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Velocity app: Hands-free speed radar

July 8, 2014

NEW YORK — Athla LLC today introduces Velocity, the first hands-free speed radar app for sports, to the Apple App Store.

Velocity uses iOS camera technology to observe and track the flight of a ball and its speed. Place an iPhone or iPad 20 feet away, parallel to the flight of the ball, and users can simply start playing and watch as the speed of their baseball pitch, soccer kick, cricket bowl, or tennis serve appears on the device. The app accurately calibrates to within +/- 0.7 mph of the Stalker II Pro, a state-of-the-art radar used by over 30 professional sports teams.

As an Internet-connected speed radar, Velocity has a FriendLink feature that creates a connected community enabling kids to compare and share their speeds and improvements with their entire team, their coaches, their parents, or friends worldwide.

“We are excited to bring performance tracking to four new sports that conveniently runs on mobile devices we already carry,” said Mike Gillam, MD, founder and CEO of Athla. “What’s the future after wearables? We believe it is ambient technology, where the room itself is the sensor, or in our case, the field or the court. Facebook bought the software company Moves rather than the hardware company FitBit. Velocity is a radar gun dematerialized into software. That change gives players a 100x performance/cost improvement that gets better with every new generation of phone released.”

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Further, families can bring the stadium experience home to any field, rink or court in their community using Velocity’s GameLink. GameLink transmits users’ data to up to seven other iOS devices enabling the speed of every pitch or serve to be seen by an audience or on a parent’s phone in the stands.

“We are inspired by the idea that kids and adults everywhere can discover talent to kick, pitch or serve that they never knew they had,” said Gillam. “Even more, we are excited to see people take their personal bests and make them that much better.”

Velocity is optimized for baseball, tennis, soccer, and cricket, with more sports on the way, including hockey, lacrosse, and volleyball.

Velocity Free is available at no cost and supports GameLink mirroring and Community access. Individual sport radars can be purchased at $6.99 each.

Velocity Ultimate unlocks every feature of every sport radar along with statistical tracking for $9.99.

For more information on Velocity, please visit athla.com.

ABOUT ATHLA

Athla designs software for digital health, fitness, and athletic performance aimed to bring out the best in human performance. Athla’s flagship release, Velocity, is the first hands-free speed radar app for sports which puts all the precision of a professional speed radar onto an iOS device. Athla is led by Mike Gillam, MD, a physician focused on digital health who trained, practiced, and taught at Northwestern University, helped build companies acquired by WebMD and Microsoft, and served as a partner level executive in Microsoft and founding director of the Microsoft Healthcare Innovation Lab.