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)
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