Heal our heels, O Healus

Usually Sportsbiztech is the one searching for stories, but a reader contacted us wanting to pitch a story idea. How exciting!

And it happens to be a good one too: Ideasforlife.tv, a video Web site that features scientific solutions for everyday problems across England’s West Midlands, has created a clip hosted by European 5000m record holder Dave Moorcroft touting the benefits of the Healus running shoes. A visual account can trump any text description that I will attempt to provide, so here’s the link to the video:

http://www.ideasforlife.tv/watch/40

The shoes, developed by Dutch marathoner Adri Hartveld with Staffordshire University in the UK, are heel-less in order to deflect the shock resulting from heels pounding the pavement. These seem to differ slightly from the Masai shoes that I wrote about last month. While the Masai shoes also have slightly curved soles, they are also being touted as casual as well as athletic footwear. This makes sense given that some of the runners that tried out the Healus shoes in the video felt like the curvature in the soles forced them to lean forward, ready to nudge them into a run.

To learn more about the shoes, go to the corporate Web site at www.healus.co.uk. One slight problem, though. The site claims that the shoes can be purchased at Bourne Sports in Stoke-on-Trent, but they don’t appear to be sold on the Bourne retail site…

Don’t let Nike try it (SEO, that is)

This past week I attended the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference & Expo, which is held in a number of cities worldwide every year. The event is full of enthusiastic geeks diving into the minutia that is search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing. In layman’s terms, if you’re working hard on your Web site, you want to make sure that (a) you’re designing and wording it in a way that Google will want index it on its first page in various keyword search results, leading to (b) an increase in the number of eyeballs on your site, hopefully leading to (c) more readers and more business.

Some Web sites do an excellent job of achieving good SEO, but the way to really learn about the subject is to see who out there is not exhibiting a best practice. One particular company that SES panelists like to take potshots at is Nike. (In fact, one of them suggested Wednesday that there be an entire panel devoted to what is wrong with Nike’s Web sites, an idea at which other speakers and attendees laughed in agreement.)

At last year’s AND this year’s SES, various speakers said that while the athletic apparel company’s online properties fare well in branded searches – the “Nike” in the www.nike.com URL certainly helps – they do very poorly for keyword results such as “running shoes.” (In Google, shoe retailer Zappos.com comes out on top for that, and according to WebProNews, a search for the keyword “shoes” gives Zappos 21 percent of the traffic for that word versus just 1 percent for Nike.) There are a number of reasons for this, the first and foremost being that search engines still can’t track Flash applications very well. Nike’s sites abuse Flash to the nth degree, so when Google and Yahoo! capture information to index, they see sites just as you would be looking at them in Lynx. (Oh, the horror. Does anyone else remember the MS DOS-like text on blue screen with [LINK] and [IMAGE] tags? To think I was once forced to surf the Web in this manner.)

So, using a handy online bot spoofer, here is a screenshot of how nike.com looks to the Yahoo! Slurp crawler:

No, I did not create this in Photoshop and paste it here; rather, the “404″ appears to show that bots can’t read images or Flash applications, so the entire Nike front page is a big blank to Yahoo! as well as Google. Now, Nike can probably get away with this since their brand is so well-known, but with more than 6 billion people on this planet, surely at least one person isn’t familiar with the company, so this is no way to draw in new customers. The easy thing to do would be to scrap the fancy Flash and go for a site that is easier on the eye, easier on your connection and easier on Google, right?

Well, Nike didn’t want to do that. When SES speaker Liana “Li” Evans, the director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance, was going to go into the “Nike Story” at a panel, I was expecting the same song and dance that I just mentioned above. Instead, she retold a sordid tale that WebProNews broke earlier in the year. Nike, in an attempt to trick the search engines, kept constructing Web sites in Flash but fed HTML code to the engines so that keywords could be picked up. In other words, the Nike site that Google’s bots crawled did not resemble the coding in the actual online site, a practice called “cloaking.” Is Nike cheating? The panelists seemed to think so. What do you think?

Insane sports tech gear for runners

While flipping through a Hong Kong gossip mag, I came across an article on an adidas “Consortium Series Micropacer Hamper.” Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Does this hamper automatically wash my clothes and save me a trip to the Laundromat?

It’s actually a pair of limited-edition, retro blue suede sneakers, with a “micropacer” embedded in the left shoe. Doubling as a stopwatch, this micropacer tracks the number of steps that the wearer takes. The two-page spread in FACE Magazine mentions that the shoes come with 10 accessories, including a USB drive, a lanyard and, of course, a Qee figure (small plastic toy figurines that originated in Hong Kong in 1995 and are produced in limited runs; if you live in the U.S., you can find them at places like Kidrobot). But back to the technology. The micropacer seems to be a gimmick, but the HK$2,980 (about US$383) shoes are actually a recent re-release of adidas’ 1984 editions, signaling their sustained popularity.

Another new gadget that adidas just released is the miCoach. The company partnered with Samsung on what it touts as a “total coaching system” for runners. It’s a phone! It’s an MP3 player! It creates a training plan just for you! The deluxe version of the phone comes with two separate devices that measure your running strides (a sensor is placed in one of your shoes) and your heart rate (a monitor in the shape of a belt is wrapped around your waist), then collects this data to be synced up with www.micoach.com, where you can create customized training plans based on the information that your phone receives. For now, though, you still need your actual human coach; although the deluxe version will put you out of pocket by US$613, the phone is only available in Europe for now.

Finally, a Swiss company has devised what it calls “physiological footwear.” Called Masai Barefoot Technology – this is patented – the shoes promise the following benefits:

• Better posture
• Increased “buttock muscle activity” (+9%)
• Increased “rear thigh muscle activity” (+19%)
• Increased “lower limbs activity” (+18%)
• Increased “abdominal muscle activity” (interestingly, the animated diagram doesn’t list a percentage increase for this one)
• Decreased stress on hip and knee joints (-19%)

Apparently this is possible due to the different layers in the sole, which conform to foot movements and distribute pressure throughout the feet, even when standing still. And unlike the previous two products, the Masai shoes are much easier to find stateside. But are they worth US$245? Maybe I really should crack open that pair of tights that I bought in Japan a couple of years ago that, when worn, claim to burn 416 kcals an hour. (Those were less than US$10.)