Fitness Service Gets Heavyweight Partner

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Fitness Service Gets Heavyweight Partner
Jake Steinfeld

Fitness guru Jake Steinfeld has scored a significant new corporate partner for his FitOrbit subscription service, which provides people online access to a personal trainer and other fitness and nutrition resources.

Health insurer WellPoint Inc. last week announced a strategic relationship with FitOrbit Inc., part of Brentwood-based Body by Jake Global LLC. WellPoint, the Indianapolis parent of Anthem Blue Cross, not only will offer the service to members but also made an undisclosed investment in the company.

FitOrbit matches its members with their choice of more than 250 affiliated trainers. Clients fill out an online questionnaire about fitness goals and health, and they are provided a selection of potential trainers to provide exercise and nutrition plans, coaching and support via e-mail.

Ken Goulet, chief executive of WellPoint’s commercial business unit, said the company has been scouting sophisticated online health and wellness services for its corporate clients to offer their employees on a fully or partially subsidized basis.

“FitOrbit offers us capabilities – especially that human touch by a human trainer – that we need to be competitive in the market,” said Goulet. WellPoint is scheduled to begin test marketing the service in Southern California and Georgia this summer.

Steinfeld – a trainer, TV fitness host and actor known for his own line of exercise equipment – said his trainers have been taught how to coach clients via e-mail.

“I’m not a tech guy, but it’s been a dream since the mid-’80s for me to try and reach a massive audience personally,” he said. “On TV I can talk to you, but you really can’t talk back. On the Internet you can connect anyone, anywhere to a real live trainer you can interact with.”

FitOrbit members receive links to online videos showing them how to perform various exercises but currently can’t upload videos of their own workouts to their trainer for critique. However, that is a feature Steinfeld would like to add.

FitOrbit was founded in 2009 and went live the following year. It recently signed up Carlsbad weight loss and nutrition company Jenny Craig Inc., which plans to offer the service to its clients. The company also has partnerships with celebrity trainers such as Jackie Warner, offering trainers who coach in her style.

Early FitOrbit investors include Spark Capital of Boston and Polar Capital of Toronto. Individuals without any affiliation can sign up by themselves at a cost of $10 a week.

Data Farm Infusion

For more than two years, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthiest person in Los Angeles, has been buying or acquiring stakes in promising startups with the goal of building an information superhighway that transforms how health care is delivered.

“You need to create a hypersecure, high-performing fiber infrastructure that can tie your iPhone or Android device to a supercomputer thousands of miles away in real time. It’s one of the challenges we’re working on,” said Soon-Shiong, who topped the Business Journal’s list of Wealthiest Angelenos this year with an estimated net worth of $8 billion.

Where to store and access all that data is a piece of the puzzle that the biotech billionaire’s holding company, NantWorks, recently solved via an equity investment and partnership in an El Segundo company that operates high-capacity computer data centers.

NantWorks is now a minority owner and key client of privately held Server Farm Realty Inc. Server Farm operates five facilities around the country that are part of the National LambdaRail, a 12,000-mile fiberoptic network that primarily connects universities and government labs so that scientific and medical researchers can share data too massive for the regular Internet. The non-profit Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health took over management and financial responsibility for the fiberoptic network last summer.

Server Farm is a 12-year-old subsidiary of Red Sea Group, a family-controlled investment company in El Segundo that until recently predominantly focused on residential and hospitality real estate development around the world. But Red Sea Chief Executive Avner Papouchado expects data storage will become the company’s largest business within the next few years.

“NantWorks is going to be a very big user of both computing and (data) transport,” Papouchado said. “My job is to provide Patrick with the brick-and-mortar part, to make his vision come true.”

Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.

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