Habit Labs

Aug'2011: Two start-ups in gamification of health have merged to create Habit Labs and achieved an early round of funding. Buster Benson, creator of HealthMonth, 43 Things, and Locavore, has teamed up with Jen Mc Cabe, founder of Y-Combinator backed health startup, Contagion, to get Habit Labs up and running.

Jul'2012: winding down its operations... Seattle-based Habit Labs this month sold HealthMonth, a game platform to encourage people to embrace and practice healthy behaviors, to DigitallyJustifiedTechnologies of Surrey, British Columbia. The principals of that company, Derek Thornton and Billy Cooter, promise in a blog post that they will improve mobile access to the site. Benson says HealthMonth has 60,000 users, 15 percent of whom are paying customers. The other part of Habit Labs, called Budge, is described on its website as “mobile health improvement programs that don’t let you fail.” That product never got out of beta, and Benson says he is shutting the site down by Aug. 31 and releasing the code to Open Source programmers. “I’m trying to help other companies in my field,” says Benson, who sold a previous startup, personal improvement site 43 Things, to Amazon.

• https://github.com/busterbenson/Budge