Garmin Connect: Location Awareness + Community

Garmin announced today a makeover for their online community for fitness devices formerly known as Motion Based. This makeover, renamed Garmin Connect itself is not particularly of interest but some of the underlying implications and insights from the program are. And maybe it’s just me but the move from a fitness friendly moniker like Motion Based to a more general name, Garmin Connect, signals to me that there are likely more of such initiatives on their way for other Garmin Products.

The service is an online community designed to allow users of Garmin's fitness products to store and share information related to their fitness routine using Garmin products. In addition to being a personal fitness portal, it appears that some of the information will be taken in aggregate in order to add value to the entire community at large, so visitors can see popular jogging paths and general stats of runners or to compete in virtual races. It should be noted that similar offerings are available through Bones in Motion via BIM Active for use with your cell phone.

The combination of location awareness and community continues to build and these added value features are likely to be an effective way for Garmin to put up a barrier to its customers adopting another GPS fitness devices, while also laying a foundation for building a higher margin component to its low cost and low margin product lines.

Garmin had previously announced the USB ANT Stick to support the Forerunner 50. The stick plugs into your PC to automatically retrieve data from the Forerunner whenever it is within range.