New Features in the Production Release
Xert Communities
By providing day-to-day feedback on your fitness and progression, sharing your successes and information with others provides you the opportunity to recognize the achievements of others and for you to get recognized for the hard work you’re doing to improve your fitness.
Many of us train and race with our friends and we benefit by sharing and comparing our ups and downs with each other. With Xert Communities, you can share your information with riding partners, teammates and coaches in a variety of ways. Xert supports four different types of communities:
Clubs are communities of athletes that share ranking information about themselves with other athletes to see how they compare against others in the club. Like a Cycling Club, Xert Clubs often are made up of other athletes that you ride, race and/or train with.
Teams are communities of athletes that share ranking as well as fitness signature information with other team members. Like a Cycling Team, Xert Teams often are made up of other team members where each individual team member’s particular strengths and weaknesses are considered in team tactics and strategies. These tactics and strategies can be discussed privately in the Team discussion area.
Squads are communities of athletes that share their activity data with one another. This activity data sharing allows members to assess the performance and effectiveness of the training being done by other members of the Squad. Xert Squads provide an excellent way for groups of friends and riding partners to coach each other, offer comments on activities and praise one another for the hard work that others in the squad are doing.
Coaches enable coaches to view and update the activity, fitness signature and progression information of athletes on their roster.
All communities include discussion and commenting features.
Improved Mobile and Tablet Performance
We’re seeing a continuous increase in users accessing our web app, Xert Online, from a mobile and tablet device. (Perhaps it’s from looking for a fitness breakthrough at the coffee shop after a ride?). We’ve made some major improvements to the performance of Xert Online on mobile phones and tablets. You can login to your Xert account, easily sync your latest activities from Strava or TrainingPeaks, check for fitness breakthroughs and even open an MPA Analysis chart with tap-and-hold selection.
New Features in Development
Advanced Carb and Fat Analytics
We’re working on a new and improved carbohydrate and fat utilization model. This model will be able to better predict MPA over longer duration activities and provide you with a determination of how effectively you are using fat and carbs for energy during your rides. This will also be accompanied by real-time apps for both Garmin, Android and iOS so that you can closely monitor your food intake and the impact of reducing carb stores has on your ability to perform.
Automated Training Programs
Applying the principles found in our unique and highly-specialized workouts towards a flexible training plan that adapts to your time availability, fitness goals and motivation – the concept of a robo-coach – is an area of development for us. This is to address the question: “What do I do to improve my fitness?”. To properly advise athletes on what to do, we need to consider all these decision points to plan workouts and anticipated progress.
Xert for iOS
We continue to receive many requests to have Xert Mobile available for iPhone and iPad devices. With the proliferation of power meters that support Bluetooth Low Energy, using your iPhone or iPad with your power meter is becoming easier. iOS is platform we are looking to deliver Xert Mobile features as well as the other new features currently on our roadmap.
The Future
Multi-Language Support and Internationalization
We’ve been fortunate to see many new registrations coming from all ends of the earth, as Xert users share their experiences in their local languages with other members. We’ve seen waves of new users coming from Spain, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Singapore, Estonia, Malaysia, China, and Japan.
Translating Xert to other languages is important as it enables people to experience and use our software in a language that is more familiar to them.
Machine Learning
What causes fitness breakthroughs? What amounts and types of stress, strain and rest do you need prior to achieving a new level of fitness?
We plan to answer this question.
Heart-Rate Analytics
As many of you know, our heritage stems from the analysis of heart-rate data, but analysis of heart-rate data is very, very hard. We know this because we have the models and they aren’t that simple.
Part of the issues with analyzing heart-rate data is the identification of each individual’s unique heart rate response characteristics. Automating this identification is needed in order to map heart-rate data to Xert’s fitness determinants in a scalable fashion. It is this automation that will leverage much of the knowledge and software infrastructure we have developed.
Providing users with deep analysis of heart-rate data will bring the value of Xert to a much broader audience. We feel we’re ready to tackle this challenge and will look to make this a top priority in the near future.
Expanding Xert to Other Activities and Sports
Bringing everything together – MPA, Fitness Signatures, Carb/Fat utilization, HR data analysis and Machine Learning – will enable Xert to become a platform with unimaginable applications in different activities such as running and swimming for triathletes but also other sports such as football and basketball, with even occupational and clinical applications. There is an extremely bright future for Xert and we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.
Xert Premium Subscriptions – Securing the Future
Our company is fortunate to have an extraordinary team. All of us share the same vision of how our software should service our customers with simplicity overtop a robust, future-proof technological base. To do this we, leverage other services providers and commercial software components to help bring new capabilities with both broader features and better reliability.
As one can imagine, developing and testing new software – for the web, mobile and other platforms, acquiring online storage, messaging and management services, and supporting customers requires us to purchase supporting commercial software, compensate our employees’ hard work and acquire the services of online service providers. This requires money and up until now, we’ve been funding the business to cover these costs directly as a startup.
We wish to continue to invest and develop more and more features and make Xert a platform for everyone. For this reason, we have introduced Xert Premium Subscriptions.
With Xert Premium Subscriptions, we’re looking for your support by asking an affordable monthly fee. With your financial support, we can continue to invest and improve the platform, add new capabilities and continue to fulfill the vision we have for our software.
Starting today, you will receive an Xert Premium Subscription for 30 days at no cost. At the end of 30 days, your account will become an Xert Free account.
You can subscribe to Xert Premium at any time by clicking on the Subscribe to Xert Premium link upon logging in or you can click on the link below to take you directly to this page:
https://www.xertonline.com/account/subscribe
We greatly appreciate your support and wish to thank everyone for helping make Xert a tremendous success. |
