They have just launched. They haven't had any news, good or bad yet. PR and 20k is nothing. You could get that streaking a football game on national TV and selling some of your stuff. If you think media attention is worth something, you don't know anybody who has been famous and broke.
Let these people perform on their own merit before you write them off so callously.
Our next step is to build in sensors like Nike+ and do verified activities, which should be pretty cool but hardly trendy/hipster.
We're working on a method to get rewards after a verified challenge has been completed - that will launch later this fall.
If you have a specific activity/prize you'd like to see, please let us know. I'll do my best to close a deal for you :).
Actually, neither Andrey (my cofounder) nor I (Jen) graduated from any of those schools.
I am an English major (with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies of all things), and Andrey graduated with a CS degree from UToronto (he's Canadian, eh).
We started by bootstrapping the company for 6 months.
You bring up an interesting point about our current reliance on Facebook and Twitter.
We recently added email functionality to help with that, but if you've got ideas about how we might improve we'd love to hear them.