Moderating a SXSW panel today called “Digital Sport: Know More, Do More,” Fallon asked a group of execs, as well as gold medal-winning Olympic athlete Allyson Felix, why data gathering is becoming increasingly important in sports and gaming.

After introducing himself as a lover of technology, as evidenced by his impressive Twitter following, Fallon shook his wrist up and down emphatically to try to boost his Nike Fuel, the new currency by which Nike measures activity for FuelBand.

“That’s why 12-year-old boys have higher Fuel levels,” Fallon quipped, to a series of laughs and groans from the audience.

“Really, Nike+ is pretty cool,” Fallon added. “There’s this one loop I used to walk around my house that I thought was two miles — and it turns out it’s only one mile.”

Nike’s vice president of digital sport, Stefan Olander, said Nike’s foray into digital data tracking through its gear has taken a practice previously known only to elite athletes and made it available to everyone. Nike used to be a product company, he said, but with Nike+ and the FuelBand, it’s becoming more of a service company. By offering data tracking, “you’re offering a service, too,” Olander said.

“Two million EA games have been played in the last month alone,” said Andrew Wilson, executive vice president and head of sports for Electronic Arts. By gathering data on that activity, “it’s like crowdsourcing for how to make a better game.”

“It used to be that we’d make a game and present it,” Wilson added. “Now we just present the components of the game and continue to build it out based on the conversation from the online community.”

In recent years, the market for wearable fitness tech for casual athletes has grown rapidly. See our earlier coverage of devices like the Fitbit, Jawbone UP and Nike FuelBand to get a sense of how some of these devices work. According to a report last year from ABI Research, wearable wireless sensors for fitness and well-being are expected to surpass 80 million devices by 2016, eclipsing the wireless sensor markers for professional and home health-care monitoring.

Fallon asked Nike’s Olander what his power workout song was. “Eye of the Tiger,” someone in the audience correctly guessed.

At the end of the panel, an attendee challenged Fallon to a race down the aisles of the room, which Fallon gamely agreed to. Sadly, the results were masked by the crowds in the aisles and at the back of the hall.

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If the early buzz over a rubberized activity-tracking wristband that syncs with your smartphone gives you deja vu, it might be because you’ve seen this all before — with something called the Jawbone UP.

Oh, right. The UP! So, what’s going on with the Jawbone UP?

Unfortunately, what we don’t know is still more than what we do know. Jawbone, which is known for its slick audio products in addition to the UP, paused production and agreed to issue no-questions-asked refunds for faulty UP bands back on Dec. 9. The company has declined to say anything specific about when it might resume production of the device, or if consumers will see a hardware update.

A spokeswoman for Jawbone has said that refunds are still in progress, and reconfirmed that the company still doesn’t have anything to share in terms of timing.

Jawbone did recently update the UP iPhone app, as it said it would; based on the update description, which includes vague “bug fixes,” the app update seems incremental.

We also know that Jawbone’s UP testers program is ongoing.

As part of the program, volunteers are sent UP bands to test and offer feedback on. They’re also issued challenges, and asked to weigh the UP against competing devices. Participants are required to respond to regular surveys and had to sign a binding confidentiality agreement, meaning that, outside of designated UP tester channels, they’re not supposed to blog, tweet or talk to the media about the product.

The program kicked off in early January and was invite-only (it’s now closed to new participants).

Below, you can see some of the questions Jawbone is posing to UP testers:

Readers, are you still using your UP wristbands, or have you returned them for a refund? Feel free to leave your comments below.

(UP band photo courtesy of Flickr/m8roberto)

A new Nike+ “pressure sensor” is coming to Nike basketball and training shoes. The sensors will track data about wearers’ movements and transmit it wirelessly to their iPhones. The enhanced basketball shoes are meant to track the movements of players during practice sessions and games, including (but not limited to) how high the wearers jump. The training shoes are meant for casual and competitive athletes involved in any intense fitness activity.

Nike has been adding sensors to its athletic gear since 2006, though some of the products send data to an iPod or accompanying fitness watch rather than to a smartphone. The company says the Nike+ community has grown to more than six million “digitally connected” athletes.

Last month, Nike introduced the Nike+ FuelBand, a lightweight rubber wristband meant to be worn all the time to track fitness levels, which are measured in a Nike-branded activity currency called NikeFuel.

With these new basketball and training shoes, Nike says, workout statistics can be shared with friends on social networks. They also offer a “showcase” mode, which allows wearers to superimpose their live data onto a video that can then be shared with friends. So now, when a heated debate arises about who jumped higher on the court, you can take it inside, to Facebook.

A couple of unanswered questions — which I’ll ask Nike in a short while, and update as needed — is whether the sensor uses Bluetooth or another kind of wireless technology to transmit the data, as well as how far the reach of the sensor is. Most casual basketball players I know wouldn’t want to carry their smartphones in their pockets while playing (and I’m imagining it’s the same case with pro players). So would the user have to head to the sidelines or locker room and be within a certain proximity of his or her phone to transmit the data? Or does the data sync automatically?

And I’m curious to hear more about how verticals are actually measured. For example, if one foot edges higher than another, is the ultimate measurement an average of the two verticals? Or is it from the foot that got higher?

The company’s first sensor-enabled basketball shoe will be the Nike Hyperdunk+, which will cost $250 and hit stores this June. The first training shoes that work on the Nike+ system will be the Lunar Hyper Workout+ for women and the Lunar TR 1+ for men.

Nike has said LeBron James will wear the Nike Hyperdunk+ shoes this summer at the London Olympics.

Update: Nike’s vice president of digital sport, Stefan Olander, offered some more details on how the new pressure sensor works.

It reads four key pressure points in the foot to track when the feet leave the ground, Olander said. That data is combined with accelerometer technology to measure gravity and overall movement.

While data transmission in the “old” Nike+ sensors and running sneakers is enabled through Nike’s proprietary radio protocol, the latest Nike+ sensors use a new kind of Bluetooth technology that is said to be faster — and saps less power from connected devices. The data is stored locally on the sensor, and users can (wirelessly) upload the data to their iPhones when they’re done with their basketball or training session.

Also, the new pressure sensors are put into both left and right sneakers — unlike earlier versions of Nike+ sensors, which slipped into just one shoe — to more accurately measure the wearer’s movements. Whether the user takes off from the left foot or right foot — for example, when shooting a layup or attempting to dunk — Nike knows the timing of the foot pressure; the company claims it has created an algorithm that is more than 96 percent accurate in measuring jumps.

I wasn’t at today’s press event, but here are some tweets from those who were, including, naturally, Nike:

Improve every time you step on the court or in the gym. Introducing Nike+ Basketball & Nike+ Training #innovate http://t.co/7dsnBBwq

February 22, 2012 8:23 am via Nike PublisherReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nike

Nike

Nike has just unveiled a Hyperdunk shoe with a pressure sensor that tracks every move & allows you to upload it.

February 22, 2012 8:21 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@darrenrovell

darren rovell

#Nike is arguing that it will bring the power of its own lab to any athlete through technology. I like the idea of the connected athlete.

February 22, 2012 8:18 am via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@jeffjarvis

Jeff Jarvis

Nike+ will tell you how high you jumped when you okay bball!!! That’s unreal!!

February 22, 2012 8:23 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@omid

Omid Ashtari

Here’s a promotional YouTube video featuring Mr. James himself, showing off the sneakers and how another player’s vertical data is transmitted to the iPhone:

In the two months since Path 2 launched, it has attracted a million new users, according to Path CEO Dave Morin. That’s roughly the same amount Path got in its entire first year.

(Path still has a long way to go; Morin’s former employer, Facebook, announced this week that it has 845 million users, and the social juggernaut has in the past year added “close friends” lists and better sharing and filtering tools.)

Beyond the two-million user milestone, Morin shared a bunch more stats and info about Path’s progress to date.

On the engagement front, he said 70 percent of people who use Path in a week return the next week.

Path users have created over 50 million items of content and half a billion pieces of feedback. The latter is a somewhat inflated stat, because “feedback” is created every time a user looks at content on Path. But for reference, there are 15 million pieces of feedback created on Path per day now, versus 10 million total in the first year, Morin said.

The most common types of content shared on Path are photos, “thoughts” (status messages) and sleep records (users can manually note when they power down for the night and when they wake up in the morning), in that order.

There’s one song posted on Path per second, and the most popular artist is Drake.

Am I getting too “in the weeds” here? How about some geographic data: The U.S. is by far Path’s biggest country, but other fast-growing contributors include the U.K., Germany, Japan, France and Korea.

San Francisco-based Path had 15 employees when Path 2 launched; now it’s up to 25.

What’s next for the company?

Well, it launched tilt-shift photo and video filters this week. Next up are extended platform tools (Path already has a deal to get health data from Nike), smarter friend-request filtering, and perhaps a Windows Phone app, Morin said.

So, perhaps the obvious next question — given Path raised Series A funding a year ago — is when will Path hit investors up for more money?

That answer was more inexact. “Sometime,” Morin said.

(Photo description credit: Dave Morin accepts the 2012 Crunchie award for best design from Google’s Marissa Mayer; (cc) Kenneth Yeung — www.snapfoc.us on Flickr)

Andy Smith, CEO of IAC-owned DailyBurn, says that the benefit of fitness-tracking tools goes away after the first few weeks, and users ultimately fall into the same activity — or inactivity — patterns as before.

“They do help a small subset of people,” Smith said. “You find that there are type-A personalities that like to track everything, and that’s great. For others, it might give them a little jump start. But the value proposition of those devices after the first few weeks goes way down.”

DailyBurn is a fitness-data-tracking company that is now focusing on fitness content. The company pivoted partly because data-tracking wasn’t all that effective, Smith said.

Last week, Nike introduced a $150 lightweight wristband with a tri-axis accelerometer for gauging activity levels; earlier this week, Fitbit — maker of the popular Fitbit device — announced that it had raised $12 million in Series C funding to continue making fitness products.

Nike’s FuelBand just became available for preorder, so it’s too early to tell how enthusiastic consumers are about that particular device. And while it’s unclear how many Fitbit units have sold since it hit the market in 2009, the newer Fitbit Ultra is listed as one of the top 50 products in the health-and-fitness section on Amazon.com.

Another wearable fitness device, the Jawbone UP, is currently in production limbo as the company deals with technical and hardware issues, but the wristband was initially received with excitement from some consumers.

“I feel like these are not quite a gimmick, but are close to it,” Smith told AllThingsD. “You get people to spend $100 to $150 bucks on something that’s just a glorified accelerometer — which, by the way, you have in your phone, too.”

“I think people know when they’re not active,” Smith added. “They know if they didn’t move around enough today. I don’t buy it.”

Smith’s opinion is informed by the fact that DailyBurn used to be more data-oriented, but has since shifted its strategy become more content-focused, he said.

DailyBurn first launched in 2008 under the name Gyminee. Back then, the company was tailored more toward fitness data tracking and the sharing of data through social networks to help users meet their weight loss goals.

In May 2010, the company was acquired by IAC. At the time, the company claimed 500,000 members; Smith said it has around two million users now.

Following the acquisition, DailyBurn introduced the DailyBurn Tracker app, as well as food-tracking app Meal Snap, an attempt to spur weight loss motivation by giving caloric estimates based on photos of food.

Ultimately, Smith said, constant tracking isn’t necessarily the best way to facilitate that.

With DailyBurn’s newest fitness product — a personalized Web video program that streams over smartphones and the iPad to users’ TV sets — the company is focused on getting people to exercise four to six times a week, for 30 minutes a day, at a good level of intensity. It’s not something you buy that’s a quick fix, Smith said.

Readers, what are your thoughts? Are health-and-fitness tracking devices useful or useless?

The new round comes entirely from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures.

The company said it plans to use the funding mainly for hiring and for aggressive product development. Fitbit declined to elaborate further on what type of new product or products it has up its sleeve, except to say that it is now looking ahead to other connected and affordable health-and-fitness devices for the year, and is hiring top engineers to get the company there.

But Fitbit’s next steps — no pun intended — probably need to be very strategic ones.

The funding round comes amid increasing competition from other makers of wear-’em-and-forget-’em data-tracking devices. While Fitbit has been a leader in this area of health-and-fitness tracking, Jawbone, a maker of audio products, launched the $99 UP wristband tracker late last year, which was initially received with enthusiasm. And Nike just introduced its version of a polymer-encased wristband, the FuelBand.

The Jawbone UP has since suffered technical difficulties, forcing the company to refund unhappy customers and temporarily pause production.

But with the $149 FuelBand, Nike has brought big-brand cachet to activity tracking. And Nike isn’t just targeting the serious athlete or runner anymore — it’s going after the casual athlete and the desk jockey, too.

While some fitness devices involve the use of pedometers, accelerometers or galvanic skin-response sensors, Nike’s band promises to combine oxygen uptake with the activity tracked through the device’s tri-axis accelerometer for a high-tech reading. To be fair, it’s not entirely clear yet how that differentiates the FuelBand, and we won’t be able to gauge how well it works until we can get our hands on one and test it.

The Fitbit also uses a three-dimensional accelerometer to measure users’ steps and activity levels. When the $100 Fitbit device launched in 2008, it punched up the idea of the average pedometer, and offered hassle-free, wireless uploading of 24-7 personal analytics and activity data. Fitbit also created a Web dashboard through which users can monitor their activity levels; for $50 a year, Fitbit users can view even more detailed analytics.

In October 2011, the company introduced the Fitbit Ultra, which added a digital clock, a stopwatch and an altimeter that measures elevation gain; a Fitbit iPhone app was launched, too.

San Francisco-based Fitbit, which recently started selling Fitbits in Canada and the U.K., declined to say how many units have been sold to date. In the U.S., the Fitbit recently became available in Target stores through a retail partnership.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Fitbit also unveiled the Fitbit Aria, a Wi-Fi-enabled “smart” scale, as Forbes reported here. The company plans to ship the scale starting in April.

(Fitbit photo courtesy of Redefinery/Flickr)

The Nike+ FuelBand measures time, calories, steps and “NikeFuel.” It uses an accelerometer to measure movement, has built-in USB and 20 LED flights that flash red or green to show your progress, and can connect wirelessly to the iPhone via Bluetooth.

The FuelBand comes with a free iPhone app, and is social network friendly, for those users who want to share their activity updates with Facebook, Foursquare and even Path. For now, the FuelBand app is iOS-only. Stefan Olander, Nike’s vice president of digital sport, says that the company will eventually explore other mobile operating systems for the app.

Nike, for competitive reasons, currently isn’t sharing details on how the band calculates users’ NikeFuel levels, whether they’re running, skateboarding, or doing any other kind of physical activity. The idea of NikeFuel — a measurement or score of a user’s activity — sounds a little bit like the Fitbit’s “flower power” currency. It’s a way for users to compare workouts without necessarily referring to data like calories burned, which may differ from user to user.

With FuelBand, Nike seems to be taking a slightly different measurement approach from those of other makers of health-and-fitness bands. The company says it maps oxygen uptake against a three-axis accelerometer during both activity and downtime to measure the metabolic equivalent of a task (a.k.a. M.E.T).

The Jawbone UP, for example, measures steps, heart rate, calories burned and sleep patterns. Basis is also focused on measuring heart rate and other metrics with its Basis B1 Band (no chest strap needed). And BodyMedia’s Fit armband uses galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors to measure body temperature and how much heat has dissipated from the body to determine the amount of energy that’s being used.

The Nike+ FuelBand will be available for preorder in the U.S. on Jan. 19, and will cost $149 — more than the UP, less than the B1 Band, and in the same range as BodyMedia’s bands.

Nike has a few other wearable workout tools already on the market, but its FuelBand is really meant to be worn all day, so Nike device users don’t have to switch from day wear to workout wear. With the FuelBand, Olander says, Nike is aiming to hit all areas and levels of the fitness market, not just serious athletes and runners.

Here’s a quick rundown of how the FuelBand compares to Nike’s other fitness-monitoring devices:

There’s the Nike+ SportBand, which currently retails for $59, has a slightly bulkier form factor, and works in conjunction with a sensor that goes under the sock liner of your left-foot Nike+ compatible shoe. This one is water-resistant, tracks distance, pace, time elapsed and calories burned, and stores 30 hours of running data. (It’s also available as a “Livestrong” SportBand.)

There’s also the $199 Nike+ GPS Sportwatch powered by TomTom, which works with or without a Nike+ sensor as well as a Polar WearLink Transmitter for measuring heart rate. Compared to a single rubbery wristband, that’s a lot of stuff to carry around; without those devices, the watch alone shows a mapped route and tracks time, distance, pace, heart rate and calories burned. It plugs directly into a USB port on your computer to upload run data and recharge the battery.

And the Nike Amp+ iPod Remote is no longer available through Nike’s store, but way back in the day — four years ago — it was a nifty device that synced the Nike watch to users’ iPods and provided voice updates on time, distance, calories and pace during workouts.

“I have about 50 pairs of Nikes in my closet, and it seemed to me like I should be treated differently by Nike than a customer who has zero pairs,” he said.

The thought inspired Swinmurn to start RNKD, which is launching in beta today. Customers can create profiles and upload pictures of items of clothing they already own by snapping a picture and designating brands and where they bought each piece.

“The idea was to bridge the gap between consumers and brands by using what people already have in their closets,” Swinmurn said.

Users will be rewarded with badges and points for uploading photos, and will have the opportunity to win gift cards based on their participation. Swinmurn believes brands could use RNKD as a way to offer clothing at a discount to their most dedicated fans.

The emphasis is on the brand, rather than the store at which the apparel was purchased, which is how many other loyalty programs are designed.

Swinmurn, who left Zappos before it was sold to Amazon, also gained inspiration for RNKD after starting a small clothing line called Dethrone, which creates gear and clothing for practitioners of mixed martial arts. He said he sells 99 percent of the apparel to small shops. “We have no idea who walks into the shops and buys the product,” he said.

Swinmurn is hoping to tip the market on its head. Brands are already giving discounts on clothing at stores like Ross and T.J. Maxx, and on online flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, ideeli and Rue La La. But those discounts aren’t being given to the biggest fans of the brands.

Instead, Swinmurn argues, discounts should go to consumers who deserve them.

RNKD is based in San Francisco, and is self-funded by Swinmurn, who has an engineering team of one.

Klout went through a lot of change in the last year. It went from two to 30 employees. It raised $8.5 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft Partners. It tweaked its influence ranking algorithm many times (often tweaking the people who have come to depend on it, who sometimes saw their score lowered). It moved to a funky new office in a former shoe warehouse in San Francisco’s hippest start-up neighborhood, SOMA.

And last but not least, Klout had to deal with exponential increases in the amount of data it processes and delivers each month. For example, the company is now on track to process about 1 billion API calls per month, up from 100 million in January of this year. That’s just insane.

What Klout didn’t do in that time is change its Web site, or make clear to visitors what its business model is and who it is serving. The company is trying to do that today.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez describes what his company offers as a “social credit score.” He told NetworkEffect, “We want to be a standard. We want everyone to know their Klout score.”

Meanwhile, all sorts of companies are finding Klout useful. The company, which has only ever responded to inbound sales queries, according to Fernandez, has run campaigns for Audi and Hewlett-Packard, and works with Nike and Disney on an ongoing basis.

(Fernandez is pictured above wearing his custom Klout Nikes; in the video below he explains why it’s more interesting to help people understand their influence rather than companies understand who is influential.)

While Justin Bieber may have the highest Klout score of all–a perfect 100–effective campaigns often target people in the 40 to 60 range, who are topically influential rather than “mega superstars,” as Fernandez put it. (I don’t take freebies, but I’m apparently in the sweet spot, with a Klout score of 53.)

Klout finds these influential social media users and emails them about special, often local, promotions–say, a trip to Toronto to inaugurate Virgin America’s service there (which has since been discontinued, sadly), or a free laptop from HP, or a weekend in Napa using the new Audi A8.

Recipients of Klout’s emails about free stuff–which are not contingent on tweeting about the goodies–open the emails 80 percent of the time and opt in 70 percent of the time, said Fernandez. And because the promotions are so targeted and have measurable influence over their followers, the effective CPM that brands pay is “still really low,” he claimed.

But Klout feels it’s important to clarify that it is a consumer-focused business. “We’ve thought of 16 possible businesses but the only place we make money is campaigns,” Fernandez said. “We want to be Google, not comScore,” he said, explaining that he means it’s more valuable to be an enabler of many businesses than an analytics seller.

Klout’s business is similar (but not necessarily directly competitive) to other social endorsement companies that use its free API, like Ad.ly and MyLikes (Update: A representative for MyLikes comments that the company has stopped using Klout.). That’s an overlap the company is well aware of, said Fernandez. “We’re a company that’s built on everyone else’s API, so we have to be cool about it and let the market evolve,” he said. “Five hundred of the 2,000 [companies using the Klout API today] are probably doing things that compete with things we may want to do.”

See also: Our interview with researcher Duncan Watts on the temptation of understanding influence.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/klout-redesigns-to-emphasize-personal-influence-video/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/in-another-pre-ipo-move-jive-software-adds-four-directors-all-with-public-company-experience/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/in-another-pre-ipo-move-jive-software-adds-four-directors-all-with-public-company-experience/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:10:03 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4528 In its latest step toward an initial public offering, social enterprise software concern Jive announced that it is bulking up its board of directors, adding four new members, all of them with either experience on public boards or at large publicly held or soon-to-be-public companies.

Two of the new directors come from the software security firm McAfee, where Jive CEO Tony Zingale held a board seat from 2008 until its $7.7 billion acquisition by chip giant Intel: Charles Robel was McAfee’s chairman and has been on its board’s audit committee, and sits on the board of Autodesk and is the lead independent director on the board of Informatica; and David DeWalt was McAfee’s president, and before that was president of software sales and services at storage giant EMC, following the acquisition of Documentum, which it acquired in 2003 and where he was CEO. Dewalt is chairman of the board at Polycom.

Jonathan  Heiliger  is  the  Vice  President  of  Technical Operations at Facebook, meaning he’s the one who makes Facebook go. He reports directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Before that he led the engineering team at Walmart.com, and before that he was COO at Loudcloud, the company that ultimately became Opsware.

Sundar  Pichai  is  vice  President  of  product  management at Google, and oversees such products as Google  Toolbar,  Chrome  and Chrome  OS. Before Google, he worked at Applied Materials, the maker of chip manufacturing gear, and was management consulting for McKinsey and Co.

I asked CEO Tony Zingale about Jive’s plans to go public. He wouldn’t comment on that, naturally, but its well understood that Zingale, who ran software company Mercury Interactive until its $4.5 billion sale to HP, was brought on with an IPO in mind, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year. He also wouldn’t comment when I asked him if Jive has hired any bankers.

But he did say that Jive is at what he called “an inflection point.” In case you hadn’t notice, social enterprise software is a segment that’s growing like crazy, with offerings from Salesforce.com, Parature, Yammer, and a host of others. “We’re building the next great enterprise software company,” Zingale says. “And guys like this don’t join boards of companies that aren’t already successful and that don’t have a pretty good runway ahead of them.”

Jive certainly has some momentum. It has about 3,000 corporate customers–including big names like Cisco Systems, Nike, VMWare, Intel and fast food giant Yum Brands–and about 15 million end users. And last year it landed a big $30 million investment from Kleiner Perkins. Its other investor is Sequoia Capital, which invested $15 million in 2007. Boomtown’s Kara Swisher talked to Zingale and another Jive director Ted Schlein about the investment in a video interview last year, which I’ve added below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/in-another-pre-ipo-move-jive-software-adds-four-directors-all-with-public-company-experience/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:42:32 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38082 Can the number of Facebook fans a company has tell you how its stock is performing?

At least one researcher thinks so. Arthur O’Connor, a doctoral student at Pace University in New York, is testing whether social-media popularity–as measured by Facebook “likes,” Twitter followers and YouTube views–is correlated with stock prices.

In a pilot study, Mr. O’Connor found a “statistically significant” correlation, although he tested only three brands–Starbucks Corp., Nike Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.–over a 10-month period. The more social-media fans a brand had, the better its stock was likely to do, even accounting for general market conditions.

The finding held true even though the three companies studied had very different returns. During the test, Starbucks stock increased 29 percent, Nike grew 14 percent and Coke fell by nearly 6 percent.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nike-digital-sports-stefan-olander/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nike-digital-sports-stefan-olander/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:05:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39404

While BoomTown was running around the endless floors of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I jogged right over to the folks at Nike, to see their new Nike+ SportWatch GPS.

The device is yet another step in Nike’s long march to try to digitize the running experience.

Nike put sweat into its digital efforts in 2006 with its wireless in-shoe sensor, which communicates with an Apple iPod.

Since then, it has moved on to its popular iPhone and iPod app, as well as an earlier watch called the Nike+ SportBand.

Now, in partnership with TomTom, it is upping the game with the new watch, which sends even more information back to the app and also its Nike+ Web site.

Nike is hoping to turn that destination, which has about four million members now, into a kind of inspirational social experience for runners of all levels.

The watch is part of that, of course, chronicling geo-location information and also a wide range of performance stats, such as time, pace, distance and calories.

Here’s my video interview with Stefan Olander, VP of Digital Sport at Nike in which we talk about it all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nike-digital-sports-stefan-olander/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/wakemate-finally-ships-will-you-sleep-better-now-that-its-watching-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/wakemate-finally-ships-will-you-sleep-better-now-that-its-watching-you/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:58:02 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34268

Let’s get this out of the way right now–WakeMate co-founder Arun Gupta said the start-up is finally shipping all pre-orders of the long-awaited sleep tracking gadget.

Gupta said, “Our goal is to fill all pre-orders by Christmas.”

And I can even verify that the unit exists, since I have been using one for a week now.

So why all the skepticism?

Because WakeMate–which began as an idea for a smart alarm clock back in 2006 and graduated out of the Y Combinator incubator in summer of 2009–has had more than a few delays in delivering product.

To be fair, the tiny company might have bit off a fair amount to chew. WakeMate chose a solution to the sleep-tracking problem that required it to build original hardware, a main Web application, as well as apps for Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

Thus, Gupta describes the first version of its product as “really, a public beta.”

And, WakeMate is indeed a little rough around the edges.

For example, the unit itself–with its semi-exposed electronics and shrink-tube wrapper–looks a little more like something hacked together on top of one of the mini DIY Arduino boards than it does a finished consumer electronics device.

But if you have any experience programming microcontrollers, you might appreciate the sort of sophistication that goes into coordinating this sleepy symphony of data gathering.

(Pardon us for a minute, while I get a little über-geeky and explain how the WakeMate wristband works. If this doesn’t concern you, feel free to fast-forward a few paragraphs to get to Gupta’s predictions for WakeMate’s future.)

When you flick the small switch on the WakeMate wristband, just prior to going to sleep, the device connects via Bluetooth to your iOS, Android or BlackBerry device.

You then open the WakeMate app and enter a 20-minute window during which you’d like to be woken.

The app talks to the wristband and transmits that time information. Then, both app and device enter a sort of low-power state. At this stage, the WakeMate becomes little more than a data logger.

There is a fairly standard, solid-state, three-axis accelerometer on board, much like the one that allows you to “shake to shuffle” your iPhone.

WakeMate then spits out three fields of data–X,Y and Z axis readings–40 times per second, which are stored in its flash memory all night.

That means an eight-hour sleep cycle will produce about 3.5 million unique data points, not including metadata.

The onboard clock–for the computer, not for human time-telling–waits until your pre-selected 20-minute window and then figures out, based on frequency and severity of wrist movement, when you are closest to being awake on your own.

When that moment comes, it wakes the Bluetooth connection, connects to the phone, sounds the alarm and starts uploading the data it collected all night directly to the phone and immediately sends the information to WakeMate’s servers.

And, not to worry, if the WakeMate dies mid-sleep, the phone knows to sound the alarm anyway.

It is quite a concert that needs to be played flawlessly for connectivity and battery life to remain intact.

Impressive data tricks aside, the world in which WakeMate was conceived looked a little different from the one into which it has been born, and that means a different set of competitive realities.

When WakeMate left Y Combinator, the world of iOS device-connected movement sensors was limited to the Nike Fit, which links running performance via a shoe-attached device.

It was also a world without Fitbit, another popular activity and health tracker.

And, unlike now, there were no sleep apps claiming to do what WakeMate does.

But now, even with all the new rivals, Gupta believes WakeMate still has the edge.

He explained: “In the early days of sleep-tracking studies, doctors decided to monitor non-dominant wrist movement as part of the data collected to determine sleep state. That continues today, so there is a ton of research that has been collected over the years on correlating wrist movement with sleep cycle.”

He added that WakeMate has built an algorithm that fits the data collected by its wristband to these medically relevant sleep-cycle models and spits out graphs mapping your sleep states, your waking moments and even times when you were in deepest sleep.

“All the competing tools out there aren’t at all based on any kind of accepted research–no one is studying pillow movement or waistband movement or anything,” Gupta said. “But we know how you are sleeping when you move your wrist.”

The major questions facing WakeMate as a company revolve around what one might expect from a start-up with such a complex beta product.

Gupta said it will focus on innovating and revising its wristband, as well as doing more interesting things with the data it will collect.

“On the macro level, we’re really doing the biggest sleep study that has ever been done,” he said. “We’ll be able to tell you how people are sleeping in San Francisco versus New York, based on seasons and all kinds of things.”

Gupta added that while he doesn’t know what the next step is, WakeMate is prototyping ideas where it could correlate sleep data with other metrics about health, occupation and stress to provide a more complete tool set.

But as more companies work on the problem of digitizing the analog data of human life, the harder questions to answer are really in front of the consumer.

Gupta said he doesn’t know what a world would look like if a health insurance company could access your sleep data, or when information about your apparent insomnia is grabbed by some hacker.

What WakeMate hopes for, he said, is a world where more people have access to the kind of medical data collection that has previously only been collectable by trained technicians in controlled settings.

But more data is better, as far as WakeMate is concerned–it is hoping that its vision puts its products at the center of an all-day biometric data collection future.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101222/wakemate-finally-ships-will-you-sleep-better-now-that-its-watching-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101203/make-the-rent-check-out-to-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20101203/make-the-rent-check-out-to-google/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:24:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26553 See? Google isn’t a one-trick pony, after all: The search giant is going to become a landlord, too.

Google is reportedly spending $1.9 billion to buy the New York City office building where it rents 500,000 square feet. And since the enormous property covers nearly three million square feet, that means Google is going to be cashing rent checks from all sorts of interesting tenants.

Barnes & Noble.com rents a big chunk of the building, which occupies an entire city block in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. So does Interpublic Group’s. Deutsch ad agency. And Sprint. And Nike.

And if Google ever wants to get a deal done with Spotify, the European music service that hasn’t made it to the U.S. yet, it won’t have to look hard to find the company: Spotify has a small outpost in the building, too.

Meanwhile, if you want to see Spotify founder Daniel Ek yourself, check out our D: Dive into Mobile conference next Tuesday, where I’ll be interviewing him onstage.

The Landlord from Will Ferrell

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101203/make-the-rent-check-out-to-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 02:32:02 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=144

Palm-CEO-turned-HP-exec Jon Rubinstein and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs faced off with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital at a Churchill Club event last night in an entertaining discussion on the future of mobile tech.

If you missed the live video feed of the event, check back with us–we’re working to repost the video. For those who want to read text, here is my liveblog of the event.

6:48 pm PT: We’re just finishing dinner. It was a chicken in some sort of puff pastry. Nothing is happening onstage, as if that wasn’t clear by the fact I am describing the meal. I think they will get started around 7:15 or so.

7:10 pm: Just about ready to go, with intros going on now. (And I just stole Kara’s seat at the head table.)

Kara: They’re both guys. Paul is taller and they work in tech.

7:14 pm: The plan is to talk about the future, but the event begins with a trip down memory lane as Jacobs holds up the Qualcomm PDQ–arguably the first smartphone combining a cellphone and Palm Pilot. For those who don’t remember, it it was bigger than a Palm Pilot and a huge phone strapped together.

7:20 pm: Digital device history continues. We’ve traced the last decade in digital devices, from the iPod through the Treo and iPhone. Don’t forget ringtones and cellphone bowling, Jacobs reminds us, referring to the Brew operating environment that Qualcomm developed.

The iPhone changed everything, Jacobs says, because it showed that the phone makers just weren’t putting enough work into the phone’s user interface.

7:28 pm: Talk is shifting to where we are today. What are the key things that are shifting? User interfaces, touch, etc. “The other things we are seeing is all of our lives are moving into the cloud,” Rubinstein says. On the limitation side, Jacobs points to the limitations of bandwidth: “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” Jacobs says, adding that the industry and government are working on it. ‘We are just going to have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”

The other big limitation, Jacobs says, is battery life. You can do all this cool stuff on your phone, but then the battery dies three-quarters of the way through the day. He puts in a plug for Mirasol–Qualcomm’s low-power display technology.

Rubinstein concurs that battery and bandwidth are the two biggest issues. “Battery technology has not progressed at the same rate as all of the other things we are trying to do,” Rubinstein says.

7:38 pm: What about all the operating systems out there, Kara asks. Rubinstein: “There’s plenty of room in the market for multiple systems,” he says, adding it won’t be like PCs, where one operating system dominates. “It’s just different today.”

Rubinstein says it’s still the infancy of the major transition. Put on the spot to rank the operating systems, Rubinstein says that clearly Apple and Android are going gangbusters. The battle, he says, is for who is going to be No. 3. “We’d sure like to be that.”

Jacobs: “I agree. It’s very early days to be calling winners and losers.” He sees pretty wide diversity of operating systems, at least for the next five years, unless the operators really clamp down. Even then, there are some alternate distribution channels emerging. Either way, Qualcomm’s in good shape as an arms dealer, he points out.

7:45 pm: Discussion of carriers. While they are immensely powerful, Rubinstein says they won’t be the only distribution channel for every wireless device. “They are not all going to go through the carriers,” Rubinstein says.

More and more screens will emerge, Rubinstein says. If I fast-forward enough years, he says, the walls are going to be big displays capable of talking to other devices.

Jacobs notes that people will be able to use their device with any tool they have access to, from a big screen to a headset to a wireless keyboard. He says Qualcomm is working on a technology that would allow wireless headsets that could work in-ear like a hearing aid.

7:50 pm: Talk about some outlandish things. Rubinstein has already thrown out the idea of a headset in your pillow. Rubinstein points out that there will be a lot of sensors, pointing to the Nike+iPod as a really early example of what we can expect a lot more of.

7:55 pm: Augmented reality is also going to be big, the panelists agree. “The (StarTrek) tricorder is going to happen,” Jacobs says. Health care will also tap mobile technology, particularly in emerging countries where there is less regulation, carriers are trusted and there are fewer skilled health care providers available. “It’s a very efficient way to manage health,” he says. “Over the next few years we will see this happen,” he says. Eventually it will come back to developed markets, but today there is too much legacy and too much regulation in places like the U.S.

8:10 pm: Sorry for the delay–we were fixing some issues with the video coding, which hopefully should be solved now. Anyway, Rubinstein and Jacobs have been throwing out things that they expect in the next five years.

Jacobs’s list includes digital networked textbooks, cellphones as gateways for health care, as well as using augmented reality to translate all the signs and menus in a foreign country.

Rubinstein and Jacobs both see a digital wallet becoming a reality, with Jacobs throwing out the idea of an end to checkout lines as the phone could pay and the store could electronically disable the security on goods, allowing the whole transaction to take place without interaction with store personnel.

“Legal shoplifting, that’s interesting.” Kara says.

The technical hurdles aren’t that big, Rubinstein says. “Clearly NFC (near-field communications) is coming.” It’s more of a social problem than a technical one, Rubinstein says.

8:21 pm: Some good audience questions. One, on what does it take to deliver an Apple-like experience. Rubinstein, who has experience as part of Apple and trying to “out-Apple” Apple, says he thinks that the key is delivering an intergrated experience.

“I don’t think Apple is the only one that can do it, but I do think it is important to have all the elements,” he says.

Another question is on the future of mobile TV–a question that prompts Jacobs to cover his face (Qualcomm spent a bundle on its MediaFlo mobile TV service that saw very limited consumer uptake and Qualcomm is now evaluating what to do with it).

Too few people liked what the service had to offer, Jacobs says, referring to limits on content, screen size, etc. Jacobs said it appears that probably broadcast makes sense for live events, while streaming with TiVo-like controls makes sense for everything else.

“I actually believe strongly in mobile TV, still,” he says.

8:30 pm: Okay. That’s a wrap from me. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to hear more from Rubinstein, he will be speaking at next week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:44:20 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=871 The prevailing opinion among tech entrepreneurs seems to be that everything, online and off, would be improved by a social component. For some sectors, what it means to “get social” is quite obvious: Yelp is made more interesting by learning what restaurants your friends recommend; millions of people love the shared experience of social games like FarmVille; Quora’s encyclopedia of knowledge is more valuable because it’s backed up by the social reputation of users’ real names.

But motivating people to be healthy and athletic is one of the most interesting and novel extensions of the digital social identity I’ve seen. Specifically, new features offered by the mobile GPS-tracking app RunKeeper, as well as its competitor Nike+, allow users to tell their Facebook friends when they are starting a run. If users comment on that status post, the encouragement is automatically sent from Facebook to the app and spoken out over the headphones of the runner.

RunKeeper, which makes both iPhone and Android apps, even allows users to automatically transmit their location to a live online map they can share with friends. (You’re right, that’s exactly like inviting people to stalk you.)

On a related note, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher recently wrote about how Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley set up his phone to automatically do a check-in at every mile marker as he ran the New York Marathon.

Since I think this idea of monitoring oneself and sharing personal data with the larger community is particularly interesting, I wanted to note that RunKeeper (actually its parent company, FitnessKeeper) announced today it had raised $1.11 million in funding led by new investor O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and including LaunchCapital and the company’s existing angel investors. Boston-based FitnessKeeper is still quite small, with nine people and $1.51 million total raised.

Nike+ screenshot via AppJudgment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101025/lebron-james-gets-a-jump-on-the-season-with-an-assist-from-the-internet/ http://allthingsd.com/20101025/lebron-james-gets-a-jump-on-the-season-with-an-assist-from-the-internet/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:18:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25061 LeBron James and the Miami Heat will usher in the new NBA season tomorrow night by playing the Celtics on TNT. But James and Nike got a head start on the season today, with help from YouTube and the rest of the Web.

Apologies for this, but it is indeed a slam dunk: James and his shoe company have a new ad to show off, and the Internet wants to see it, then talk about it. Google tallies 58 stories so far about the new ad. Make that 59….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101025/lebron-james-gets-a-jump-on-the-season-with-an-assist-from-the-internet/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/another-web-ad-shop-gets-gobbled-up-deep-focus-to-the-engine-group/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/another-web-ad-shop-gets-gobbled-up-deep-focus-to-the-engine-group/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:12:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24848 Deep Focus, the New York-based digital agency that works for Nike, Time Warner’s HBO, Microsoft’s Bing and many other blue chip names (here’s an example) has been acquired by U.K.-based The Engine Group. No terms disclosed, but there is this: “This isn’t an exit, it’s a grand freaking entrance,” blogs CEO Ian Schafer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/another-web-ad-shop-gets-gobbled-up-deep-focus-to-the-engine-group/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100924/exclusive-former-googler-cassidy-steps-down-as-polyvore-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20100924/exclusive-former-googler-cassidy-steps-down-as-polyvore-ceo/#comments Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:54:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=34180

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (pictured here), former president of Google’s Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations, is leaving her CEO job at the fashion and shopping social network Polyvore.

Co-founder Pasha Sadri, the creator of Yahoo (YHOO) Pipes, will take over from Cassidy as the company’s top exec.

According to sources, the pair had disagreed on scaling and strategic direction. The announcement was made internally at the start-up this afternoon.

The company confirmed the move (see statements below).

The registered site allows users to “mix & match products from your favorite stores” into fashion “sets” on any topic, from Haiti to the late designer Alexander McQueen.

In other words, everyone can play at being be a stylist, merchandiser or, if aspirations are high enough, presumably, the editor of Vogue magazine.

Founded in 2007, Polyvore has garnered $8.1 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Harrison Metal and Matrix Partners. It has just over a dozen employees and is based in Mountain Vew, Calif.

Sadri said in a previous interview that Polyvore was founded to allow people to link self-expression with real-world brands and products. The odd name for the company is a combination that seems to roughly mean the devouring of many or much.

Cassidy came to Polyvore in February.

She had previously left the search giant and joined venture firm Accel Partners as a CEO-in-residence last April.

“I was at the end of my streak [at Google] and ready to take the next step and run or grow my own company,” she said at the time. “It is key for me to be stepping out and spreading my wings now.”

Singh Cassidy was one of Google’s more visible execs and one of its highest-ranking women leaders. She had been at Google (GOOG) since 2003.

Previously, she was at Yodlee–an online banking start-up, which was backed by Accel–along with stints at Amazon (AMZN) and OpenTV.

Here is a video interview I did with the pair in late July, as well as with product head Jess Lee:

Here are statements from both Sadri and Cassidy:

We are grateful to have had Sukhinder with us at Polyvore. She is an incredibly talented leader who has scaled our company with new partnerships and raised our profile in the industry. We are immensely appreciative of her contributions to Polyvore. However, at this point in time, we have different visions on how to scale the company and take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us. As a result, the Board, Sukhinder and I have reached an agreement where I will resume responsibilities as CEO, a role I had prior to Sukhinder joining. When we founded the company, we believed we could be the style site where people could connect and share their ideas. Polyvore has grown to over 7 million unique visitors a month; a fashion set being created every 3 seconds and partnerships with Nike, Lancome and others.

Sukhinder will stay on as an advisor to the company as we grow and scale.

Polyvore is an amazing company with a strong community, product and team. The company has endless opportunities ahead of it to become the destination site for fashion style. In the seven months I have been at Polyvore, I have been pleased to scale the company with revenue, marketing, partnerships and key talent. However, at this point in time the founders and I have different visions for how to scale the company further and realize these opportunities. As a result the Board, Pasha and I have agreed that I will be moving on from my current role at the company. I will continue to serve as an advisor.

I plan to take a few months off to spend with my family. I am delighted to have worked with an incredible team in an incredible market space, and wish the team all success in the years to come.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100924/exclusive-former-googler-cassidy-steps-down-as-polyvore-ceo/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100901/the-icoach-apps-help-runners-go-farther-faster/ http://allthingsd.com/20100901/the-icoach-apps-help-runners-go-farther-faster/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:43:21 +0000 Nick Wingfield http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1494 Before the iPhone came out, I ran with a watch that uses GPS satellite technology to keep tabs on my pace, distance and other measurements when I run.

Like a lot of runners, I’ve gotten hooked on the ability to tally up how many miles I put in on the road and to use my watch to motivate myself to run a bit farther or faster.

The Adidas miCoach

These days ordinary smartphones have GPS built into them and developers are creating apps that use the technology for tracking runs. Plus some of the apps do a lot more than a GPS watch: They can help you devise a training schedule prior to races and more actively coach you during your runs.

I spent a couple of weeks using three running apps for the iPhone—Running Method’s Run Coach Pro, FitnessKeeper’s RunKeeper Pro and Adidas’ miCoach—with the goal of seeing whether any of them could be an adequate substitute for my GPS watch, a Garmin (GRMN) Forerunner 305, which cost me $190 two years ago with a companion heart-rate monitor (the same package now sells for $153 on Amazon). (There’s a BlackBerry version of miCoach app and an Android app is in the works.)

The answer, in one case, is an emphatic yes. There are, however, some tradeoffs to running with an iPhone that might make using any running app a deal-killer for some people. First, the iPhone is a handsome device that faces a risk of disfigurement from your sweaty hands as well as from falling onto concrete so runners will want to consider buying an accessory that keeps the phone safe.

My Garmin is a giant of a watch, but at least it doesn’t require its own carrying case on a run, unlike the iPhone. Armbands for the iPhone let you easily glance at the screen while you’re working out. I ran with the iPhone tucked into a carrying pouch that came with a water-bottle belt I used on long runs. The iPhone is also a music player, which meant I could leave the iPod Shuffle at home. The iPhone’s maps feature also would have been very helpful on runs in unfamiliar places where I’ve gotten completely lost.

Revolver’s Run Coach Pro ($2.99) was the most bare-bones apps I ran with. It starts by guiding you through a few selections to develop a training plan for everything from achieving basic fitness to finishing a 50K “ultra” run. You tell the app your experience level as a runner, when any race you plan to run will occur and which day of the week you like to do your long runs—the endurance workouts that are a cornerstone of half-marathon and marathon training.

The RunKeeper Pro app helps runners record information about their runs.

The app then crafts a weekly running schedule telling you which days to run and rest on; how long to run (in time terms); and how hard to run (for example, easy or race pace). During runs, it tracks your distance, your overall pace and time elapsed.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Run Coach Pro is that you have to look at the iPhone screen while you’re running to check on your progress. That’s a big distraction if, like me, you run with your iPhone in a case on a belt.

The app could have gotten around this by using voice commands to tell me through my headphones when to go faster or slower, which would have been helpful on days when the app recommended I do interval runs, where I was supposed to vary my pace.

RunKeeper’s RunKeeper Pro ($9.99), in contrast, uses a pleasant female voice to tell you when you’re falling short of or exceeding a target pace that you establish with the app before your run. You can control how often the voice chimes in through your headphones at various time and distance intervals.

It also helps them work out smarter, right.

If you’re listening to music, RunKeeper Pro temporarily dims your tunes so you can hear the voice commands. A free version of RunKeeper lacks these voice commands.

I was most disappointed by the lack of a feature that allows you to build a training calendar for a specific race. The publisher says such a feature is coming. The app syncs all the data it collects during a workout to the RunKeeper Web site, which makes it easy to look at some basic weekly and monthly statistics your runs, but charges extra for weekly reports with other data, like average pace and calories burned.

The free miCoach app from apparel maker Adidas does all the same run tracking of the other apps, but it was the only one to really use the intelligence of the iPhone to provide decent coaching during runs.

I first set up a training calendar for a half-marathon in November through the miCoach Web site on my computer, which then synced the plan with my iPhone. It then told me to do a 12-minute “assessment workout” during which a coach instructed me to proceed from a walk to a fast pace, providing detailed instructions on how much I should be exerting myself at each interval (“conversation should be difficult”). It assessed my fitness level by judging how fast I moved into different intervals.

This step was key for helping miCoach calibrate how fast I should be going during different stages of a run. All of the instructions it gave me during runs were personalized to my fitness level based on that initial assessment run.

Adidas has also done a good job keeping all of its coaching from getting too complicated. The app and its companion Web site use a color-coded system of speed zones, from the slowest, blue, to the fastest, red, to visually illustrate how difficult an upcoming series of runs will be.

It’s worth noting that all iPhones now ship with a running app made by Nike, which I omitted from this review because it currently requires an additional $19 sensor that attaches to your running shoes to track runs. A new version of the app that uses the iPhone’s GPS is due out soon. For now, miCoach is the only iPhone app for which I would forsake my Garmin watch.

Walter S. Mossberg is on vacation. Mossberg’s Mailbox will return Sept. 16. Email Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100901/the-icoach-apps-help-runners-go-farther-faster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100618/whos-winning-the-world-cup-online-its-nike/ http://allthingsd.com/20100618/whos-winning-the-world-cup-online-its-nike/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:00:31 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=26179 The real games at the World Cup might be on the soccer field–or “pitch,” if you’re being proper–but there’s also a World Cup competition of sorts on the Web, especially where advertisers are concerned.

Among brands that are advertising around the World Cup, Nike (NKE) is running away (horrible pun intended) with the online attention, according to several Internet and social-media trackers. A Nielsen study released Friday found that Nike had about 30 percent of the World Cup “buzz” among brands on blogs, message boards and social-networking sites–a coup for a company that isn’t a partner or official sponsor of the World Cup or of FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

FIFA has been trying to limit the visibility of companies that haven’t paid the hefty price for official sponsorships, the Journal reported this week. But although the organization can restrict advertising around venues, there’s little it can do online. Poor FIFA partner Adidas had about 14 percent of the online mentions, followed by Coca-Cola (KO) and Sony (SNE) at about 12 percent each.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100618/whos-winning-the-world-cup-online-its-nike/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100521/nikes-not-so-secret-world-cup-ads-go-viral-before-they-launch/ http://allthingsd.com/20100521/nikes-not-so-secret-world-cup-ads-go-viral-before-they-launch/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 11:53:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19746 The World Cup starts next month. So where’s the blitz of Nike (NKE) ads that always accompanies the globe’s biggest sporting event?

Funny you should ask. Nike will formally start pushing out its new ads tomorrow on TV, Facebook and Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But the marketer gave the campaign a small push early this week, which is all it took. People are lapping this stuff up.

This three-minute spot, for instance, is on an “unlisted” YouTube page, which means it’s theoretically “private”–it won’t show up in YouTube search results or its homepage, and you can only get to it via a link (I got there via AdWeek’s Brian Morrissey). But it has already racked up some 400,000 views. That number will start getting really, really big tomorrow.

No idea who any of these people are? No worries. There’s a partial explication, via Nike press release, below.

The story starts when the viewer is drawn into the heat of battle on the pitch as a ball drops from the air into the path of Didier Drogba. As the world holds its collective breath, Drogba picks his way through sliding defenders and expertly chips the goalkeeper – wild celebrations commence across Africa. But they are curtailed at the last second as Fabio Cannavaro makes a stunning overhead goal line clearance. This game-changing moment propels Cannavaro to pop culture icon complete with television chat show appearances and a song dedicated to his moment of brilliance.

Other global football stars including Wayne Rooney experience how a moment on the pitch can last forever. In one scene, the England striker sees an intercepted pass picked up by midfielder Franck Ribery. The ensuing impact brings a nation to its knees and leaves us to imagine Rooney’s destroyed career and his life as a groundsman, living in a caravan, with Ribery’s image looming large above him on a giant billboard. Fast forward, and Rooney relives the moment, sprints after Ribery and wins the ball back. Personal and national pride restored, we see him receiving a knighthood, with headline-grabbing plaudits, a maternity room full of little Waynes and an effortless table-tennis defeat of Roger Federer. The Rooney ripple effect comes full circle.

Similarly, Cristiano Ronaldo is fouled in a game, and as he prepares to take a vital free-kick for Portugal, we flash forward to see the ripple effect if he scores; a stadium named in his honour and a Film Premiere for a movie of his life.

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