No offense to the Geni team that have spun off Yammer but it says it all that they “won” at TC50. I have seen 10 Yammers out there, who took Twitter and re-purposed it. Business model, really? The valley loves Twitter so much that clones win things?
FitBit is far more interesting to me. Having a tiny device that tracks what your activity has a chance at being huge. Imagine a social network, or apps on existing networks, that show your exercise regime, what you are eating, and more. “Your mother just lost 4 pounds!”, “Bob just ran 3 miles!”. This will be incredibly viral. You can join up and see how you are comparing to your friends and family. You can join groups. Weight Watchers 2.0 baybee. That is something that you could get excited about. Nike+ is a player here, and the first person to get the social balance right will be huge. Don’t you think?
September 11th, 2008 at 3:23 am
OMG, Americans must have got crazy. Maybe viral, but definitely not global like, say, well Twitter.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Seems kind of embarrassing for some twitter-knockoff to have won, but I can’t say that I’m really feeling your choice, either, Dion. I don’t want to be alerted throughout my day about how many pounds some SLOB managed to knock off or put on during his coffee break. :S
September 11th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Stu,
The point isn’t for people to push out “I lost 10 pounds” to random people on Facebook. The point is that I could start a group, we could all sign up, and we could all share information on what we are doing. The device can give real data, which although far from perfect, is better than the lies we make up to please ourselves :)
Bodybug does this for personal trainers, so they can watch what they customers are doing, and this takes it to the next level. But yes, this is an opt-in thing :)
September 11th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Dion, same thought here on both products, can’t agree more. What’s more, announcing that Yammer has a business model simply because they know what to charge users for when there will probably be no one willing to pay at all – how reasonable is that? I just fail to comprehend the whole idea.
And even if we ignore the social implications for FitBit (by the way, I heard there is already a similar product called FitBug but without bluetooth – so it is also not 100% new but at least not widely popular already), it will never hurt to have a product to actually remind us that we need do something in addition to sitting in front our computers the whole day.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
There are several fitness social networks out there already that let you make groups and follow your friends / family (e.g. FitLink). But you are right, they could do with better device integration to take some of the work out of tracking. FitBit should partner with these and expose their data.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:46 am
So, we have a bunch of high tech pedometer-like gadgets (bodybugg.com, fitbit.com, fitbug.net, nike+, or name your gps…), everyone of them with its closed site tracking exercises and calorie expenditure. Plus lots of third party pages and social networks offering the same kind of tracking.
I’m with #5 Linas, a great moment to start sharing and exposing workout data.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Actually, the list of sites that offer uploadable pedometer type products with social networking is actually a lot larger than people think. WalkingSpree, Fitbug, Virgin HealthMiles, SportBrain, Nike+, BodyBugg, WalkStyles and more.
August 15th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Yeah, there are plenty. The last one is http://www.bodytrace.com with their internet-capable bathroom scale…. Now that is weightwatchers 2.0!
November 17th, 2010 at 10:24 am
@Joe, I’ve personally tried bodytrace and it’s pretty legit… thought I did have one break on me. However, the customer response team was on that pretty quick. Much better option over withings scale but that one DOES have wifi.
As for FitBit… it’s one of the most interesting tools I’ve been looking forward to try. Good to see you mentioned it. P.S- yammer is so useless.