MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history.

It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter.

The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality.

What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example..

Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard.

There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc.

Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads.

It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time.

With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations, big funding, and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure.

But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava, MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition.

MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital.

With its a deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings.

Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here.

Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users
who sign up here. iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com. Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer.

What do you think?

Read more : 9M Users Strong, MapMyFitness Brings Check-Ins, Advanced Google Maps Integration To Fitness Tracking

It has been a wild week so far at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City. Rainstorms and traffic jams couldn’t stop nearly 2000 people from making it to our big weekend hackathon, and our last two days of interviews, panels and startup presentations over at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen.

Tomorrow is going to be the grand finale.

Following an announcement from the White House’s top tech officers, interviews with Brooklyn hardware makers, the appearance of an entrepreneurial movie star, and much more, we’re going to be hearing from the top final six companies from our Startup Battlefield.

The winner will be selected tomorrow afternoon by our panel of all-star tech judges: top New York entrepreneur Chris Dixon, Google executive Marissa Mayer, leading New York investor Fred Wilson, Kleiner Perkins partner Chi-Hua Chien, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, plus TechCrunch founder and CrunchFund investor Michael Arrington.

Here are the six finalists appearing on stage tomorrow, in alphabetical order:

Ark, the people search engine that was so popular with users on Monday that the carefully-prepared company got taken offline.

Babelverse, the human-powered translation service that won its way out of one hundred companies in Startup Alley.

Gtar, the iPhone-guitar hardware startup that has blown past its goal on Kickstarter after launching on stage.

Open Garden, the mobile app that lets you tether internet connections across multiple devices.

Sunglass.io, which is bringing 3D modeling to the browser for designers everywhere.

Uberconference, the cross-platform service that makes conference calling easy for everyone.

See you all tomorrow!

Read more : The Final Six Disrupt NYC Startups: Ark, Babelverse, Gtar, Open Garden, Sunglass, Uberconference

We’ve learned that Airtime, the video startup founded by famed Napster alums Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, has allegedly made its first acquisition — before truly exiting stealth mode. The target? Erly, the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup aimed at letting people create social experiences around their experiences.

Update: We’ve confirmed the acquisition with a source at Airtime, and have been told that it will be announced along with a new $25 million round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins, including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures. As part of the new round of funding, Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon will be joining Airtime’s board of directors as part of the new funding.

Update 2: The news has now been added to Airtime’s company blog, but at press time their entry does not include details on the size of the funding round.

It seems like an interesting fit at first, but as soon as you scratch the surface it all comes together. Erly’s founder and CEO is Eric Feng, a super sharp young industry vet who previously served as the Chief Technical Officer at Hulu. He alone clearly brings a lot of video and managerial experience to the table. What he’s built at Erly is still very early stage (ha, ha) but from what we’ve seen it’s a solid product. LinkedIn says that the company has around 10 employees.

Airtime, which is set to launch on June 5th, has taken its time to work on building something big. It would make sense that they’d want to bring together a rockstar team to make the most out of that crucial post-launch period. Of course Fanning, and especially Parker, have attained rock star status of sorts in this industry and beyond — which comes with a very unique set of expectations. Bringing on the likes of Feng and his team is a savvy move, for sure.

Read more : Airtime Acquires Former Hulu CTO’s Startup Erly, Raises $25M Series B Funding

If you’re someone who thinks gamification is just a fad, you may want to look away now.

To be clear, Bunchball isn’t just jumping on the latest buzzword. The company was founded to deliver gamification tools all the way back in 2005 — founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia has told me that he probably came to the market too early, and has had to keep the company alive while the industry caught up. Now it’s focused largely on enterprise customers who want to use game mechanics to turn employees into better workers.

There are, however, other applications. For example: Bunchball just announced that it’s partnering with financial literacy site Wall Street Survivor. The site already offers a virtual stock market simulator, but apparently that wasn’t game enough, so it has been redesigned using Bunchball’s Nitro platform.

On the new version of Wall Street Survivor (viewable on the beta site), there are now “missions” where users learn about stock market concepts. They receive badges for completing those missions and making trades. They can also receive rewards if they have some of the best returns among the virtual portfolios in the Wall Street Survivor database.

The change is being touted as a way for the site to appeal specifically to millennial, who may be intimidated by investing and the financial world, but will enjoy the gamified approach.

Read more : Wall Street Survivor Gamifies Financial Education With Help From Bunchball

The Zend Framework community has just pushed out it’s fourth beta release!

New features include:

• The ServiceManager, a performant, easy-to-use way to create and configure the various objects you use in your application, particularly your controllers and their dependencies. While it largely replaces ZendDi within the MVC, it also allows using DI as an abstract (fallback) factory.
• The InputFilter, a new, object-oriented component for filtering and validating input, whether from the web, a model, or a web service.
• A newly rewritten Form component, which consumes the new InputFilter, and acts as a bridge between your domain model and the view layer.
• Refactored Log and Crypt components.
• and much, much more!

You can read the full release announcement on the Zend Framework 2 blog.

Read more : Zend Framework 2.0.0beta4 Released!

When it comes to financing a brand-new startup, most founders find themselves stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. While some lucky startups attract angel investors or have access to money from friends and family, the vast majority are on their own, at least at first. That’s why it’s so tempting to use credit cards to jumpstart your business. Entrepreneurs who’ve maxed out their cards warn that while it may be necessary, it can also be dangerous.

The relatively low cost of starting a tech business today has made this choice more enticing than ever. If you need only $5,000 or $10,000 to get going, is it worth the risk to put it on your cards? “I’m seeing more people using credit cards for financing,” says David Worrell, founding partner of Rock Solid Finance, which helps business owners find solutions to their financing problems. “These days nobody’s got any collateral, so it’s a choice between cash and credit cards.”

Beware Revolving Credit Charges

When Bob Herman founded Tropolis Group in 2010, he decided to finance with credit cards so he could take advantage of a cash-back rewards program and use the bounty to buy supplies for the business. So far, Herman has put about $60,000 on his credit cards, using them mostly to finance software development.

To ensure he didn’t get in over his head, Herman says, “I only put monies on the credit cards for which I know I have corresponding payments due from customers. I then pay off the cards in full each month to avoid the high interest on revolving credit.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. “At one point, we had a customer not paying their bills on time for which we had already placed funds on a card,” Herman says. After diligently following up for payment, eventually he got the customer to make most of the payments. “I did have to write off a portion of the receivables but was able to recover the following month using revenues from other projects.”

“I advise using revolving credit only if you will receive value from a cash-back or points program, and if you’re sure you can pay off the balances in full each month to avoid high interest charges,” says Herman. The strategy has paid off for Tropolis Group, which now includes AppTropolis, BagTropolis, IT Tropolis and ShipTropolis. Sales have doubled year-over-year since launch, and Herman expects them to double again in 2012.

Don’t Forget to Pay Off Your Cards

Vincent Turner, founder and CEO of Planwise, a startup that helps people better visualize the future financial impact of their life plans, learned the risks of financing with credit cards the hard way from a previous startup. Before getting venture funding, Turner had used a personal credit card to get the company going. When a group of investors bought out the original investors in 2010, he recalls, “they raised heaps of additional money, but were never prudent enough to pay off the $8,000 debt on my credit card.”

As the company began to flounder, Turner stepped back, not realizing the investors had never paid off his card – they were just servicing the debt. When the business went bust, responsibility for the card debt ended up back with Turner: “Now the bank is hounding me for full repayment.”

The experience shaped how Turner funded Planwise. “We never make any commitment to spend money unless it is fully funded,” vows Turner, who financed the startup himself and then secured angel investors. He does have a business credit card, but its credit limit is $5,000 and he uses it only for small purchases.

Both Turner and Herman are playing it smart, according to Worrell. “As a tool to help you grow or manage your finances, I think a credit card is even more essential than ever,” he says. But you need to be careful about how much you spend, and never charge more than you can afford to pay off.

Also important: “Always match the source of money with the use,” Worrell advises. “For example, use a credit card for short-term [needs] and pay it off in the short term.” You shouldn’t use credit cards to pay salaries or rent, but you could use them to buy supplies or finance a short-term project.

Read more : Could You – Should You – Fund Your Startup With Credit Cards?

The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

As TechCrunch was the first to report, Ellen Pao, an investment partner at Sand Hill Road venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins, has filed a lawsuit alleging that during her seven year career there she has been the victim of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and acts of retaliation for rebuffing unwated advances and reporting her alleged experiences.

You can find a full rundown of her complaint here, along with the lawsuit document in its entirety.

In a statement sent today to TechCrunch, Kleiner Perkins said the suit is without merit and vowed to “vigorously defend” itself regarding the matter.

It’s all shocking for a lot of reasons, one of them being how it seems so contrary to Kleiner Perkins’ longtime reputation. Kleiner Perkins has had a sterling image for years, and it has actually become known for being especially female-friendly. The VC space is widely known for being a boys’ club, but Kleiner Perkins has actually been one firm that’s seen as bucking that trend.

KPCB has assembled a partner roster with a particularly healthy number of females in leadership positions — Aileen Lee, Juliet deBaubigny, Beth Seidenberg, and Mary Meeker are among its current senior investment team. In a recent roundup of female investors in the tech space by Whitney Hess, KPCB was found to have the highest ratio of female investors — 10 out of 44 — of any other VC she compared it to. Today, there are a total of 12 female partners at Kleiner Perkins, nine of whom are investing partners.

Overall, when it comes to women in the tech investing space, Kleiner Perkins has historically been perceived as one of the good guys. This news is still breaking in many ways, so it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Read more : Women At Kleiner Perkins: By The Numbers

Shopping on the iPad is becoming one of the best ways to shop. You’re sitting on your couch, comfy as a bug in a rug, swiping through dresses, and t-shirts, and shoes! Oh my! But there’s one issue: you have to switch between all the different brand apps to enjoy yourself. Sure, you can hit up the Saks 5th Ave app and view multiple brands at once, but those brands aren’t offering the ability to reach out to you directly with their sales, content, and promotions.

But that’s why Buyou, the crowd favorite here at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley (and thus one of our Battlefield members), has stepped onto the stage with its iPad app.

It’s a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more easily target clothing you may enjoy directly to you.

Buyou offers up a Featured section, to highlight special products and promotions, as well as a Deal Feed, that throws together all the hottest deals within its retailer network so you can save a buck or two while iPad shopping. You can also shop by category, and save items to a wishlist.

Another pain point that Buyou addresses for retailers is their social presence. Retailers often produce a ton of content for Facebook and Twitter, and even though you may follow them, you’ve likely done so to unlock a deal or be a part of a promotion, not to surf through their content on a daily basis. Buyou filters all its retailers’ social media content through the app and presents it in an unobtrusive, thoughtful way.

The app is currently live in the App Store with 32 retailers already on the platform, including Express, Bonobos, Gap, Lands’ End, LEGO, Nine West, Oakley, and The Sharper Image. The company is currently working on adding new brands.

Click to view slideshow.

Read more : Buyou Is A Free Online Mall Brought Straight To Your iPad

One of the hottest trends in gaming right now isn’t mobile, social, or massively multiplayer games, but online casinos. This may seem somewhat surprising considering that it was only a year ago that the Justice Department seized the domain names of some of the country’s largest online poker platforms, like PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UB.com, and Absolute Poker, charging their founders with bank fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling, among other offenses. And five years prior, the Unlawful Gambling Act effectively putting a stop to online gambling in the U.S. and sending the market into a tailspin.

However, in December, the Justice Department reversed its stance on many forms of online gambling, paving the way for what is becoming a revitalization of the social gambling market. Naturally, with activity in the space increasing, a number of startups have popped up to take advantage, like the rebranded Titan Gaming, for example.

Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog, which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers players the chance to win real prizes. Traditionally, online casino players participate in the casino gaming experience recreationally, with the rewards being the opportunity to socialize with friends or earn a few virtual badges.

So, RocketFrog wants to change this by leveraging the Facebook platform — where all of your friends are already — to create social tournaments, where players can interact and compete against their friends to win real prizes, not just accumulate points on leaderboards or vie for status increases.

Each day, the startup will run poker, blackjack, and slot tournaments in small-ish fields of 80 to 300 players, with levels lasting two to five minutes. In a somewhat unusual business model, RocketFrog plans to recruit a different advertiser each day to sponsor a variety of prizes, including movie tickets, music, and good, with prizes obviously being related to whatever company happens to be paying for the ads. If it’s Pizza Hut, prizes will likely include coupons, meal offers, and probably some free pepperoni.

The platform intends to accomodate gamers of all abilities, so that if a user is new to a game, for example, they can peruse through the startup’s suite of learning tutorials, game strategy articles, and expert tips. Its games also allow players to choose their stakes and limits in an effort to customize the overall gaming experience, while challenging friends, tracking their bank roll, sharing achievements, earning loyalty rewards, and comparing game stats and rankings.

RocketFrog was founded in 2010 by Brett Calapp, Matthew Osborn, and Uri Kozai. Calapp is the former CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010.

The startup’s leadership, along with the potential market opportunity, has attracted a familiar face in social networking. Tom Anderson, also known as the co-founder and former president of Myspace, has joined RocketFrog’s advisory board alongside reality TV star and celebrity poker player Brody Jenner.

When asked what he sees as RocketFrog’s core value proposition, the former Myspace president said that few have “really pushed incentive-based gaming on the Facebook platform.” It’s as simple as the fact that millions of people play online poker for free, he says, so if they’re given an engaging platform and gaming experience, why wouldn’t they want to play for realworld prizes? What’s more, “RocketFrog is also giving advertisers what they always want but can’t seem to get — an immersive and deep experience that actually features their brand — banners alone aren’t enough.”

CEO Brett Calapp says that, while legislation and regulations will take time to iron themselves out (legislation may not be put in place until next year, or 2014) and casino platforms are popping up by the minute, RocketFrog’s core strategy is to avoid making players feel inferior about their bankroll in order to drive sales of virtual currency, but instead to reward its players by offering them the ability to compete in tournaments for quality, realworld prizes.

Rather than relying on a small, obsessive segment of addicted players, Calapp says that RocketFrog wants to expand its community to include new players, those not typically classified as gamblers, but who don’t want to just play for meaningless virtual rewards.

RocketFrog has a steep uphill climb to track down the bigs in the space, like DoubleDown Casinos and Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘em, but with some influential advisors and a mission to bring social, tournament-style gamble-gaming to the masses, the startup may just be onto something.

For more, check out RocketFrog at home here.

Read more : RocketFrog Wants To Build The Largest Social Casino On The Web, Myspace Tom Joins As Advisor