Strands Blog

At a press conference today with Abel Antón in Madrid, we excitedly announced a renewed vision for Strands.com (press release here). Strands.com, a service we first launched last May, now aims to provide all of the tools that runners, cyclists, and multi-sport athletes require to log their training and careers. The base for this new service has been the Spanish-based website Mientrenamiento.com created by Vincent Gozalbo, who is now part of the Strands Team.

The latest release of Strands.com allows athletes to log workouts and routes manually through the web, or automatically from Garmin, Nike Plus, and the Strands iPhone App. In addition, users are able to see their statistics graphically, comparing themselves with the rest of the community (or just the people they follow).

(click for detailed preview)

Besides the common features of a daily training log, Strands.com allows its users to add other online services using the idea of “life-streaming.” This enables users to add videos or pictures from services like YouTube and Flickr, and share their training log through Twitter or Facebook. In total there are more than 25 services currently supported.

Although just recently launched with this renewed vision, Strands.com has already proven to be a powerful tool for anyone wanting to train smarter by logging their miles, routes, gear, and nutrition; as well as an effective tool for communicating with training partners and teammates.

This is just the beginning of a feature-packed road map for Strands.com, and we’ll be excited to make more announcements as we continue to grow. And as always we love to hear from you, so feel free to send us your feedback.

Winning gold metals in the marathon at the 1997 and 1999 World Championships in Athletics, we’re extremely excited for Abel to join the Strands Family as a Marketing Director in Spain. In addition to the gold medals in ‘97 and ‘99, in 1998 he became the first Spanish runner to win the London Marathon (view his fulls stats at iaaf.org).

His presence on the Strands Team has been generating some buzz, and you can see him interviewing alongside fellow runner and Strands Team member Fabián Roncero for a Spanish TV station while greeting fans at the Madrid Half Marathon.

If you’ve already received your invitation, you can follow his run at strands.com/abelanton. Not a member yet? Request an invite!

Photo: George Herringshaw, 28th August 1999

Strands is pleased to announce and introduce Team Strands!

With gear support from Puma Running, Strands is excited to be one of the few non-running company or shoe-store sponsors of runners on the national and world class level. Team Strands currently includes a handful of Olympians, Pan American Qualifiers, NCAA All-Americans, and USATF road-race circuit finalists. Many of them have been running for Team Strands for over a month now, and you can become a fan or catch up with their latest victories on the Team Strands Facebook group.

Team Strands is led by Matt Downin and is currently comprised of 25 runners, but there will undoubtedly be more added to the roster as we continue to grow. All of the runners have been using Strands.com to log their training and preparations for upcoming races, and you can find links to their training logs from the Team Strands page to discover how they train, and see where they’ll be competing next.

A couple of articles have already been generating some buzz about Team Strands, including an interview with Matt Downin on Track Shark.

Austria based tunesBag, an online music hub that allows its users to store, access and share songs and playlists recently launched Strands Social Recommender™ in their player. Users can now get recommendations based on the tracks they play, rate, add to a playlist as well as the recommendations they like by clicking on them.

tunesBag uses Strands™ flexible algorithm configuration to influence how the recommendations are calculated. Based on the current track that the user has selected, other tracks with the same tags and artists are given high priority resulting in similar music recommendations. Through Strands™, users can also discover new artists that share similar styles with the tunes in their music libraries. While users can get recommendations from day one, the quality of recommendations improves with continued use as the user behavior starts to influence the results. Strands Social Recommender™ builds on listening histories and evolves with the current behavior ensuring that recommendations are relevant and offer consistent content discovery. Unlike recommendation features in other music clients, Strands Social Recommender™ is able to truly personalize recommendations by filtering out tracks that are no longer relevant, ie, user gave track low ratings, already owns track or added track to favorites.