Now comes the dog fitness tracker Whistle. The  $99.95 device promises to keep tabs on how Fido spends his time, developing trends and compiling reports that give an inside look into how he is behaving compared to other dogs (or even himself a year ago).

But the most significant piece of Whistle’s monitoring is its communication with veteranarians. Essentially, you can bring your Whistle to the doggie doctor and she can tell you whether or not Fido’s behavior is consistent with a host of data provided by Whistle’s cloud system. The idea is that dips in sleep patterns or playtime could lead to an early diagnosis of a health problem.

It’s a notion that obviously resonates deeply with pet owners, particularly those who have had a dog or cat die from an undiagnosed health condition. But the likelihood of getting this early dianosis thanks to Whistle seem pretty slim. Frankly, it’s a reach to say that a fitness tracker can be used as an early detection device — for dogs or for humans. Sure, when there are severe dips in energy and stamina, a fitness tracker can present a stark picture of that, but it’s more about noticing subtle changes in day-to-day activity than it is about treating illnesses.

There’s no medical evidence to suggest that a fitness tracker improves health or quality of life, much less provides an early warning system for illness. An article earlier this year by Wired said it best: these devices are behavior tools, but not much else.

So where does that leave Whistle, and the day-to-day health of your dog? It’s better to view fitness trackers of any kind as devices geared towards accountability, rather than cures for obesity or other health problems. And you may not be so enamored when your tracker tips you off that your dog just needs more exercise.

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Nike said the 10 startups, which were culled from “thousands,” kicked off the program today in Portland, Ore. and will focus on building their products on top of the Nike+ and NikeFuel platforms.

During the program, the startups will be mentored by health and tech leaders, including Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of digital sport; David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars; Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare; and quantified-self expert Tim Ferriss. In addition to the mentorship, support and work space, they’ll receive $20,000 each.

Given the rising interest in quantified self-type fitness and health tracking devices and apps (like Nike’s own Fuel band), it’s little wonder that the company spots an opportunity in supporting health startups and encouraging new ideas and applications of its platform.

“We are excited by the response to the Nike+ Accelerator and the high caliber of applicants to the program,” Olander said in a statement. “We recently celebrated the first year of NikeFuel and the Accelerator program is a natural next step to broaden and enhance the Nike+ ecosystem – allowing Nike to offer richer experiences to athletes of all levels.”

Here are the 10 companies:

• FitDeck: Digital decks of exercise playing cards that deliver ever-changing workouts for fitness and sports.
• GoRecess: Helps users find, book and review fitness activities.
• Chroma Games: An indie game studio that creates virtual worlds tied to real-world activity.
• CoachBase: Provides a digital sports coaching platform.
• GoFitCause: Leverages fitness data as a means of raising money for charities.
• HighFive: Ad network for health and fitness apps that helps people achieve their goals by rewarding them along their journey.
• Sprout At Work: Provider of corporate wellness solutions leveraging social and gamification tools to inspire employees and empower employers.
• GeoPalz: An interactive gaming and rewards platform for kids and families.
• Incomparable Things: Creates activity-driven fantasy sports leagues.
• RecBob: Offers a platform that makes recreational sports easy by organizing play.

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Soon after seeing the success of CodeYear, Derek Flanzraich, founder and CEO of the New York-based health startup, said he started buying up domains for HealthYear.

“I was really stuck by the power of New Year’s resolutions and the power of people publicly committing to them,” he said. “[CodeYear] really hit the trend that people are increasingly interested in learning to code… I remember thinking there’s this exponentially growing trend of people committing to their health and building it into their lives more and perhaps we could try for something for health and wellness.”

The program — like CodeYear — is pretty simple: people sign up for one of six different tracks related to eating better, sleeping more, stressing less, running a 5k, boozing less or getting stronger. Each day, they receive a newsletter with general health tips and, each week, they get a message with advice and tips for sticking to their specific resolution.

This time of year, news sites, fitness magazines and morning shows are all chock full of advice for sticking to health-related New Year’s resolutions. But Flanzraich said Greatist’s tips and HealthYear reflect the startup’s overall identity and mission to be a trusted, authoritative site about health and fitness for a new generation of “young, savvy and social” consumers.

Greatist attempts to blend the social media know-how of Buzzfeed with the fun, approachable tone of fitnesss magazines with the scientific integrity of higher-brow health journals. Its in-house editorial team makes sure that all content — even articles about “60 healthier drinks for boozing” or the best foods for curing a hangover — is backed by studies from PubMed as well as vetted by Greatist’s own network of health and fitness experts.

So far, its approach seems to be working. In the last year, the site, which launched in 2011, has grown its traffic from under one million unique visitors to just under two million visitors. It also closed a seed round of funding (it declined to share details on the amount or the names of investors) and was accepted to the New York-based Startup Health Academy. Flanzraich also said the team has grown from five people to 14.

When Codecademy launched CodeYear, learning to code was just a nascent trend, while aspiring to improve one’s health — especially at the start of the year — is so common it can hardly be called a trend. And, so far, HealthYear’s registrants number in the hundreds, while CodeYear’s attracted hundreds of thousands in its first week. But Flanzraich is right that there is groundswell of new interest in health and fitness — at least in using new online resources, apps and digital devices that give people the ability to be more proactive about their health on a day-to-day basis. HealthYear may not help kick off a new movement in the way that CodeYear did, but it could tap into a growing surge of interest in digital health tools — from those that track and monitor fitness to those that keep people informed.

It’s also worth noting that while Codecademy attracted considerable attention at its launch, the company never disclosed how many people stuck with the program. Flanzraich said that even if HealthYear participants don’t follow every piece of advice or lose momentum after resolution season passes, he hopes it can continue to bring more awareness about the healthy steps they can take.

“We’re trying to give people nudges to stick to their resolutions,” he said. “It helps remind you that you’re in charge and that you can choose [to do] one healthier thing at a time.”

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The result is a sleeker user experience and an upgraded platform that will mean even faster updates in the future. Here’s a look at some of the improvements in 3.0, which is coming to Android soon.

The overall look, which de-emphasizes bold colors, has been cleaned up to create a more consistent UI that is easier to read and navigate. Users can now share in-app photos to Facebook and Twitter more easily at any time during their workout. Runkeeper photos are integrated with Twitter’s card system. It’s all part of an improved sharing and end-of-workout experience on Runkeeper.

Runkeeper Elite users ($19.99 per year) can also enable live activity tracking so friends can follow a user’s progress. Signing up for Elite is also now enabled right from the app. The new Runkeeper also does a better job incorporating improvements over the last year such as the ability to track progress against set goals and compete with friends in the app.

Under the hood, Runkeeper touched up every page in the app as part of an overhaul of the codebase. By refactoring the code, Runkeeper can boost the performance of the app and push out new releases much faster.

RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs said the redesign touched almost every employee at the company, which has grown to 38 people, up from 12 a year ago. He said hitting this release on time gives the company confidence it can maintain an aggressive timeline into 2013, as it plans a lot more improvements.

The company, one of the first GPS tracking fitness apps for the iPhone, continues to grind away, thanks in part to $10 million raised a little over a year ago. It’s now up to 14 million users, with half a million new users jumping onboard each month. With the New Year upon us, the update to 3.0 should get a lot of new sign-ups from resolution-setting users.

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A Chicago-based startup called MiGym, however, wants to weave a tighter-knit relationship between the gym and its customers, benefiting active exercisers and the less motivated alike. It’s developed a smartphone app platform used by health clubs across the country. The app doesn’t just create a smartphone presence for a gym, it seeks to engage its members more actively. It uses social networking to connect members with similar sporting interests and exercise regimes, and it allows them to view, book and manage classes.

George Monical, who heads up the MiGym division of Chicago app development shop Solstice Mobile, said he has even bigger ambitions for the app. Soon MiGym’s dozens of national and regional health club chains will be able to start tracking workout data. MiGym is tapping into APIs offered by gym equipment makers like Life Fitness and exploring ways of quantifying the health benefits of more traditional workouts from aerobics classes to free weights — tying them all into a single unified workout tracking tool.

It’s a neat idea, but not one that’s very useful if all of that info is trapped inside your gym app — it would become just one more disparate repository of health information. But Monical said MiGym believes strongly in the concept of the quantified self (subscription required), and it aims to incorporate its apps into the overall fitness data ecosystem, Monical said. In addition to working with Life Fitness, its tapping into the APIs of Fitbit (see disclosure) and Runkeeper as well as any source of open health data it can get its hands on.

The idea is that MiGym will accept information for its own app and share it with other apps, Monical said. So if you take a three-mile run in the park tracked by an external app or device, those steps run and calories will be included in MiGym’s meters. Conversely, any data taken from the gym, whether it’s scooped directly out of an elliptical trainer or approximated from a kickboxing class, could be funneled into any outside fitness portal, Monical said.

Eventually, MiGym wants to explore direct partnerships with the healthcare industry, transmitting information to your doctor or — with permission — to your insurer. If State Farm and Allstate can track use machine-to-machine technology to track your real driving behavior and consequently reward safe drivers with lower premiums, Monical asked, why can’t health insurers do the same thing, granting lower rates to people who keep in shape?

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Kzenon

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According to Monday’s announcement, the program targets companies that use Nike+ technology, including the FuelBand and Nike+ Running app, to create products and services for athletes to get help in training, coaching, and data visualization.

The accelerator, which will be based near Nike’s Portland, Ore. headquarters, will accept ten companies to participate  and be mentored by Nike executives and other tech industry leaders.  Mentors include Stefan Olander, Nike’s Vice President of Digital Sport; David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars; Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare; and quantified-self expert Tim Ferriss.

TechStars, which was founded in 2007 and says 120 of its companies have raised north of $200 million in venture capital to date, operates out of five cities. The new Nike accelerator and the Microsoft Accelerator are the only two programs that it powers outside of its  traditional accelerators.

Given the momentum behind quantified self fitness and health tracking gadgets and software, Nike’s interest in supporting sports and fitness innovation makes plenty of sense. In addition to Nike’s technology, companies like Fitbit, Striiv and Jawbone help people monitor their physical activity. By supporting startups in digital health and fitness, Nike can stay ahead of the curve and encourage more fitness-focused companies to use Nike technologies.

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference last month, Nike’s Olander spoke about the opportunity in sports data. Check out a video of him speaking below.

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Because of that, as a category, aspirational apps and services that depend on real-world results have a significant built-in barrier to scaling that other apps rarely deal with: They’re subject to the frailties of human nature. Confronting users with the intent of getting them to change is a tough low-odds endeavor, and the early drop-off period poses a significant challenge to those web services and apps that are trying to make us thinner, fitter, or smarter.

Simply put, it’s tough for your company to scale when users uniformly drop off after the first few weeks.

There’s an understandable motivation then to look for ways to keep users coming back and engaged. The issue is that otherwise smart methods can become distracting gimmicks if not employed appropriately. Here are a few trendy options developers often reflexively turn to when creating apps that can easily become a liability if they don’t make sense to your service.

Make everything a game

There’s no arguing that gamification has been employed to spectacular effect. At the same time it’s extremely hard to do well. A common complaint about Foursquare, clearly one of the foremost examples of well-crafted gamification, is that users quickly suffer from “check-in fatigue.“ Once the initial glory wears off, most people get bored of staying on top of the leaderboard.

Perhaps more treacherous is when game-play features are strapped onto an app without proper context. Such applications routinely fail to get traction from the start. For example, Google News introduced “Google News badges” back in July 2011 to little fanfare. (I have yet to see anyone  show a level badge for how many news articles they’ve read; not surprisingly the company mercifully put the feature to bed in September)

The bottom line: gamification can help if it makes sense to the app and is designed within a context. As a gimmick it’s never enough to keep a user base engaged over the long haul.

Drag friends into it

In the real world, aspirational businesses often use a form of peer pressure to compel people to follow through on their mission:  personal trainers push us to keep our commitment to get to the gym, and Weight Watchers uses positive peer pressure to keep its members coming back and paying dues week after week. With apps though it’s a far different story. No matter how entertaining or lifelike, virtual avatars simply don’t have the same psychological impact as interacting with people in the real world. So while skipping out on a real person may trigger feelings of guilt, that avatar trainer in a PlayStation or Wii fitness game? Not so much.

The other approach, linking activities and milestones to the social graph, is a similar and obvious temptation for aspirational apps. The inevitable pitfall though is that most people tend to happily share the accomplishments they’re proud of (I ran an 8K!), but inevitably and understandably bury their disappointments (I skipped a scheduled run to eat a cake). The challenge for aspirational apps then is to replicate the discipline or positive reinforcement that’s created from real world interactions with trainers, professors, and peers, and not come off like a tattletale or nag.

Go quantified

While the  Quantified Self movement – succinctly described in ‘The Economist’ as “an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies, hackers and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems” – isn’t new itself, new technologies are rapidly transforming what is possible with all that personal data.

Yet while data collection is becoming a more seamless part of our daily routine, quantified self applications tend to appeal to only niche, narrow markets (i.e., an early adopter fitness freak with sleep apnea). In order to scale on any appreciable level then, aspirational apps are compelled to target a broader audience base.

Require big cash, up front

In the offline world, consumers are often willing to pay a high price for aspirational products in a weak moment. You might call it the Rosetta Stone model, for the $500 language course we imagine will soon have us chatting up an Italian supermodel. Or maybe the fitness center model, as they annually convert droves of News Years hangover cases into pricey yearly memberships. In both cases, consumers feel great at the moment of purchase; however, only a minority of customers will actually use the product after the initial excitement and motivation wear off.

Similarly with an aspirational product, it’s possible this strategy could make for a quick initial hit (though at high price points there are low odds). But it’s unlikely you’ll maintain a happy, engaged customer base after that, which is crucial. More to the point, we’ve seen that people are hesitant to pay a lot of money upfront for most online services anyway, preferring to go with pay-as-you-go, no-commitment subscription models.

Humans are complex. We’re a convoluted mix of big plans and inertia. For self-improvement and learning apps to successfully scale, they need to find a way to keep their users happy, motivated,and committed over a long period. While there’s a large market awaiting apps and services that can overcome these challenges and can tap into age-old human needs for peer recognition, achievement, and self-improvement, designers need to consider the very real limitations of the methods they choose to keep users motivated.

Boris Wertz is the founder of Version One Ventures. Follow him on Twitter @bwertz.

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Olander told Wired senior editor Mike Senese that Nike’s sports technology — which allows people to track their runs, times and physical activity, among other things — has been successful because “people want credit. That’s one of the ultimate drivers for us as humans” and it’s “propelled everything we do at Nike+.” Forty percent of the runs completed through Nike’s GPS running app are shared on either Facebook or Path.

Getting that credit is another reason why Nike chose the wrist for its FuelBand, whereas competing technology Fitbit can be clipped to clothing or put in a pocket. Clip-on or pocket devices can get lost or can fall off too easily, Olander said. Plus, everyone can see your wrist and “you want to have this…as a symbol of your goal.”

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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Mueller’s adventure might be extreme, but for anyone who has spent enough time in Silicon Valley — and it doesn’t take long — it probably isn’t shockingly extreme. Everywhere you turn, someone is training for a marathon or planning a vacation to climb a mountain. Even Dennis Crowley (a New Yorker, I know) just finished a triathlon. They’re certainly not uncommon activities within VMware, Mueller told me, where he also works with someone who won an Olympic medal in tae kwon do.

Physical fitness is one thing (bicycling to work is commonplace, and I recently visited one startup with a weight bench, chin-up bar and tractor tire (for flipping) outside its office), but running 100 miles in an ultra-marathon like Nicira Founder and CEO Martin Casado does is something else altogether. Then there are the mad scientists, guys like self-proclaimed human guinea pig Tim Ferriss and quantified-self devotee Dave Asprey.

So what gives? Why are Silicon Valley’s best and brightest consumed by pushing themselves to their physical limits?

Average isn’t good enough

According to sports psychologist Dr. JoAnn Dahlkoetter, who works regularly with Olympic athletes (and with a technologist, go figure, preparing to complete a deca-Ironman event), technologists are drawn to such arduous physical feats because they aren’t really used to doing average things. Success in the technology world means doing something no one has ever done before, and that mindset carries over into athletic undertakings. “It’s satisfying to see how far you can push yourself,” she said.

She appears to be onto something. PayPal Co-founder, man about Silicon Valley and avid cyclist Max Levchin told Men’s Health last year, “My natural behavior is to push myself over the limit every day. … [If] I wasn’t given this direction [from a coach], I’ll do this until I fall over on the bike, dead.”

Triathletes completing the swim portion.

For successful individuals, Dahlkoetter says there’s also a “constellation of traits” that are necessary in both business and endurance sports. These include having true enthusiam for what you do, or a “fire inside,” and the ability to break a grand dream into the individual steps necessary to make it happen.

Discussing his ultra-marathons with my colleague Stacey Higginbotham, for example, Nicira’s Casado said he knows how to pace himself, even run slower than he’d like, if it means he’ll finish the race. Levchin speaks about his obsession with data, monitoring everything every aspect of his rides and his own body to ensure he’s always improving.

There’s also internal motivation and self-direction, Dahlkoetter says, and the courage to keep working even when you’re tired and to see mistakes as learning opportunities. “It takes a certain kind of mindset,” she said, “where you feel like you have to be able to push yourself through the pain and work through all the adversity that happens.”

For Mueller, it’s about gratification

OK, so these things might be true for the CEOs — the guys who join Levchin on the Men’s Health list of “fiscally fit” men, or serial risk-taker Richard Branson. They might also explain why, according to Mueller, many companies in Silicon Valley are willing to give sabbaticals (VMware gave him two months) to employees who want to undertake such adventures as climbing a mountain or rowing across the sea. They like to foster these traits.

But Mueller isn’t a CEO of a large company, and he hasn’t sold anything to Google for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet he has swam the English Channel and climbed the highest mountain on each of the seven continents (the 120th person to do). He summited Mt. Everest without a guide. (Zoom out on his adventure map below to see all he’s done.)

He thinks does these things in part because of the personal gratification they bring. When you’re working in large teams on complex problems, everything takes a long time and there’s not necessarily a defined beginning or end. And no matter how much code you contribute to a project, you know it’s going to be checked and double-checked by several people.

Mueller (far right) and his team.

It’s cool work, Mueller said, but “you have none of the personal gratification you get from climbing a mountain.” Aside from being the first team to row the Arctic Ocean, he said the gratification on this trip will be taking plankton samples from the freshly melted ocean so the University of Alaska, Fairbanks can find out where whales are and help protect them from Shell’s new oil-drilling efforts in the area. (This Los Angeles Times article on the adventure goes into detail on the science.)

The scientific aspect is Mueller’s way of actually giving back to a cause that he feels it’s easy to just pay lip service. Like most people, he recycles but still drives a gas-powered car to work most days. “It seems kind of two-headed to say you shouldn’t drill up there and then drive a gas-powered car,” he said.

Then again, as Dahlkoetter suggests, maybe it’s just about doing something very few people, or no one, has done before. Everybody in the Valley wants to be part of a first, “that’s where the spoils are,” Mueller said. “Not everyone is lucky enough to do it in business. … That’s what the Arctic row is about.”

Feature and Mueller images courtesy of Arctic Row; triathlon image courtesy of Walter Baxter.

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RunKeeper is announcing with Pebble that when the watch become available this fall, it will have RunKeeper integrated into the watch. That means users will be able to start their RunKeeper runs, monitor their progress and stop their activity, all from their watch with their smartphone tucked away. The phone will talk to the Pebble watch over Bluetooth.

Jason Jacobs, RunKeeper’s CEO told me that Pebble’s founder Eric Migicovsky first reached out to him four to five months ago before the watch raised close to $8 million on Kickstarter. The two stayed in touch and after the success of the Kickstarter campaign, they talked about how RunKeeper could get early access to Pebble’s SDK. Now, RunKeeper will work with the Pebble team to get the app integrated for launch, which is expected in September.

While RunKeeper has integrated with more than 65 devices and apps, Pebble is its first smartwatch partnership. Jacobs said RunKeeper users have been pushing for the integration in the company’s support forum.

“This is the first smartwatch that harnesses the full power of the smartphone but in a form factor that’s much more conducive to inactivity training,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs said he’s interested to see how the first integration works and he’s open to going even further potentially building a standalone app for Pebble that doesn’t rely on a smartphone. That would likely take improved hardware from Pebble because the watch currently doesn’t include GPS.

The RunKeeper integration validates Migicovsky’s plans to turn Pebble into an app platform. And getting a well known name like RunKeeper should attract more developers interested in the opportunity.

Migicovsky told me a couple a weeks ago that the company is working on Pebble’s open SDK and expects to have it out by August, a month before launch. He said at the time that there were already 32,000 visitors to the developer forum in its first week. With all the extra funding coming through Kickstarter, he said there was an opportunity to make the SDK even more robust, which could in turn attract even more developers. With more than 53,000 watches pre-sold through the Kickstarter campaign, it’s likely other developers will also want to get in on the action.

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