Endomondo's Sports Tracker gathers pace – reaches 500,000 users

Endomondo‘s free GPS-powered Sports Tracker app, which notably runs on multiple mobile platforms, including Garmin watches, has achieved more than a million downloads and reached 500,00 registered users. That’s up from 40,000 registered users at the start of January and 100,000 in April. Or, as the Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup is keen to point out, a doubling of its user base every 10 weeks over the past year.

The Endomondo Sports Tracker app, which competes with the likes of RunKeeper and MapMyFitness in the US and European players such as Map My Tracks or perhaps Nokia’s own Sports Tracker, lets you track your fitness activities via GPS.

In addition to the basic tracking of your route, split times, calorie consumption and more, Endomondo provides the user with a sort of “audio coach”, as strange as that sounds. For each mile or km, a voice will inform the user about distance and speed. Better still, the service enables friends to follow the user’s run in real-time from their PC in which they can send messages that are converted to audio and blasted at the person trying to get fit. Talk about back seat driving!

Other community features include the ability for friends to challenge each other e.g. who runs the most miles or burns the most calories in a month. You can also set up public challenges and events etc. And workouts can be posted to Facebook and Twitter.

Endomondo is partly self-financed and partly backed by business angels, including Jacob Aqraou, General Manager, eBay Classfieds Group, although the startup is looking to raise VC funding. To that end, its business model is largely a freemium play: a premium app is planned before the year’s end, with premium website features coming in early 2011.