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January 23 2012
Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012
The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would be announced.
Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.
This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.
Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.
The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.
Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.
Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012
The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would be announced.
Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.
This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.
Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.
The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.
Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.
December 05 2011
Path’s Next Version May Include Quantified Self Features
The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.
I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“ is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.
I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.
But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market. Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.
Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.
Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”. Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.
These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.
Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.
Path’s Next Version May Include Quantified Self Features
The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.
I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“ is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.
I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.
But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market. Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.
Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.
Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”. Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.
These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.
Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.
July 22 2011
Harnessing the Power of the Quantified Self through the Feedback Loop
image courtesy of Wired
I’ve written quite a bit about the Quantified Self but if you’re new here you can read my primer here. In this month’s Wired there’s an article on Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops. As I was reading this I immediately was thinking about how the methodology described can have the power to modify our behaviors through usage of the devices and services that are powering the Quantified Self.
This section of the article speaks directly to the application of the Quantified Self
Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don’t often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn’t really scaled.
Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It’s just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.
That’s quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors. Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.
Some devices already exist that both capture personal data with user interfaces that can leverage a feedback loop. The article mentions the Zeo which is one often discussed Quantified Self device providing a feedback loop to help you sleep better. I recently wrote about the Bodymedia Armband which captures my physical activity and sleep data. With that device I was able to actually quantify the levels of physical exertion and that feedback actually fueled me to try harder during my workouts so that I could see the results next time I uploaded my activity data to the service. It’s actually a combination of a feedback loop with gaming mechanics that I feel can create a powerful way to modify our behaviors.
The article provides several more examples of devices and services that utilize a feedback loop. Rypple, which offers a service to help teams work better is one that seems pretty cool that I’ll have to check out. I think many web services can leverage the feedback loop and or gamification to increase effectiveness and usage. I use a service called RescueTime to track my activity across apps and websites on my computer. The service provides a feedback loop that helps make me more productive.
I think we’re going to see this leveraged much more in the near future as the continual proliferation of easily accessible personal data continues to get mined across all aspects of our lives. Be sure to visit Wired to read the full article as well as listen the the podcast they’ve created on the feedback loop.
Harnessing the Power of the Quantified Self through the Feedback Loop
image courtesy of Wired
I’ve written quite a bit about the Quantified Self but if you’re new here you can read my primer here. In this month’s Wired there’s an article on Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops. As I was reading this I immediately was thinking about how the methodology described can have the power to modify our behaviors through usage of the devices and services that are powering the Quantified Self.
This section of the article speaks directly to the application of the Quantified Self
Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don’t often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn’t really scaled.
Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It’s just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.
That’s quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors. Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.
Some devices already exist that both capture personal data with user interfaces that can leverage a feedback loop. The article mentions the Zeo which is one often discussed Quantified Self device providing a feedback loop to help you sleep better. I recently wrote about the Bodymedia Armband which captures my physical activity and sleep data. With that device I was able to actually quantify the levels of physical exertion and that feedback actually fueled me to try harder during my workouts so that I could see the results next time I uploaded my activity data to the service. It’s actually a combination of a feedback loop with gaming mechanics that I feel can create a powerful way to modify our behaviors.
The article provides several more examples of devices and services that utilize a feedback loop. Rypple, which offers a service to help teams work better is one that seems pretty cool that I’ll have to check out. I think many web services can leverage the feedback loop and or gamification to increase effectiveness and usage. I use a service called RescueTime to track my activity across apps and websites on my computer. The service provides a feedback loop that helps make me more productive.
I think we’re going to see this leveraged much more in the near future as the continual proliferation of easily accessible personal data continues to get mined across all aspects of our lives. Be sure to visit Wired to read the full article as well as listen the the podcast they’ve created on the feedback loop.
June 16 2011
A Look Back at the First Quantified Self Conference
It’s been just over two weeks ago that the very first Quantified Self conference took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. If you don’t know what the Quantified Self is you can learn more on my initial post about the site here. But the cliff notes version is that the group was formed to discuss devices and other methods of generating and tracking personal data to help optimize our health and behaviors and share that knowledge. Some devices you may be familiar with that can be used for lifelogging (or self tracking) are Runkeeper, Nike +, Fitbit, and an item I reviewed recently called the Bodymedia armband. I’ve created a page that I continually update that lists some of these items here.
One of the results of the conference has been this new site which provides a complete guide to self tracking by the Quantified Self group. This is an excellent resource for someone who has interest in learning more about the devices and services available which can also be filtered by various categories and price ranges of the products listed. They provide the ability to add tools and the site is also building a community of users by allowing people to create profiles and review tools as well. This should turn out to be a great resource moving forward.
I really wanted to attend this but unfortunately wasn’t able to make it. I did however track much of the discussion thankfully to all the Tweets coming out from the conference. There were also some posts written on the Quantified Self site recapping the conference. I feel that the best coverage from the conference however was written by Ethan Zuckerman who liveblogged a great deal while there. One of his posts was covering the discussion of context behind the Quantified Self conference provided by one of the group’s co-founders Kevin Kelly.
Here’s a snippet from Ethan’s post:
We’re in the middle of a third paradigm of metaphors and organizing principles for personal computers. We’ve moved from desktop and office metaphors, to page/link and web metaphors, to a new metaphor around streams, tags and the cloud. RSS feeds, Facebook walls, Netflix streams are our general drift at present. This accompanies a shift from the me to the we, and from pages and files to data.
What emerges in this new model are Lifestreams. That’s what we curate in the age of the quantified self. We head upstream, and we leave a wake of data behind us. Lifeloggers, who log everything they do, are pioneers in this space. Gordon Bell and others take these exercises to an extreme, and they’re sharing it, as part of the shift from me to we.
These lifestreams intersect with each other and are, in a way, creating a new media. If we organize computation around lifestreams, an intersection between our lifestreams is a communication, an event of some sort. The media we are in is these streams of data. Everything around us has a sliver of intelligence in it, and is generating bits of data. Each of those objects has a lifestream of data, from the hotel room to your shoes. This environment, with data streams and life streams, is the space where we’ll do the work of the quantified self.
I was excited after reading this because it provides a broad paintbrush by using both the terms Lifelogging and Lifestreaming. Kevin provides the distinction between both the data we’re generating by our behaviors online along with the tracking of personal activity. I’m glad that he discussed this all encompassing aspect of personal data generation and didn’t limit the aspects of what the Qauntified Self can provide.
There’s quite a bit more to what Ethan covered and you can read the rest of his post on Kevin Kelly here. Lastly Ethan wrote another post with his reflections on the conference in which he provides more context regarding his inclusion at the conference and views as an outsider looking in. It’s another great read and although I disagree with his skepticism on the ability for concepts being generated by the Quantified Self going mainstream, he does a great job of dissecting and getting better understanding of it.
A Look Back at the First Quantified Self Conference
It’s been just over two weeks ago that the very first Quantified Self conference took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. If you don’t know what the Quantified Self is you can learn more on my initial post about the site here. But the cliff notes version is that the group was formed to discuss devices and other methods of generating and tracking personal data to help optimize our health and behaviors and share that knowledge. Some devices you may be familiar with that can be used for lifelogging (or self tracking) are Runkeeper, Nike +, Fitbit, and an item I reviewed recently called the Bodymedia armband. I’ve created a page that I continually update that lists some of these items here.
One of the results of the conference has been this new site which provides a complete guide to self tracking by the Quantified Self group. This is an excellent resource for someone who has interest in learning more about the devices and services available which can also be filtered by various categories and price ranges of the products listed. They provide the ability to add tools and the site is also building a community of users by allowing people to create profiles and review tools as well. This should turn out to be a great resource moving forward.
I really wanted to attend this but unfortunately wasn’t able to make it. I did however track much of the discussion thankfully to all the Tweets coming out from the conference. There were also some posts written on the Quantified Self site recapping the conference. I feel that the best coverage from the conference however was written by Ethan Zuckerman who liveblogged a great deal while there. One of his posts was covering the discussion of context behind the Quantified Self conference provided by one of the group’s co-founders Kevin Kelly.
Here’s a snippet from Ethan’s post:
We’re in the middle of a third paradigm of metaphors and organizing principles for personal computers. We’ve moved from desktop and office metaphors, to page/link and web metaphors, to a new metaphor around streams, tags and the cloud. RSS feeds, Facebook walls, Netflix streams are our general drift at present. This accompanies a shift from the me to the we, and from pages and files to data.
What emerges in this new model are Lifestreams. That’s what we curate in the age of the quantified self. We head upstream, and we leave a wake of data behind us. Lifeloggers, who log everything they do, are pioneers in this space. Gordon Bell and others take these exercises to an extreme, and they’re sharing it, as part of the shift from me to we.
These lifestreams intersect with each other and are, in a way, creating a new media. If we organize computation around lifestreams, an intersection between our lifestreams is a communication, an event of some sort. The media we are in is these streams of data. Everything around us has a sliver of intelligence in it, and is generating bits of data. Each of those objects has a lifestream of data, from the hotel room to your shoes. This environment, with data streams and life streams, is the space where we’ll do the work of the quantified self.
I was excited after reading this because it provides a broad paintbrush by using both the terms Lifelogging and Lifestreaming. Kevin provides the distinction between both the data we’re generating by our behaviors online along with the tracking of personal activity. I’m glad that he discussed this all encompassing aspect of personal data generation and didn’t limit the aspects of what the Qauntified Self can provide.
There’s quite a bit more to what Ethan covered and you can read the rest of his post on Kevin Kelly here. Lastly Ethan wrote another post with his reflections on the conference in which he provides more context regarding his inclusion at the conference and views as an outsider looking in. It’s another great read and although I disagree with his skepticism on the ability for concepts being generated by the Quantified Self going mainstream, he does a great job of dissecting and getting better understanding of it.
June 06 2011
Several Methods Including Using Your iPhone for Gordon Bell Lifelogging
Today I came across this post where the writer had just watched the great documentary by Banksy called Exit Through the Gift Shop. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it and is currently available as a streaming movie on Netflix. John came to a similar correlation as did I about one of the film’s main characters, Thierry Guetta, who had a compulsion to try and record as much of his life in video. It struck him to a similar project created by Lifelogging pioneer Gordon Bell in which he wore a custom camera around his neck to try and record large portions of his life.
John goes on to discuss an idea he has for a device that could record video using an iPhone or Anrdoid and upload the data to Amazon S3 storage in realtime. What John doesn’t realize (I’ll have to let him know) is that there are solutions coming. First off there’s already a device that was inspired by Gordon Bell has been created called the Vicon Revue and can be purchased today. The problem with this device is that it’s quite pricey at around $750 and would require you to carry yet another gadget around. You can learn more about it from this review that an Engadget editor wrote last year after using one at E3.
Another option though that is closer to what John was theorizing is something I came across a while back dubbed “The Lifelapse Experiment“. This is a product that is still being developed and not many details are available as to how exactly it will work. The premise is that they’ve created a special pouch that you can place your iPhone into which exposes your camera and then you wear it around your neck. There aren’t any details on the app that is presumably used to both capture and store the data and all you can do on the site currently is sign up for the beta. They also have a button to purchase it which isn’t activated yet. This would apparently do much better if they launched it as a Kickstarter project.
One other option available is the Loooxcie camera as well. This is a small camera that you wear over the ear like a Bluetooth headset. It has the ability to record directly onto itself or be integrated with either an Android or iPhone for added functionality and storage.
So there are some options to capture some Lifelogging video out there and surely both the devices and apps to fuel them will continue to evolve nicely.
Several Methods Including Using Your iPhone for Gordon Bell Lifelogging
Today I came across this post where the writer had just watched the great documentary by Banksy called Exit Through the Gift Shop. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it and is currently available as a streaming movie on Netflix. John came to a similar correlation as did I about one of the film’s main characters, Thierry Guetta, who had a compulsion to try and record as much of his life in video. It struck him to a similar project created by Lifelogging pioneer Gordon Bell in which he wore a custom camera around his neck to try and record large portions of his life.
John goes on to discuss an idea he has for a device that could record video using an iPhone or Anrdoid and upload the data to Amazon S3 storage in realtime. What John doesn’t realize (I’ll have to let him know) is that there are solutions coming. First off there’s already a device that was inspired by Gordon Bell has been created called the Vicon Revue and can be purchased today. The problem with this device is that it’s quite pricey at around $750 and would require you to carry yet another gadget around. You can learn more about it from this review that an Engadget editor wrote last year after using one at E3.
Another option though that is closer to what John was theorizing is something I came across a while back dubbed “The Lifelapse Experiment“. This is a product that is still being developed and not many details are available as to how exactly it will work. The premise is that they’ve created a special pouch that you can place your iPhone into which exposes your camera and then you wear it around your neck. There aren’t any details on the app that is presumably used to both capture and store the data and all you can do on the site currently is sign up for the beta. They also have a button to purchase it which isn’t activated yet. This would apparently do much better if they launched it as a Kickstarter project.
One other option available is the Loooxcie camera as well. This is a small camera that you wear over the ear like a Bluetooth headset. It has the ability to record directly onto itself or be integrated with either an Android or iPhone for added functionality and storage.
So there are some options to capture some Lifelogging video out there and surely both the devices and apps to fuel them will continue to evolve nicely.
May 15 2011
A Startup Opportunity for the Mint of Personal Activity Devices and Services for Health
Since I recently started testing out the Bodymedia armband I’ve also looked into other devices and the associated data and visualizations they provide. It got me thinking that as we start to incorporate several of these personal tracking devices and associated services into our lives, an opportunity to create a single dashboard will present itself. It’s not going to be efficient to have to visit multiple sites and manually stitch all the data together to provide a full picture of our on-going health initiatives. The opportunity for someone to aggregate this data in a simple way to paint the complete picture will become a very apparent and important missing link.
Some devices track multiple activities such as exercise and sleep such as Bodymedia and Fitbit, while others focus simply on one such as the Zeo which only tracks sleep and provides additional tracking metrics not available with the Fitbit or Bodymedia devices. Then there are other single minded devices and tracking services like Runkeeper and Nike+ for working out and the Withings scale and blood pressure monitor and many others that we would want incorporated into a complete tracking system (see list of items here). Beyond these devices there are plenty of other data sources that we would want to import from to provide more correlations for a complete health picture. Furthermore, there are things such as vitamin supplements, medicines, medical history and even additional genome analytics such as 23andme.com that would add much needed context to the data collected for relevancy over time. For example if you’re taking blood pressure medication or a sleeping aid you’d want that context along with your sleep patterns and blood pressure readings. It’s clear that there are many data points that need to be sewn together in a single service to help create a holistic picture of our health makeup.
Bodymedia armband dashboard provides several health related metrics
Mint.com set the bar when it came to tackling the very difficult aspect of connecting all of our financial footprints from bank accounts, to credit cards, to home loans, and investment accounts to provide a very clear and nearly real-time financial picture. I believe the same opportunity to do this with personal tracking devices, related services, and other contextual and historic data will present itself to create a real-time personal health picture. Building such a service will require the co-operation of existing device makers and their cloud data services to either open up or create API’s that can be integrated. I would imagine though that this wouldn’t be a very difficult barrier to convince support since it will be in the device maker’s best interest to provide the ability to connect their data to such a service as an added value for consumers. It would also provide a competitive distinction over other companies that don’t.
I’m extremely bullish on the ability for these devices and services to penetrate the mainstream over the next few years as the advantages become clear for using them. They provide great motivation for being able to quantify and improve our health and lives overall and with the breadth of devices and data collected an immediate need will present itself to make sense of all the information. Clearly the opportunity for a startup (or several) will emerge from this need and I’ll be the first in line to try them out. Here’s hoping that this blog post helps fuel them.
Sleep tracking from Bodymedia, Fitbit, and Zeo compared
A Startup Opportunity for the Mint of Personal Activity Devices and Services for Health
Since I recently started testing out the Bodymedia armband I’ve also looked into other devices and the associated data and visualizations they provide. It got me thinking that as we start to incorporate several of these personal tracking devices and associated services into our lives, an opportunity to create a single dashboard will present itself. It’s not going to be efficient to have to visit multiple sites and manually stitch all the data together to provide a full picture of our on-going health initiatives. The opportunity for someone to aggregate this data in a simple way to paint the complete picture will become a very apparent and important missing link.
Some devices track multiple activities such as exercise and sleep such as Bodymedia and Fitbit, while others focus simply on one such as the Zeo which only tracks sleep and provides additional tracking metrics not available with the Fitbit or Bodymedia devices. Then there are other single minded devices and tracking services like Runkeeper and Nike+ for working out and the Withings scale and blood pressure monitor and many others that we would want incorporated into a complete tracking system (see list of items here). Beyond these devices there are plenty of other data sources that we would want to import from to provide more correlations for a complete health picture. Furthermore, there are things such as vitamin supplements, medicines, medical history and even additional genome analytics such as 23andme.com that would add much needed context to the data collected for relevancy over time. For example if you’re taking blood pressure medication or a sleeping aid you’d want that context along with your sleep patterns and blood pressure readings. It’s clear that there are many data points that need to be sewn together in a single service to help create a holistic picture of our health makeup.
Bodymedia armband dashboard provides several health related metrics
Mint.com set the bar when it came to tackling the very difficult aspect of connecting all of our financial footprints from bank accounts, to credit cards, to home loans, and investment accounts to provide a very clear and nearly real-time financial picture. I believe the same opportunity to do this with personal tracking devices, related services, and other contextual and historic data will present itself to create a real-time personal health picture. Building such a service will require the co-operation of existing device makers and their cloud data services to either open up or create API’s that can be integrated. I would imagine though that this wouldn’t be a very difficult barrier to convince support since it will be in the device maker’s best interest to provide the ability to connect their data to such a service as an added value for consumers. It would also provide a competitive distinction over other companies that don’t.
I’m extremely bullish on the ability for these devices and services to penetrate the mainstream over the next few years as the advantages become clear for using them. They provide great motivation for being able to quantify and improve our health and lives overall and with the breadth of devices and data collected an immediate need will present itself to make sense of all the information. Clearly the opportunity for a startup (or several) will emerge from this need and I’ll be the first in line to try them out. Here’s hoping that this blog post helps fuel them.
Sleep tracking from Bodymedia, Fitbit, and Zeo compared
May 13 2011
Lifelogging Physical Activity and Sleep with the Bodymedia Armband
I was excited to discover the folks from Bodymedia who had a booth at the GDGT event at SXSW this year. In my coverage of devices used for Lifelogging, I continue to look for new gadgets in this arena. On the surface the Bodymedia armband sounded very similar to Fitbit in that it offers the ability to track physical activity and sleep. I’ve been testing one for a few weeks [Disclosure: Bodymedia sent me one] and being familiar with the Fitbit I was curious as to the differences compared to it. I asked the representative at the booth when I first saw it and they told me that main difference is that Bodymedia has sensors that allow it to measure several additional metrics. By visiting their website you can learn about what the sensors measure which include skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and heat flux which they state provide more accuracy and detailed picture than what a pedometer can provide. They also offer more details as to how Bodymedia differs from pedometers, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors as well.
Bodymedia is a device that bills itself primarily as a “weight management system” or device to help you lose weight. Beyond tracking just physical activity and sleep you can use their system to track calories consumed (manually) and it also can track calories burned and calculate your calorie balance daily against the goals you have setup within the system. I didn’t track that information as I was primarily interested in simply tracking my physical activity and sleep. However during the course of testing I discovered this interesting iPhone app called Meal Snap which allows you to take photos of food and have calorie count calculated from it. I may have to try this as the process of manually tracking calories is what prevents me from wanting to do it.
So I wore the device for 2 weeks straight. Wearing it was pretty comfortable. I was concerned that having it on basically 24/7 might become bothersome but it really wasn’t too bad. You just have to make sure to adjust the band to a comfort level depending on your current activity. For instance I’ll have it on a little tighter when I’m working out versus when I’m going to sleep. The battery lasts for a very long time, I never had it at a low level primarily because I was eagerly plugging it into my computer every day to upload the data collected. Publishing the data to the site is seamless after installing the software and creating an account on their website. They then import the data to provide some interesting activity charts.
For physical activity they provide 2 levels of tracking which include moderate activity and vigorous activity. For sleep they provide duration that is then broken down by lying down versus actual sleep to calculate your sleep efficiency. The graphs allow you to mouse over them to get more details as to the amount of time spent for each of the 2 levels that are tracked. Beyond the graphs they also keep a tally of special achievements based on your activity. This includes notifications for personal best scores by date and metrics for activity levels, calories burned, and sleep efficiency. You can so choose to brag about these achievements from the handy Facebook integration built into the service. They also offer a free iPhone and Android app so you can take your activity graphs with you on the go.
After using the device for a few days and uploading data I liked the interesting insights it offered. By providing a method of tracking your physical activity based on 2 levels of endurance, it sets a bar so that you can continually determine if your workouts are achieving the perceived goals you are expecting. In an attempt to make sure that I’m always maintaining or trying to exceed my previous activity levels it actually provides a strong motivation to work out hard so that I can quantify it when I import the data to my computer. I also found myself trying to work out harder to try and best my top achievements for each category. The device has aligned itself as a way to lose weight but I feel that’s limiting some of the larger benefits that it offers which is a motivational tool for working out and almost gamifying the experience. I’d actually like to see some more emphasis put towards offering features along those lines. I also wish they offered some more details around the data collected to educate me about it. For instance they state that moderate activity is 3-6 METs and vigorous activity is 6+ METs but they don’t offer any more details regarding this. It would be great to offer some helpful information to explain this to users. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more granular breakdowns of data. Same goes for the sleeping data.
When it comes to trying to incorporate these tracking devices into your life there are several considerations I think you need to make. A big one in my mind is those that can combine multiple features so to make the tracking as simple and ubiquitous as possible. For instance if you wanted to track activity and sleep you can also use two separate devices such as Runkeeper and Zeo but those require 2 separate interfaces as well as services to track the data whereas having one device to track both in a single service and interface may be more desirable. I find that attractive about the Bodymedia armband but of course then you may have to make a trade-off on features or determine if the data / value of one device offers more important tracking information to justify using separate devices. It’s not an easy determination so you should look into this before choosing one or more of the ones out there.
Overall I think incorporating a device like the Bodymedia armband will offer you some good benefits towards your health and ability to actually measure the effectiveness of your physical activity and sleep by being able to track it over time. I also found it to be quite a motivational tool for me as well which was an added bonus I wasn’t expecting. I personally see these types of devices gaining quite a large adoption rate over the coming years as they continue to improve and as we continue to incorporate more personal data collection into our lives.
Lifelogging Physical Activity and Sleep with the Bodymedia Armband
I was excited to discover the folks from Bodymedia who had a booth at the GDGT event at SXSW this year. In my coverage of devices used for Lifelogging, I continue to look for new gadgets in this arena. On the surface the Bodymedia armband sounded very similar to Fitbit in that it offers the ability to track physical activity and sleep. I’ve been testing one for a few weeks [Disclosure: Bodymedia sent me one] and being familiar with the Fitbit I was curious as to the differences compared to it. I asked the representative at the booth when I first saw it and they told me that main difference is that Bodymedia has sensors that allow it to measure several additional metrics. By visiting their website you can learn about what the sensors measure which include skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and heat flux which they state provide more accuracy and detailed picture than what a pedometer can provide. They also offer more details as to how Bodymedia differs from pedometers, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors as well.
Bodymedia is a device that bills itself primarily as a “weight management system” or device to help you lose weight. Beyond tracking just physical activity and sleep you can use their system to track calories consumed (manually) and it also can track calories burned and calculate your calorie balance daily against the goals you have setup within the system. I didn’t track that information as I was primarily interested in simply tracking my physical activity and sleep. However during the course of testing I discovered this interesting iPhone app called Meal Snap which allows you to take photos of food and have calorie count calculated from it. I may have to try this as the process of manually tracking calories is what prevents me from wanting to do it.
So I wore the device for 2 weeks straight. Wearing it was pretty comfortable. I was concerned that having it on basically 24/7 might become bothersome but it really wasn’t too bad. You just have to make sure to adjust the band to a comfort level depending on your current activity. For instance I’ll have it on a little tighter when I’m working out versus when I’m going to sleep. The battery lasts for a very long time, I never had it at a low level primarily because I was eagerly plugging it into my computer every day to upload the data collected. Publishing the data to the site is seamless after installing the software and creating an account on their website. They then import the data to provide some interesting activity charts.
For physical activity they provide 2 levels of tracking which include moderate activity and vigorous activity. For sleep they provide duration that is then broken down by lying down versus actual sleep to calculate your sleep efficiency. The graphs allow you to mouse over them to get more details as to the amount of time spent for each of the 2 levels that are tracked. Beyond the graphs they also keep a tally of special achievements based on your activity. This includes notifications for personal best scores by date and metrics for activity levels, calories burned, and sleep efficiency. You can so choose to brag about these achievements from the handy Facebook integration built into the service. They also offer a free iPhone and Android app so you can take your activity graphs with you on the go.
After using the device for a few days and uploading data I liked the interesting insights it offered. By providing a method of tracking your physical activity based on 2 levels of endurance, it sets a bar so that you can continually determine if your workouts are achieving the perceived goals you are expecting. In an attempt to make sure that I’m always maintaining or trying to exceed my previous activity levels it actually provides a strong motivation to work out hard so that I can quantify it when I import the data to my computer. I also found myself trying to work out harder to try and best my top achievements for each category. The device has aligned itself as a way to lose weight but I feel that’s limiting some of the larger benefits that it offers which is a motivational tool for working out and almost gamifying the experience. I’d actually like to see some more emphasis put towards offering features along those lines. I also wish they offered some more details around the data collected to educate me about it. For instance they state that moderate activity is 3-6 METs and vigorous activity is 6+ METs but they don’t offer any more details regarding this. It would be great to offer some helpful information to explain this to users. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more granular breakdowns of data. Same goes for the sleeping data.
When it comes to trying to incorporate these tracking devices into your life there are several considerations I think you need to make. A big one in my mind is those that can combine multiple features so to make the tracking as simple and ubiquitous as possible. For instance if you wanted to track activity and sleep you can also use two separate devices such as Runkeeper and Zeo but those require 2 separate interfaces as well as services to track the data whereas having one device to track both in a single service and interface may be more desirable. I find that attractive about the Bodymedia armband but of course then you may have to make a trade-off on features or determine if the data / value of one device offers more important tracking information to justify using separate devices. It’s not an easy determination so you should look into this before choosing one or more of the ones out there.
Overall I think incorporating a device like the Bodymedia armband will offer you some good benefits towards your health and ability to actually measure the effectiveness of your physical activity and sleep by being able to track it over time. I also found it to be quite a motivational tool for me as well which was an added bonus I wasn’t expecting. I personally see these types of devices gaining quite a large adoption rate over the coming years as they continue to improve and as we continue to incorporate more personal data collection into our lives.
February 28 2011
Forbes Introduces its Readers to The Quantified Self
I came across (hat tip to Rafe Needleman) a story written by Kashmir Hill who covers tech and privacy at Forbes about self-tracking where she takes the Fitbit for a spin. You may have already heard about the Fitbit device which lets you track workout activity and sleep. But Hill also provided a window into details about the Quantified Self. In her interview with Fitbit cofounder James Park, she even quoted his reference to the group:
He said that most folks using the Fitbit now are doing it for health and fitness reasons, as opposed to the Quantified Selfers who are obsessed with data collection in all possible ways. “It’s good to have a set of hardcore users, though, (the Quantifed Self folks). They become the evangelists — the passionate people stretch the boundary of what’s possible,” says Park.
You can read the Forbes story here and if you want more details on the Quantified Self you can read my post here.
Forbes Introduces its Readers to The Quantified Self
I came across (hat tip to Rafe Needleman) a story written by Kashmir Hill who covers tech and privacy at Forbes about self-tracking where she takes the Fitbit for a spin. You may have already heard about the Fitbit device which lets you track workout activity and sleep. But Hill also provided a window into details about the Quantified Self. In her interview with Fitbit cofounder James Park, she even quoted his reference to the group:
He said that most folks using the Fitbit now are doing it for health and fitness reasons, as opposed to the Quantified Selfers who are obsessed with data collection in all possible ways. “It’s good to have a set of hardcore users, though, (the Quantifed Self folks). They become the evangelists — the passionate people stretch the boundary of what’s possible,” says Park.
You can read the Forbes story here and if you want more details on the Quantified Self you can read my post here.
February 25 2011
Under Armour’s New Data Capturing Workout Shirt
As I mentioned in my post about Lifelogging, we’re seeing an explosion of devices and objects that are coming out that will capture data. Under Armour has just announced their E39 workout shirt. Well they don’t exactly call it that. They describe it as:
“The world’s most innovative athletic evaluation & improvement tool. The electronic compression baselayer that tracks your biometric signals. The data, stored in the heart of the shirt, transmits to a computer or handheld. You look at it, you learn, you get better.”
The shirt will come equipped to track heart & breathing rate, g-force/horsepower gauge, and have a body positioning interface. Wired just did a story on how the NFL will be using these shirts during scouting for the 2012 season. They also provide some details about the shirt:
“Yet just below the sternum, the shirt also contains a removable sensor pack called a “bug” that holds a triaxial accelerometer, a processor and 2 gigabytes of storage. The information collected can be broadcast via Bluetooth to smartphones, iPads and laptops so that scouts and trainers can view the power and efficiency of each athlete’s movements. Heart-rate and breathing-rate monitors are placed on both sides of the sensor pack, helping to gather even more intel from the body’s core.”
You can read more about how the shirt will be used during the scouting as well as the slow planned testing and eventual rollout to consumers by reading the full Wired article.
Under Armour’s New Data Capturing Workout Shirt
As I mentioned in my post about Lifelogging, we’re seeing an explosion of devices and objects that are coming out that will capture data. Under Armour has just announced their E39 workout shirt. Well they don’t exactly call it that. They describe it as:
“The world’s most innovative athletic evaluation & improvement tool. The electronic compression baselayer that tracks your biometric signals. The data, stored in the heart of the shirt, transmits to a computer or handheld. You look at it, you learn, you get better.”
The shirt will come equipped to track heart & breathing rate, g-force/horsepower gauge, and have a body positioning interface. Wired just did a story on how the NFL will be using these shirts during scouting for the 2012 season. They also provide some details about the shirt:
“Yet just below the sternum, the shirt also contains a removable sensor pack called a “bug” that holds a triaxial accelerometer, a processor and 2 gigabytes of storage. The information collected can be broadcast via Bluetooth to smartphones, iPads and laptops so that scouts and trainers can view the power and efficiency of each athlete’s movements. Heart-rate and breathing-rate monitors are placed on both sides of the sensor pack, helping to gather even more intel from the body’s core.”
You can read more about how the shirt will be used during the scouting as well as the slow planned testing and eventual rollout to consumers by reading the full Wired article.
February 03 2011
Interview with David Galernter on the Future of Lifestreaming and My Thoughts
David Gelernter © Getty Images
At the recent DLD conference Johannes Kuhn conducted an interview with creator of the Lifestream concept David Galernter. The topic of the discussion was the future of interfaces and the lack of ambition in the use of our current technologies. This is a pretty long interview that goes on for over 30 minutes. It covers many interesting areas including Lifestreaming. Naturally I wanted to focus on and share that area of the discussion here.
From the interview:
sueddeutsche.de: Talking about your idea, because your concept of lifestream which you alluded to a lot of times…the platform that comes closest to it of course is Facebook, at the same time they do well with the proprietary structure, why should they change it?
Gelernter: That’s exactly what I would say if I was Facebook. I would say “I have lots of money, I will make all the rules”, but for me, for a member of the public who says “I am not willing to worry about what’s posted on Facebook” if I am also interested in AOL or Myspace’s, other social network sites, I might also have a Gmail-account or another kind of netmail, if I also have a phone service which provides its own communications format or if I use Skype over the internet.
Facebook is making huge amounts of money, I don’t expect Facebook to say “Let’s change”, it has a lifestream in it, it has a lot of other stuff in it. If I was Facebook I wouldn’t change, they are making lots of money. The impulse doesn’t come from inside these companies, it comes from outside.
sueddeutsche.de: Where do you see developments that go in the right direction that we could actually see in the next twelve months? Or do you think that is a long-time thing that is going to take a bit longer.
Gelernter: I think within the next twelve months we might see some clarity. I think as we see more and more streams, lifestreams, event streams, feeds, activity streams, the Facebook Wall, Chatter that was described by Salesforce yesterday, these are all the same things, lifestreams.
I think we will see clarity that there are two different ways to arrange things on the web: By space – I scatter them across a website, some’s here and some’s here, or like desktop, an icon is here, an icon is there [points on the different parts of the table, editors note] or I arrange it by time, telling a story: This is what happened this morning, and then five minutes later this happened, an hour later this happened. I think there will start to be clarity that these are the two basic systems.
We need them both, so what we need is to think about an optimal way to do the spacial arrangement, an optimal way to do the narrative arrangement, so we can have one storytelling narrative arrangement not ten different incompatible ones.
So we can have one principle of arranging things in space, not HTML for websites and applets for Smartphones and desktops for computers. I don’t think anything is going to change in implementation-terms, I think the industry and the community will see more clearly these are the big categories: space and time. Let’s think about the best way to do each one. I think that could happen.
sueddeutsche.de: That means we have to rethink the whole website or is it you have to think beyond it and really imagine the internet like it’s everywhere, your lifestream can be everywhere, in your fingertips?
Gelernter: That’s very much it. The lifestream is not on the web, it is everywhere, it is in the cloud, it is distributed. I think nobody has to take down his website today, the modern history of software is that new stuff absorbs old stuff.
So in fact we don’t lose our investment, it is still there, but we build new stuff that is simpler and more powerful and that includes the special cases. So we move from complexity to simplicity, keep the complex thing but we add simpler layers as we understand better and more clearly.
You can read the full interview here and there’s also an audio version.
It’s always interesting to listen to David Galernter’s view on Lifestreaming. I can appreciate his holistic approach to the concept but I focus on how it will be applied primarily to web services and related devices. I’m not as optimistic as he is regarding the speed and clarity we’ll see from web services or other systems built on Lifestream data. I’ve been watching this very closely for almost 4 years. I feel the heightened interest in Lifestreaming related services has significantly subsided from the attention of startups, VC’s, and the public. This has been due to many factors including privacy concerns, difficulty level, user adoption, and lack of monetization strategies for startups that entered the field. Not to mention that most users are now dialing back the services they use and mainly focusing on Facebook and Twitter.
That being said I think we will see a resurgence in Lifestreaming and related services in the future but this will be primarily fueled by 2 things. The value people will begin to discover by sharing Lifestream data and the increasing devices and services that will sprout up around Lifelogging. In the early days (around 2007) of Lifestreaming tools and services being released many argued that Lifestreaming took a pretty large investment to create, while for the most part not many people were interested in viewing others Lifestreams. I always argued that services needed to be built to take advantage of aggregating and analyzing this data in meaningful ways to provide users with value. This is now starting to happen in a big way with social content readers where we are having our news filtered and delivered based on a select peer groups. More recommendation services built arround our selected friends that work similarly should be coming in the near futures as well.
With regards to Lifelogging I am seeing a multitude of dedicated devices and smartphone apps that track all sorts of personal data around exercise, sleep, weight, health, etc. As these devices become better, cheaper, and the data collected starts providing large benefits to improving our lives, we will see adoption of them start to surge. I think these two areas show not only the ways that Lifestreaming could recapture the interest of users, but also provide good monetization options for startups. I don’t often make predictions but I see this starting to happen between the next 1-3 years. Hopefully I’m proven wrong but I think people are currently too distracted by Q & A services, local deals, and location services. But in time those shiny objects will make way for new ones.
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Interview with David Galernter on the Future of Lifestreaming and My Thoughts
David Gelernter © Getty Images
At the recent DLD conference Johannes Kuhn conducted an interview with creator of the Lifestream concept David Galernter. The topic of the discussion was the future of interfaces and the lack of ambition in the use of our current technologies. This is a pretty long interview that goes on for over 30 minutes. It covers many interesting areas including Lifestreaming. Naturally I wanted to focus on and share that area of the discussion here.
From the interview:
You can read the full interview here and there’s also an audio version.
It’s always interesting to listen to David Galernter’s view on Lifestreaming. I can appreciate his holistic approach to the concept but I focus on how it will be applied primarily to web services and related devices. I’m not as optimistic as he is regarding the speed and clarity we’ll see from web services or other systems built on Lifestream data. I’ve been watching this very closely for almost 4 years. I feel the heightened interest in Lifestreaming related services has significantly subsided from the attention of startups, VC’s, and the public. This has been due to many factors including privacy concerns, difficulty level, user adoption, and lack of monetization strategies for startups that entered the field. Not to mention that most users are now dialing back the services they use and mainly focusing on Facebook and Twitter.
That being said I think we will see a resurgence in Lifestreaming and related services in the future but this will be primarily fueled by 2 things. The value people will begin to discover by sharing Lifestream data and the increasing devices and services that will sprout up around Lifelogging. In the early days (around 2007) of Lifestreaming tools and services being released many argued that Lifestreaming took a pretty large investment to create, while for the most part not many people were interested in viewing others Lifestreams. I always argued that services needed to be built to take advantage of aggregating and analyzing this data in meaningful ways to provide users with value. This is now starting to happen in a big way with social content readers where we are having our news filtered and delivered based on a select peer groups. More recommendation services built arround our selected friends that work similarly should be coming in the near futures as well.
With regards to Lifelogging I am seeing a multitude of dedicated devices and smartphone apps that track all sorts of personal data around exercise, sleep, weight, health, etc. As these devices become better, cheaper, and the data collected starts providing large benefits to improving our lives, we will see adoption of them start to surge. I think these two areas show not only the ways that Lifestreaming could recapture the interest of users, but also provide good monetization options for startups. I don’t often make predictions but I see this starting to happen between the next 1-3 years. Hopefully I’m proven wrong but I think people are currently too distracted by Q & A services, local deals, and location services. But in time those shiny objects will make way for new ones.