MacDirectory Magazine

CLOSER LOOK SKIMBLE > HELPING YOU STAY MORE HEAL THY AND FIT WORDS BY CLAUDIA PAREDES Computer Engineering with minors in Management Sciences and International Studies, co-operative education, from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Keeping track of sports activities is hard, especially for the multi-sport athlete. Where did you bike and how fast did you go? Which yoga pose or skateboarding trick did you nail? At what height and how fast did you skydive? It’s always rewarding to know what you accomplished for the day, but how would you remember and share it? A bit of guesswork is okay, but if you are putting the time and dedication all athletes put in, then you need exact precision. This is why Skimble is revolutionizing every athletes’ day! This young company started in San Francisco with a team of two. Today the Skimble application is being used all around the globe. With the mission to inspire active lifestyles, Skimble provides a location-based, social iPhone and web application to help you track and share your activities, near and far. With Skimble, you can connect with other active people, follow your friends’ active updates and share your own achievements on Skimble, Twitter and Facebook. Tracking and sharing all your sports activities has never been easier. You can even compete on social leader boards and win prizes just for being active. On June 1, Skimble released a new version of its iPhone application. The new Skimble has a new look and feel with more than 45 activities to track, including the ability browse by activity or location on an interactive map or search for supported sports. To further track precision, it now offers a countdown timer for path sports and have deep tracking functionality for team and racquet sports. Maria Ly and Gabriel Vanrenern are the Skimble co-founders. Both having active lives, they decided to create a free application, which could be the social ‘super sports watch’ for everyone. Both unconventional athletes, they needed something to keep track of their adventures and monitor their athletic progress. Maria doesn’t practice your average sports, she has trekked to and practiced yoga at K2 base camp in Pakistan. With just over three years of climbing experience, she’s climbed up to 5.13a around the world and recently ranked second overall in both the Touchstone Climbing Sport & Bouldering Competition Series. Before Skimble, Maria worked on product and marketing at Google, Flurry, and Cypress. She even was a gymnast on the Canadian national all-stars power cheer team. Maria holds a BASci in Gabe, co-founder of Skimble, is also an active risk taker. He has rock climbed 2,400 feet in a day and sometimes sleeps on the side of cliffs. Gabe has brought his strong technology background to Skimble to make it what it is today. He has received awards including the Top 100 Products by PC World and the Sun Microsystems Duke’s Choice Award. Gabe is also a published author for his research in computer security and has multiple patents pending. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. Now, no company could begin without a good creative mind, which is where Sophia Brueckner comes in. Sophia designs the sports icons and is the “go-to-girl for visual design feedback.” She worked on software engineering at Google. She also surfs, practices yoga and climbing. She holds a Sc.B. Applied Mathematics & Computer Science from Brown University and is expected to obtain her MFA Digital Media at R.I.S.D. by 2012. In addition, Skimble has a very active community that helped them translate the Skimble iPhone application into French and Spanish. Now you can be part of this community too. Skimble has various free events around the San Francisco Bay Area such as rock climbing competitions or biking events that are open to the public. “We want to help inspire people to be active, stay healthy and have fun. So when you’re out there being active, make sure you skimble it!” – Team Skimble MacDirectory 115

• Cover