HeiaHeia
Type of site | Social network service |
|---|---|
| Owner | Mooze Oy (Ltd) |
| Website |
www |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required |
| Current status | Active |
HeiaHeia (derived from a Scandinavian sporting chant, Heia! Heia! in Norwegian and Heja! Heja! in Swedish) is a sports and exercise related social networking website developed in Finland. It was launched in December 2009 by Olli Oksanen, Jussi Räisänen and Ivan Kuznetsov. Oksanen and Kuznetsov left Nokia to found the new company.[1] As of January 2010, HeiaHeia has users in 134 different countries with over 40,000 users in Finland alone.[2] More than half of HeiaHeia users are female, which has influenced the look and feel of the service.[3]
The idea behind HeiaHeia is to promote participation in sports and exercise and thus improving global wellbeing. HeiaHeia allows users to support and encourage their friends to do sports and exercise. It is geared towards people who are not elite athletes and thus stand to gain most out of community encouragement.
HeiaHeia users logged over 1,000,000 exercises in the first 370 days of operation.[4]
HeiaHeia allows people to "check-in" to do over 350 different sports and activities and more are added by administrators as they are requested. Whilst all the "usual" types of sport and exercise are represented, HeiaHeia users can also choose to count other activities that provide exercise. For example, snow shoveling reached a top 10 spot in 9 different countries in the winter of 2010/11.[5]
Features
HeiaHeia allows people to take control of their exercise planning, motivation and targets. Users create their own network of friends, family, colleagues and sports team members. Users see what other people in their network have done and what they have achieved.
HeiaHeia sells services for companies and sports teams as well.