Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms to ensure they are not staging "ambush marketing" or illegally associating themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas, McDonald's, Coca-Cola and BP....

Wearing purple caps and tops, the experts in trading and advertising working for the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) are heading the biggest brand protection operation staged in the UK. Under legislation specially introduced for the London Games, they have the right to enter shops and offices and bring court action with fines of up to £20,000.

Imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more, to deliver an ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user’s own historical health and fitness data. The Health Graph has the potential to completely alter the health and fitness landscape.

What does this mean for device manufacturers and developers? They now have the opportunity to build an endless array of apps, that draw on the powerful data within the Health Graph. Health Graph developers also benefit from the social features on RunKeeper.com to gain exposure and drive sales. Social features, like our FitnessFeed and Facebook & Twitter sharing integrations, are a fundamental part of the RunKeeper.com experience; we’re opening up these forums to apps and devices that build on the Health Graph, to provide our 6MM+ community members with easy access to all the tools that integrate with RunKeeper.

"Senator Wyden has long worked with U.S. industry on combating the trafficking of counterfeit goods like fake shoes and apparel. But going after trade in real merchandise can be done in a variety of effective ways, like inspecting shipping containers at American ports of entry to identify and seize fake merchandise.

"Unfortunately, the content industry has piggybacked on the legitimate efforts of apparel designers to combat counterfeit goods and now threaten the integrity of the Internet as a means to combat intellectual property infringement. The Internet is too important to our economy and to advancing American values to be inappropriately regulated and censored under the guise of protecting IP, which is why Congress and the Administration should be as cautious as it is surgical when it aims its sights on the Internet."

But quite the contrary, Nike's arrival did nothing but help RunKeeper. Nike poured their huge marketing budget into educating people on why to run with their phone, and as a result, RunKeeper's numbers more than doubled. My blog post from this time period is here.

And flourish RunKeeper did. We gained more than 2 million iPhone users, we were named by TIME Magazine as a top 10 iPhone app of 2009, and this big, passionate, global community of runners rallied around the RunKeeper system on the social web, and at www.runkeeper.com. We also ported our solution to Android (where we are currently a featured app), enabled manual map creation on the web, and integrated with a wi-fi scale, so users could send their weight data to www.runkeeper.com as well.

Along the way, other footwear companies like New Balance tried to get in the game with the 'NB TotalFit' app, but didn't make a dent (white labeled from our 'big scary' competitor).  Then, Nike's arm got twisted even further when Adidas came out with their MiCoach system in August 2010, which is a GPS-based system.  Here was another running shoe company jumping into the mix with a reasonable attempt, this one without tethering users to a specific pair of shoes.  And Adidas came in with full guns blazing, running TV ads, sponsoring major races/events that featured MiCoach prominently, and investing heavily in trying to unseat RunKeeper as the go-to smartphone fitness tracking platform.  So, one month in, what are the results so far?  As of today, Adidas is ranked #18 in iPhone health/fitness and RunKeeper is ranked #14.  Not bad for this little startup from Boston with zero marketing budget .  In fact, MiCoach was #61 until last week, when Walt Mossberg's column gave them a big (and arguably misinformed) plug in the WSJ.

All of you big guys jumping in with major marketing budgets, you are doing this as a brand play. We are not. You are doing this to try to ultimately sell more people your footwear/apparel. We are not. You are big and slow moving. We are not.