For years, celebs and CEOs have the luxury of having a personal fitness trainer shadow them, tracking their activity levels, urging them along so they look better and feel better than the rest of us. Fitbit won't provide you with your own personal trainer, but the tiny clip-on wireless motion sensor/recorder may be the next best thing.
Introduced today at TechCrunch50, the small, wearable, $99 device records and then transmits to the Fitbit server an encrypted stream of motion data. Your motion data. The server translates the recorded movement into exercise intensity levels, calories burned, sleep quality, steps and distance. You don't have to do anything.
Click the button on the Fitbit Tracker you're wearing and you get an icon back telling you if right now you're living up to your fitness activity plan. Click it again and you get chapter and verse, or in this case calories burned, steps taken, and distance covered.
This is not your mom's pedometer. You wear the Fitbit Tracker 24/7. It knows when you've gotten a good night's sleep; it knows when you took the elevator instead of walking. Combined with entering your food intake at the Fitbit web site and you have the type of complete fitness picture only the very rich or high-tech Olympians have had until now.
What's more, at the web site which will be up and running when the first Fitbit ships late this year or early next, you'll be able to share your fitness plans, and your data, with others.
(Credit:
Bob Walsh)
The scary side: If you thought corporate keycards and RFID tags that can rat you out were an invasion of privacy, those were the warm-up acts. Or maybe not: you're the one who decides for the sake of that (hopefully small) potbelly you're forming from too many hours in front of your laptop who gets to know what you're doing to reduce it. Furthermore, the company says data between the tracker and the web site will be encrypted, that you set your privacy settings there, and they will not share user-identifable data with 3rd parties.
Can FitBit really make tracking fitness so simple that people will change what they do and therefore actually improve their health? "The goal of Fitbit is to make people more aware of their overall wellness, and to help motivate them to set and achieve their personal fitness goals," the company's CEO, James Park, said in an e-mail. "We created the Fitbit Tracker to be effortless and easy to use. By automatically collecting data, and wirelessly updating this information to the Fitbit Website, the Tracker can seamlessly blend into everyday lives, and empower users to improve their overall wellness."
The company has promised me an evaluation unit when they're available; as unsettling as it will be, I need to lose some pounds, and all the usual ploys, diets and pills haven't cut it, so I'll be making my own personal bargain with Fitbit later this year.
The inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, Cliff Kushler, is back in the game with a new alphanumeric entry technology for today's devices: touch-screen laptops and smartphones. His new technology, Swype, is quite simple to use, although beneath the user interface there's a lot going on.
Swype works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out, you press your finger or stylus on the first letter, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. When the word is done, then you lift.
We tried it. It works. Even on tiny smartphone keyboards, it is intuitive and fast, and we didn't even run the tutorial. Basically, it's an amazing new input method.
A built-in 65,000-word dictionary corrects obvious and even creative spelling errors. A word menu pops up if the correction is somewhat ambiguous; in our tests, the top choice was usually correct, and it can be selected with a simple swipe upward.
Little tricks make it possible to capitalize words (jerk the stylus up and down) or select double letters (wiggle the pen over a letter).
Kushler says he can type 55 words per minute on his product. Discount the developer's advantage: Real human beings should be able to motor along at about half that, we estimate.
The development team is focused on Windows Mobile (smartphones) and also the tablet version of XP and Vista, and Surface. However, Kushler mentioned how great the iPhone hardware was for his method. While no deal with Apple is pending, I do agree with Kushler that his technology would improve the iPhone experience.
The company may also develop Swype for other platforms such as Linux and Symbian.
Challenges for the company: Selling the technology. For it to work best for users, it should be embedded at the operating system level. I really do hope Swype gets those deals.
One of the coolest things to be shown off at the TechCrunch50 conference might not ever become something any of us can use. It was a mythical technology demo from a company called Tonchidot Corporation, which showed off its "Sekai Camera" application. It uses both the camera on your phone and GPS to offer up a near real-time tag of what you're looking at.
The funny thing is the entire demo could have been a complete hoax. We never saw the service in action--just a video of it placed in the gadget-saturated Akihabara district of Tokyo. It identified things like restaurants, local shops, and even products with links to user reviews, ratings, and of course buying options.
If the technology is working, objects on the touch screen get tagged in near real time. Users can then interact with those objects, making use of their handsets' interface. In this case it was the iPhone, so users could manage what they're seeing into ordered lists and candy-colored floating tags that moved as they moved.
According to its creators, the technology does not pull as much information from the camera as it does from your location. The information gets piped over to Tonchidot's servers, then filtered into tags. It also uses a similar model to some of the location-based social networks seen on the iPhone, so users can leave little virtual "hobo codes" for one another around major cities. So say, for instance, you ate somewhere and didn't like it, you could visually tag it and leave your review. Others would then be able to see it when they use the application.
Things we still don't know about the technology include:
-Who will be serving the advertisements attached to local shops and products
-If it's limited to the iPhone or any device with a camera, GPS, and a fat data pipe
-What happens when things change in local areas, since the visual tags are based partially on things the technology recognizes
-When this would be available as something you'd get in the iPhone apps store
(Credit:
Tonchidot Corporation/CNET Networks)
Livescribe's Pulse can record notes from a meeting in ink and sound, as well as perform other tasks, such as translating a handwritten word from English to Spanish.
(Credit: Jared Kohler/CNET News)It's not my beat, but digital pens are a bit of a pet interest of mine, so I like to try and keep you up-to-date on them when I get a chance.
In that vein, I thought I would let you know that Adapx, which specializes in writing software that ties digital pens to other applications, announced its latest product--one that combines the digital pen with Excel. The result is that forms can be filled out in ink and paper, but the data is captured electronically. It made the announcement at this week's Demo show in San Diego.
Seattle-based Adapx already has a product that ties in with Microsoft's OneNote. The company is one of a host of firms that are trying to make a go of digital-pen products.
One that I have spent some time with firsthand is LiveScribe's Pulse digital pen. The big thing this start-up adds to the mix is the combination of audio and ink. That makes it particularly handy for note taking.
The audio notes can be played back on a PC, but they can also be played straight from the pen. By clicking various points in one's notes, you go straight to that part of the audio. That makes it especially handy for students or journalists.
I've been playing around with it for a while now. I've been meaning to get around to a full-on review. In lieu of that (at least for now), I will just say that I find it very useful. It should get even more useful later this year, when Livescribe launches a Mac version of its desktop software and enables users to print on the special "dot" paper at home, rather than having to buy notebooks from Livescribe.
After some initial sluggishness getting to market, Livescribe has been getting particularly good play at Target. I've spotted nice displays in the stores, and it's also been featured in several weekly circulars. Livescribe won't give sales figures, but it says it continues to exceed Target's weekly forecasts. The Pulse has also been available for sale on Amazon.com since July and is in several college bookstores.
Invision.TV has created a personal recommendation engine for the Web that allows viewers to get a better selection of Web-based video content to watch.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--There's so much video content on the Web today--YouTube, ESPN, news sites, and so forth--that it can be difficult to find what you want to watch.
That's the premise behind Invision.TV, a company that has created a dashboard for aggregating and sharing Web-based video content.
The idea is based on interactive TV program guides that many of us are familiar with through our subscription TV services, for example. But instead of giving you selections of content from TV services, the video all comes from the Web.
The service embeds many Web video sources' players into its dashboard, while with others it simply links out to sites. But either way, it gives users seamless control of a wide variety of content and an easy way to find what they want to watch.
Additionally, it has a social networking element, allowing users to share video content with friends on, say, Facebook.
All told, this seems like a nice way to deal with the massive amounts of video content that's available online at any time--and to keep up with your favorite sites' videos, all without having to search sites individually.
SAN DIEGO--If you're the kind of person who runs a lot of PowerPoint presentations, you probably are very familiar with trying to connect your computer to a million different projectors.
But a Taiwanese company called Awind showed at DemoFall today a product called MobiShow which is designed to take the difficult and complex connection problem--what if you don't have the right cables--folks like this face on a regular basis.
MobiShow is a mobile-phone and Wi-Fi based projection controller.
The idea is that with MobiShow running on your mobile phone, you can use that device as what amounts to a remote control for the presentation.
You would run MobiShow--which would be connected to your computer via Wi-Fi--and then use your mobile phone to set the proper screen resolution, as well as to easily click through various slides in a PowerPoint presentation.
This would be extremely useful for the road warriors who until now have been forced to try to always remember to bring the various cables and connections they need to hook up to clients' projection systems. Instead, they can rely solely on their computer and their mobile device.
SAN DIEGO--We all have very busy lives and a big part of that is trying to manage a steady flow of new information.
Here at DemoFall today, Alerts.com unveiled its new intelligent alerts delivery dashboard.
The idea is that users can pick and choose Web sites on which to set up alerts and then aggregate them all on the Alerts.com site for delivery to whatever devices they want.
For example, if you're looking for an apartment and want to use Craigslist to find it, you can sign up for an alert directly through Alerts.com--instead of having to set it up on Craigslist itself--and then select where and how you want the alert delivered.
The same is true for dozens of other Web sites in many different categories, such as entertainment, sports, news and so on.
Once all the alerts are set up, you can use a pretty simple dashboard to organize and control them all. The dashboard shows a list of all the alerts, how the information from them is to be delivered and an easy on/off switch.
The Plastic Logic digital reader is a thin, light device that can store all kinds of digital documents.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Why would you want an Amazon Kindle, which is kind of bulky, not too attractive, and of limited scope when you could have a real digital document reader that is thin, easy to use, and very strong?
That's the business case from Plastic Logic, one of the first companies to be on stage at DemoFall this morning.
The company's plastic reader is designed to store dozens or hundreds of business documents on a very thin digital reader. It can store e-books, magazines, newspapers, PDFs and all kinds of information, the company said.
It's made with plastic, not glass, meaning that it is designed to be strong and to be able to stand up to being hit with objects or, presumably, even dropped.
It looks pretty cool, and is said to weigh only ounces, "not pounds," has a battery that lasts days and can be read in bright daylight.
The company hasn't given this product a name yet, and it's not clear when it will be available. But Plastic Logic said it is opening a Germany manufacturing plant later this month, so it shouldn't be too long.
(Credit:
Real Networks)
Related coverage: Could Apple add RealDVD-like DVD-ripping to iTunes?
RealNetworks will soon let users rip DVDs to their hard drives--legally. The company will be unveiling the RealDVD software at Monday's DemoFall conference in San Diego, but CNET got an early look at the software. Our hands-on impressions follow:
Operation is simple and straightforward. Once the RealDVD software is installed, just pop a DVD into your PC, and the program will copy the entire disc to your hard disk. Depending on the read speed of your computer's DVD drive, the operation will probably take 15-20 minutes (for dual-layer discs that house 7 to 8.5GB of data). You can copy as many as your hard drive will hold, and the program's browsing screen gives you the cover art and relevant metadata (cover art, stars, directors, plot summaries, ratings).
Whether you're at 37,000 feet or you're accessing the program on a home theater PC hooked up to your TV, you need only click on the movie you want to watch, and it'll start straight away. (We say "movie," but RealDVD works just as well for TV shows on DVD as well.) The files are uncompressed, and include everything on the disc--all the extras, and all of the surround sound and alternate audio tracks. Videos can only be watched in the program's built-in software player, but you can toggle to full-screen viewing, and videos autoresume wherever you last left off.
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