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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.
May 19 2011
My Talk About X PRIZE and Other Topics on the Tummelvision Podcast
A few weeks ago I was honored to be a guest on a podcast that I’ve been a listener of called Tummelvision. The podcast has 3 great hosts which include Kevin Marks, Deborah Schultz, and Heather Gold. Here’s the topic of the show in their words:
Tummelvision is a weekly salon-style podcast about the art and science of engaging and collaborating in a networked age. Each week we explore how to connect and create a world that puts people at the centre of business, technology and culture with the smart folks creating this new world.
Each week they invite a guest from varied areas to discuss how they “tummel” and share other interesting information about their roles for work, personal projects or other areas. They have varied guests from different fields which make for an eclectic show that both stays fresh and offers interesting topics to learn about. The hosts always make for a very engaging discussion around the topics that surround the guests that often go on welcomed tangents that branch off to other areas surrounding their discussion. It’s definitely a source of delicious brain food that is fed in different tasty chunks each week. I highly recommend it.
When I joined them we covered quite a few varied topics during the first half of the show including higher education, name spaces, and influence. The second part of the show I peel back the curtain to offer some insight to what we do at the X PRIZE foundation. You can visit their website and listen to my show here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.
March 17 2011
The Value of Sharing Tools and Resources Knowledge
image courtesy of Flickr user Nancy White
Today I saw a post at ReadWriteWeb about a Wiki started by Songkick’s Ian Hogarth so that startups could collectively share tools and resources used to run their companies. Here’s the link to the Wiki which is a good resource, but I once had a vision of something grander along these lines. I have actually given this quite a bit of thought in the past and even had a startup idea to actually create a website where companies could create profiles to share knowledge of web tools, services, methodologies and more, to collectively help one another. How meta right? When thinking this through further I had concerns about whether companies would actually be willing to interact and participate in sharing this knowledge.
From the Read Write Web Post (re: the Wiki)
That advice and openness makes this a valuable resource for startups, so they can focus on building their product and not get sidetracked on questions like “Does anyone recommend a CRM?” As Hogarth argues, “I’m a big believer of trying to focus on your core competency (in our case tour dates) and then partnering with the best class companies elsewhere.”
Primarily regarding web tools and services, it can be a pretty painstaking process to research and find the right one. In my work for X PRIZE Foundation I have to not only find great tools and services, but also have to consider many free, open source, or low cost tools. We are a non-profit so I do my best to try and limit the budget we allocate to these so I can put it to better uses. Recently I joined a really interesting service called BagCheck which is a community to share and discover interesting and detailed lists of items around a given topic. In testing out the site I create a “Bag” called Great Web Services to Help Run Your Business. In it I provide a list of many of the tools and services I use at X PRIZE. So basically my vision would be to have a site dedicated to this specific niche where companies, startups, nonprofits and even freelancers could collectively share their knowledge so that we could make tool and service discovery a much easier process. Perhaps I should rekindle this startup idea…if only I had the time.
October 07 2010
How to Empower Co-workers and Leverage Web Services to Publish Your Website
I manage all the websites and related services for the X PRIZE Foundation. In the latest iteration of the re-design of our Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE website I wanted to streamline the workflow and enable several co-workers to easily publish content to our website. I’m pretty happy with how things turned out and wanted to share what we did so that it may help you thinking of ways you can utilize some of these some of these methods for your own website.
We use the Drupal to power all of our in-house websites but these methods could be applied to any CMS (content management systems) that are out there. Our sites are visually rich as we have an in-house creative services department that generates a large number of videos and photos. We post these videos to our YouTube channel as well as our website. The workflow to get them on our website would normally take several steps of sending the request along with details which then get published through our CMS and eventually added to the site. This is just one example. We are a pretty small group and I wanted to find ways to reduce the timeframe, people, and steps involved to accomplish publishing content to our site.
So I looked at all the web services we were currently using to determine how we could leverage them in a home page redesign. The plan was to make it so the content could be dynamically updated by my co-workers by utilizing the services they were publishing content to already or in some cases create new ones. Below is an image with numbered areas that I will break down explaining how we accomplished this.
1. For our latest videos section we created a YouTube Playlist and pull the first four videos from there to populate this section. We’re utilizing the YouTube API to pull the thumbnail and video title to be displayed here. We also then utilize ThickBox to display the video and keep the user on our site. Our YouTube channel is managed by someone on our creative services team so they can easily control which videos appear here without having to request any changes to my team.
2. Our photos section is powered by a Flickr Set. A member of our creative services team who has full control to easily add or remove images to appear in this section. We are utilizing the Flickr API and also display the photos using ThickBox and allow you to scroll through them. To keep it fresh we randomly pull images from this set upon every page load.
3. For our top stories section we created an account on Delicious. A member of our communications team then bookmarks stories they want to appear here using a specific tag. The reason for the tag is that we have several that we use to publish to various areas of our websites. We then take the RSS feed generated by this tag and process it using the Simplepie script to display here.
4. For this section we took all the RSS feeds from the blogs of the teams that were competing and processed them through Simplepie to display here. The output was displayed in reverse chronological order and we limited it to only show a single post per team so that nobody could flood the feed. We also renamed several of the blog feed titles as necessary along with formatting the output and date.
Having distributed these publishing responsibilities to additional people in the company and utilizing externals services gives us many advantages. It removes web production involvement, it puts the publishing power in the hands of the department, and it speeds up the time to publish. It’s a win, win, win. Of course there are many considerations before this can be implemented. You need to make sure that your organization has the approval processes and ability to support it. You also need to have steps in place to deal with the reliance of external services which may include utilizing caching and local asset backups.
I’ve been very happy with the outcome thus far and These are just some examples that I hope you find helpful. There are so many ways that web services can be utilized both for publishing content and streamlining workflow and I continue to look at ways to expand on these methods in other areas of our sites.
Lastly, I want to give a shout out to Blake Lucchesi who developed the functionality described in this post within Drupal for us.
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