re attempting to fix the problem. 

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Qmerit named to list of 10 most promising supply chain management solution providers for 2019

Shelter, one of the three basic human requirements, is a market space that will never fade. With more and more development, buildings are becoming taller and larger in numbers. Although there is a lot of effort involved in their construction, the work doesn’t end there. Maintenance and repair of such structures is also an equally exhaustive task. It involves employing a large distributed labor force, purchasing required materials and a whole host of other operations. So how does one manage such tasks in an efficient and organized manner? Qmerit, an expert in supply chain management for properties, has the answer to this question.

Inception and Early days

Birthed out of ABM Industries, a Fortune 500 leader in facility solutions with over 120,000 employees, Qmerit already had a fair amount of exposure to the industry even before it commenced operations. The platform was originally envisioned by Tracy K. Price to help ABM bring order to the chaos of managing a liquid workforce consisting of internal, subcontract and contingent labor resources that service and maintain buildings. With the experience gained from building Mesa Energy Systems, FieldCentrix, and The Linc Group, Mr. Price set out to solve the perennial problem of sourcing qualified, skilled labor resources in the building trades.

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Would you trust this startup to plan a mystery date for you?

We did — and here’s what it was like

It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Friday and I have plans. At least, that’s what I’m told. I have no idea what those plans might be — and neither does my date.

We’re out of the loop because we’ve hired a new startup called Mystery to keep us out. The company uses technology to plan your evening without asking you to lift a finger.

Mystery was started by Shane Kovalsky and Vince Coppola, who met while working at Convoy, a billion-dollar Seattle startup that operates a marketplace for the trucking industry.

“At Convoy, we learned that very difficult operations problems can be automated, and we’re doing the same thing here,” said Coppola, Mystery’s chief technology officer. Initially, the pair wanted to plan entire weekends, but they soon scaled back those ambitions to planning evenings on the town, such as dates or small group outings.

After working under the radar for several months, Mystery just launched an app. The startup, which has six employees, also raised a seed round of $1.2 million led by Founders’ Co-op along with a cadre of other investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Frontier Venture Capital, Gramercy Ventures, Ride Ventures, Pixvana CEO Forest Key, former LinkedIn and 23andMe COO Sarah Imbach, and Crowd Cow CEO Joe Heitzeberg.

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Misty starts shipping its programmable robot to backers

When we met with Misty back at CES, the Sphero spinoff had an April timeframe for its programmable robot, Misty II. But the best laid plans, et al. The startup announced this morning that it’s started shipping the robot to its around 500 or so crowdfunding backers over the coming weeks. It’s a few months late, but that’s just kind of the life of the robotics startup. 

And as we’ve mentioned in previous posts, the company’s got a pretty long runway for its ambitious plans. They started last year with the modular, handmade Misty I. The Misty II is still more platform than product, with the intention of giving developers a place to create various robotics tasks.

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