Despite the persistent dull thuds of individual apples being dropped on the floor, Elaine refused to give in to Gary’s passive aggressive demand for a coffee table.

I think it is only a matter of time until we see more Pinterest snark.  The form has already been cast by sites like authors of catalog living and unhappyhipsters.com. Pinterest should be the great canvas where this mode of unadulterated snark might find it purest expression.

I tried it.  It’s hard.  These two are geniuses.

USPM advertising

Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up.”   The more I dig into this mobile wellness space, the more that comment resonates with me.

I am pretty excited about mobile fitness trackers.  I get excited about the challenges of acquiring users and monetizing them in this space.  I’ve taken a look at fitbit and Nike’s Fuelband as well as online activity trackers on the iPhone and Android platform like Runstar, Sporttracker, and iMapMyFitness.  But, in a sense, I’ve been wallowing in the shallow end of the pool.

The whole universe of Mobile Health, or mHealth, encompasses both these personal fitness apps and systematic health delivery programs on the national and global scale.  Looking at the technology at this scale, the perverse incentives and rewards of our for-profit healthcare system rear their ugly heads and bring sharp focus to concerns on privacy and ownership of data.

For the quick survey of what I’m talking about, take a look at this mobile communications for medical care report from China Mobile and University of Cambridge (by way of Craig LeFebrve). It’s a year old, but this mHealth report gives a startling overview on how technology can solve some of the thorniest problems in healthcare.  The applications range from the prosaic, like WebMD repackaged as an app, to advanced malarial probes, lens-less microscopes and remote ultrasound sensors using mobile phones as a computational and communications platform.

Macaw, a new health app launched at this year’s CES show, lies squarely in this domain of remote sensing and reporting.  Macaw and its backers give a glimpse of some of the ideas and dynamics of the entry of this kind of technology in the marketplace.  Macaw is a joint venture from Qualcomm Life and US Preventive Medicine.  Qualcomm Life was previously known as Qualcomm Wireless Health and is the initiative of the chip maker to own the communications infrastructure for data from remote medical devices.  Basically, this app for your phone provides an activity and GPS tracker which is a small part of the preventive wellness plan that US Preventive Medicine retails to consumers for $49 initiation and $19/month at Sam’s Club.  This prevention plan includes activity, diet and lifestyle guidance to help users reduce their potential for acquiring debilitating illness.

Retailing products is new for USPM.  Most of prior business announcements have been about sales to employment groups.  The Macaw application is the first manifestation of the kind of integrated health management and monitoring applications to be built on the Qualcomm’s 2net technology platform, which Qualcomm hopes will grow to include a vast variety of medical sensing technology that they can make available to other remote medical monitoring and diagnostic applications.

I’ve used a few mobile health apps like Endomondo, Nike +, Lose it!, and MyFitnessPal, and, compared to any of them, Macaw is both cryptic and cartoonish.  It looks like the kind of software that you get when somebody else is paying for it.  I got through the sign up, answered the 7 questions they need to make a plan for me, and then I was stuck.  It wasn’t clear what to do next.  Somehow my plan didn’t materialize.   I thought about digging a bit further to figure this out, but paused.  Something was bugging me.

This app would seem to have all the ingredients for the complete fitness solution — it includes activity and lifestyle choices, eating right and activity.   The problem is that the business model and the benefits of application are all directed at the companies who provide the healthcare, and not at me, the consumer/patient.

I can get behind almost all the exercise and fitness apps on the market.  Nike is all about just doing it.  Livestrong is all about living strong as it were. I don’t have to question the motivation of the authors of the apps.  These people make money by you reaching your goals, being happy about it, and telling other people.  The goals of US Preventive Medicine are not so clear.  US Preventive Medicine provides counseling services to large corporations to help their employees live healthier lifestyles.  The idea being that they would then cost less to insure for health care, especially treatment for chronic medical conditions like diabetes and hypertension.

Seems to me that they make money when you, as part of a pool of subscribers to a health plan, lower your aggregate risk of getting an illness requiring managed care and maintenance (like diabetes.) My overall health and quality of life is incidental to providing medical cost outcomes to insurers and employers who contract for insurance programs.

Macaw kind of takes the fun out of getting healthy.

I am sure I am not alone in this sentiment –  when I’m running 25 miles a week or counting calories to reach my fitness goals,  I’m not really interested in a “win-win” with the insurance company.  I’m doing the work for my health.  When you look at who benefits, it is fairly transparent.  US Preventive’s messaging and public communications all point to the fact that their customers are insurance companies or the corporations buying health insurance, not the people trying to be healthier.  And, so, my spider sense tingled, my cynicism took hold, and I abandoned the app.

This is really too bad, because preventive health education and engagement programs are the best bang for buck in terms of both patient quality of life and return on investment.  I personally want them to succeed.  To do so, however, they will need to shift their model to be relevant to and authentic for their real customer.

Apocalypse No.

This ad is wrong in so many ways, it’s kind of hard to start.  First, why a Mayan apocalypse?  Mayan apocalypse is no more probable than a zombie invasion, virus outbreak, or the gods of Asgard coming down to earth.  Any of those offers a lot more comedic opportunity. It might be better to stay away from apocalyptic scenarios altogether.   Disaster is not far from the top of my mind.  Last year a tsunami and nuclear meltdown poisoned a fifth of Japan.  The earth is getting hotter because of industrial activity.  Industrial activity like building Chevy trucks that get less than 20 miles per gallon.  I don’t advise car companies to evoke Ragnarok, but if you have to go there, at least, have it make sense.

For example, what kind of jerk would look at the destruction out the window of his truck and smile?  If the world ended in a cataclysm, the first thing I would do is go looking for my wife and kids or my siblings or my mom.  I might smile at my dog, but it would be a bittersweet gesture as I fixated on the all the people killed and ripped from their loved ones. I wouldn’t go meeting up with a bunch of fat guys at some random place (Wall Street?) to talk about who or who didn’t survive and what truck they drove.

If I were that into trucks, I would have driven down to the nearest Landrover dealership and taken my pick of the trucks on the lot.  (Or the Ferrari dealership).   Then, I would be focused on rounding up a couple of years’ supply of gas, food, and ammunition.  See, I’ve seen all the apocalyptic movies and I know the script.  Speaking of, isn’t the Walking Dead the best show ever.  I’ve been reading the serialized graphic novel and if that isn’t literature, I don’t know what is.  Chevy had an awesome product placement in that show, when Glen finds a brand new orange Camaro, hot wires it, and uses the wailing of the car alarms to lure the zombies away from the other survivors.

Second, if the guy just drove out from under a pile of rubble and his truck is undamaged, why is he all dirty? What exactly is the timeline here?  How did he get into the truck if it was under a pile of rubble?  Frogs fly from the sky at the end, but before that, the spot becomes buried under an avalanche of red herrings.  There is a Bob’s Big Boy sign on fire, a giant robot a la Transformers, and a kilometer wide spaceship from Independence Day.  Cool references, but what does it mean?

Basically, they got it all wrong.  What this spot needed was zombies.  Zombies give the protagonist something to struggle against.  Maybe Ford trucks just don’t hold up against zombies as well as Chevy.  That is a storyline I could get into.

The understanding I am left with is that the apocalypse happened because of the same kind of unthinking consumerism that is epitomized by people whose main interest in the immediate aftermath of a world-ending cataclysm is to figure out which kind of truck is better and eat some twinkies.

TwitPic @adam_hinton

Last week, I wrote about Nike Fuel and the FuelBand that is being launched this month.  I took a spin over to the Nike channel on youtube and can see how the marketing is shaping up.  This is going to be a hit.  Nike has managed to wrap up the idea of “Just Do it” in the functionality of the product and just like they managed to move fitness apparel into a fashion statement beyond the strictures of performance athletics.  The product engagement ecosystem includes the device and it’s design, the smartphone apps, the website apps, twitter, celebrity athletes and endorsers.

Message #1:  All activity is good and athletic

Message #2: “Be Like Mike”

The way Nike is marketing this idea may very well get people over their reticence to post their exercise activity.  I don’t post my workouts on Facebook because I don’t want to brag and I’m not sure anybody really cares.  I do post them all to Endomondo and share because I want to find other people who are running in SF and want to encourage anyone who may be interested.  But everybody on Endomondo is already “doing it”, so I’m not recruiting new customers.  I think Nike Fuelband users will post on Facebook.  They are already posting on Twitter  even before the Fuelband is in the market. The #Makeitcount hash tag is generating a ton of activity.  You have a mix of consumer and celebrity athlete tweets streaming on the site. The idea has legs, and Nike has a product that will help users realize their aspirations.

On a related note the Nike athlete vignettes look a lot like an ad I helped make back in the 90s for Adams golf:

Bagel making at La Victoria on ravn.com

You wouldn’t think it too hard to find something an activity for the family on weekends in San Francisco.  The city is a tourist Mecca.  It’s practically designed for amusement.  Yeah, right.  I find myself scrambling through the listings on sfgate.com trying to find something age appropriate that isn’t a San Francisco tourist franchise.   That’s why I was delighted to find ravn.com.  Just type in what mood you’re in, and who’s in your posse  and your price range.  The site comes up with interesting appropriate activities to do.  I can see it becoming a regular part of my planning. Check it out!

Hot on the heels of my endomondo review from last week, comes news about fitbit.  The company closed a round of $12 million in series C funding.  The money ostensibly is to launch and gain market traction for their new product, the Aria, a wirelessly connected scale and body fat percentage sensor.  I thought I saw their first product, the Ultra in Costco last weekend.  A quick perusal of the box marketing led me to the conclusion that it was a $100 pedometer.  But then I realized that this wasn’t the fitbit, but another wireless sensor called Bodymedia Fit Core, which monitors temperature, galvanic skin response and motion.  The wireless communication adds some value, but I couldn’t really see it as useful for me.  Without GPS you’ve just a got a pedometer.  You can buy a pedometer for about $5 on Amazon.  Getting rid of the data entry isn’t necessarily going to help you lose weight or get fit.  Ultimately you can tell if what you’re doing is working by stepping on the scale once a week.

I have endomondo on my Android phone which records my real effort of moderate exercise and a lot of ways to visualize my performance on a website.  I believe the Aria’s wireless scale and body fat tester changes the game somewhat.  As the CEO describes it, the Aria “closes the loop” between tracking a user’s effort and the results.   I think there might be something to this.  Whereas the Ultra has fewer sensors and less functionality than app on your phone, there is no way your phone can weigh you or calculate your body fat percentage.

Regardless of the raw functionality, fitbit is going to have to figure out a way to make weighing yourself fun.  I think that Wii Fit nailed this with the way they made weighing into a game.  No matter how good or bad the result of the weigh in, Wii fit gives you two other ways to win. You can try to be as still as possible and equally distribute your weight on the scale while you’re weighing in.  You then get a selection of two balance and agility games.  Your performance on the games gives you a Wii fit age, a synthetic score which purports to measure your overall fitness.

Whatever the validity of the Wii Fit Age score, I found the Wii Fit tremendously fun and I have used it pretty consistently for over a year an average of 3 times a week.  For some reason the rest of the family never got into it.    My daughter would do the body test with me once every couple of months.  My wife has used it maybe 3 times.

There are more cool devices like this in the market.  Jawbone’s UP is a cool looking band. Now comes the Nike FuelBand to the mix of products in the mobile wellness category.  The winner in the space is going to be the product with the best software, the simplest interface, and the strongest social sharing pull. I’ll let you know who I think that is in my next post.

http://www.nike.com/fuelband/

"Look at me. You aren't afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since before you were born?" - Miss Havisham

Fitbit’s new Aria isn’t the first wireless scale. A French company called Withings has had a wireless scale on the market since at least 2009.  I believe Withings is going to fail.  The products look cool in an international space-age plastic frog design kind-of-way, but the name is poison.  I don’t know what it sounds like in French, but in English, the first image it conjures up is “withering”.  Withering, as in decrepit chair-bound Mrs. Havisham of Great Expectations.  At the very least it conjures up “Wuthering” as in Wuthering Heights.  Tragic love story, but more clearly remembered as a book you didn’t want to read in high school.  It’s the antithesis of a thriving fitness program.   I first ran into Withings in the sensor menu of one of the GPS running trackers I installed on my Android phone.  I looked it up online once, but the name was so repellent, I immediately crossed it off the list for consideration.  What were they thinking when they named this thing?  The “wi-“part is probably representing “Wi-Fi” and “things” because they were planning a long lines of Wi-Fi enabled sensors.  Put that all together and you have a brand that has no connection to product benefits or the consumer.  I don’t want anything named Withings.  Nike FuelBand on the other hand, has all the write syllables in all the right places. “Fuel” rocks: Top Fuel, Jet Fuel, Fuel for the Fire. Regardless of what it does.  I want fuel.  I take a deeper look into Nike’s FuelBand in my next post.  I’ll explore why I think it is a major winner and what they need to do right to win the mobile wellness category.

Nike FuelBand

What Klout is to online influence, Nike Fuel could be to exercise.  And there isn’t a company better positioned to pull it off than Nike.   Mobile wellness sensors have been gaining steam for years, but exploded at this year’s CES.  Each product claims more axes of accelerometers, or data samples per second.  I don’t see many of these capturing much market share. The gadget sites and investor news have been hyperventilating about the FuelBand’s design. Yeah, it’s cool, but not necessarily cooler than Jawbone’s UP or the fitbit for that matter.   At least Nike has stepped away from making seamless white boxes like their + cadence sensor for iPod.

Nike’s activity tracker is poised to dominate not because of the design (which is cool).  The big idea is Nike Fuel.  When you use the FuelBand you earn Nike Fuel which is a synthetic index for your activity.  Fuel is earned the same way for everybody so whether you are walking fast to get to the bakery before all the chocolate chip cookies run out, or you are doing wind sprints at the track, the software score you fuel points.  Nike is paying off their long time brand promise of enabling their customers to be like the athletic legends who pitch for them. Remember “Be Like Mike” and “Just Do it”?  The Nike Fuel band, software and social sharing are the embodiment of the idea.  You can measure your activity against anyone else in the world.

People can share their fuel scores online with friends and the interface on the band and iPhone shows how well a user is doing against their daily goal with a color-coded fuel meter.  Abstracting fitness metrics like steps, miles, calories and duration to a synthetic normalized number, let’s everybody play the same game in fitness, from Lance Armstrong to your Aunt Sally.  With the simplicity of Klout, Nike has the potential to give people struggling for fitness a way to win socially online.  There are challenges: Klout was able to realize the hockey-stick growth curve because they could estimate and publish anyone’s Klout score calculated from their public Twitter activity.  Nike is going to have a harder time.  Although Nike can get the fuel readings from the contracted athletes, for the market to take off, Nike needs a large percentage of users to share their daily or live feed scores.  People may not just do it.  They may hesitate to share because they are embarrassed by their lack of activity.  Conversely, they may not share because they don’t want to flaunt their exercise success to friends who may not be having such a good time of it.

Either way, I want some Nike Fuel.  Too bad it is only for the iPhone.

People out running in Copenhagen

When I was younger, I’d go running with my girlfriend in the park.   When I chose our route, I would mix in hills (they are hard to avoid), and maybe stretch the distance a bit.   She was a runner, but hated running hills, and often  took the difficulty of my chosen route personally, as if I was tricking her.  There were times when she was downright pissed. I would say, “I didn’t put that hill there.”  That went over like a lead balloon.

As a solution, we decided to map our routes together.   So, we measured the distance and mapped the route the old-fashioned way.  We’d take the car to the top of the Golden Gate Park.  Watching the odometer, we’d drive to the one mile point, get out of the car and mark a line on the road in chalk. We’d continue marking the miles off all the way to the beach and back up.  In less than a week, all the chalk marks would be gone.  Street sweeping, overspray from the sprinklers and foot traffic would wipe it all away.  Even spray paint didn’t last more than a couple of weeks.  We also tried noting landmarks like a tree or a no parking sign that corresponded with the mile distances, but these things changed as well.

Now I have my choice of run tracker apps to use for this purpose.  They not only mark the distance, but the overall time, lap time, elevation and even the playlist you listen to.  I have installed a bunch.  On my android phone, I have endomondo, runkeeper, immapmyfitness, google tracks, runstar, recordbeater, and rhythmrunner.  I’ve tried each of them at least once.  They all purport to track your run and give you precise records of your performance.

That’s the theory.  GPS on my Droid X is a little dodgy, however.  Sometimes all I have to do is to turn the GPS off and back on again.  Other times I have to turn off the whole phone.  Once I’ve gone through the reboot cycle and the phone has my GPS position. I can start and do the run.

Phones are amazing.  They have all the sensors in them to track and respond to your location speed, cadence and the processing power to be an excellent sports tracker.  Except for one thing, that capacitance touch screen is really not good.  First, when you are running, it is easy to hit the wrong button or part of the screen.  You are bouncing up and down, glancing away to make sure you don’t run into anything, and you are maybe a little short on breath.  The odds of hitting the wrong button are pretty high.  The wrong button may end your workout prematurely, pause your workout so you end up not recording the last mile that you ran, or call your boss.  That’s not the worst part. Sweat.  Touch screens don’t work so well when they are wet.  One drop of sweat on the screen and the phone goes in paroxysm, randomly triggering buttons, bouncing around screens and not responding to touches.  The fit is irreversible.  The only cure is to wipe the sweat off the screen and reboot.  This messes up my running rhythm, and it happens with every running app.  This may have skewed my opinion of some of them.

Regardless, I’m sticking with endomondo.  The interface is really good.  I can’t remember if I had to login the first time or not.  But now I just hit start and run. It tells you when you hit the mile laps and your pace.  You can pause anytime and it stops adding to your time.  You resume and it picks up where you left off without penalizing you for the time off.  You can automatically have it pause when you stop moving.  I turned this off because my cranky GPS, but I like the idea.  Although it records your workouts on your phone including the route maps, there are a whole bunch of other goodies on the website.  You can see all your workouts, participate in distance and speed challenges and find other runners in your area.

There may be 6 million users worldwide, but they aren’t in San Francisco.  That’s disappointing, because the social features on the website are awesome.  You can see the profiles, pics, routes and workouts of other people in your area (should they choose to share their information).  You can view who is running or cycling right now and track their progress in real-time.  Of all the location-based apps, this one is delivers tremendous functionality.  Just for kicks, I picked a place with a lot of users, Copenhagen to see who was doing what.  There were at least 50 people running or cycling around.  If you’re single, you could scan for attractive fitness buffs to coincidentally run into on the path.

And, to really enjoy the benefits of these apps, there needs to be a solution to the sweat problem.  My new invention idea for this is the Running Rag.  It is a square of super-absorbent fabric that you clip to your running gear.  When you want to mess with your phone to skip a song, take a look at your vitals, or see which single prospect is coming your way, you wipe your forehead and hands on it to keep any moisture from messing up your screen.  It becomes a fashion statement, your Running Rag.  There is ample precedent.  Golf towels are ubiquitous and carry the same branding opportunities.  Think on it.

By the way, the wireframe app I’m using is also from Balsamiq.  Awesome.  I’m likewise digging the UI Patterns and Patternry libraries of solutions to common interaction problems.