Though Foursquare is now busy trying to take on Yelp, one of its more rewarding, but personal, use cases (now that the fervor around badges and mayorships has died down), is its ability to add insight and data around your check-ins. Often after registering your location, the app rewards you with a little encouragement or commentary via a pop-up message. Today, the service is making these little moments shareable with a new button that lets you edit and post that message to Facebook, Twitter and more.

For example, you might learn that you hadn’t been at some airport since last December, or it’s your third day in a row at a favorite location. In Foursquare’s blog post about the feature, it gives the example of a user who wants to brag about hitting the gym three days in a row. (Though let’s get real, we’ll probably see more people posting about their ongoing bar streaks, don’t you think?)

The update may seem to be a minor one on the surface, but it’s one that could encourage more of Foursquare’s users to return to the app more regularly in order to post and share rather than try to win a mayorship crown or some other tired prize, like a badge. These things were fun at first, but the excitement has worn off. But Foursquare still needs a steady stream of data to keep its local recommendations current and accurate.

The feature also ties in nicely with the new movement in “quantified self” devices – where users are trying on items like the FitBit or Jawbone UP, for example, in order to track and learn more about their daily activities through data.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, in fact, expressed an interest in the quantified self space, during an interview he did with TechCrunch last week at Disrupt NY. Though he had dismissed the rumors about Foursquare developing wearables of its own, he did say that this is an area Foursquare would like to further explore.

Also of note, Crowley used an auto-checkin utility recently, when he ran the Boston Marathon (ahead of the attacks), which let him track his progress mile by mile – so he’s clearly a fan.

Foursquare is actually sitting on a goldmine of personal data through its historial check-ins, but prior to now, the messages taking advantage of that info have been ephemeral – you would see them and then hit close, nothing more. Today’s update is the first step towards letting users better interact with Foursquare’s data store, if only by posting it to social networks or saving images to their Camera Roll.

The new feature is available for iPhone and Android.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s no shortage of apps to help you get healthier. Most push the idea of the Quantified Self. Better data, makes for better decisions — a claim that is difficult to argue against.

Today, Nutrino sees its official launch with a virtual nutritionist app for iOS that provides personalised meal recommendations based on a user’s profile, goals, habits and taste. It also includes a grocery list component, which at launch ties into major UK supermarket chains, in addition to support for Withings wireless scales to save on manual data entry.

Nutrino starts from the premise that, rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach, nutrition should be personal to each individual. And while there are lots of apps and gadgets on the market to help users track their diet or fitness, Nutrino’s pitch places more emphasis on its recommendation algorithms — two years in the making, apparently — which it claims enable it to truly personalise its nutritional/meal planning features.

Users began by taking a survey within the app, with a largely toggle-driven UI, which forms the basis of their Nutrino profile. This includes obvious things like gender, age, height, weight, and something as subject as their excersise-related lifestyle e.g. couch potato. They also define their goals, such as lose or maintain weight, as well as their culinary tastes and eating habits, and so on. The app then provides a daily meal plan for each user. Naturally, there’s a tracking element, too, hence the ability to sync weight data with the Withings wireless scale/app.

Finally, each meal can be added to the app’s “Grocery List” feature, for easy purchase at one of the supported grocery stores — Tesco and ASDA in the UK with “more chains worldwide to come soon”. Nutrino also ties in with the likes of Pret, pod, eat, Costa Coffee and Café Nero, for users who are eating on-the-go.

In terms of business model, in the future Nutrino will target communities with special nutritional requirements, such as people with diabetes, hypertension, or athletes etc., who would be willing to pay a subscription for more tailored features. There’s also tie-ins with grocery shopping, and take-out food ordering. To that end, I can see something along the lines of weight loss coaching app Noom’s recent partnership with recipe kit subscription service HelloFresh.

The startup is funded to the tune of $400,000 from family and private investors. It’s founded by Jonathan Lipnik, Yaron Hadad, Jose Luis Martin de Bustamente, Eduard Ros Bajona, and Ido Cohn, and is spread across the UK, Spain and Israel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Alert.Us, a recently launched mobile family safety application, has some interesting ideas about the direction that these sorts of GPS tracking apps should go. In fact, says CEO Antoine Martin, the company’s goal is to have kids actually accept and recommend the app. That’s a bit different from the other parental control or safety apps on the market today which generally launch with the needs of parents, not their offspring, in mind. It’s also a fairly lofty goal, since kids don’t generally want to be tracked.

Currently, the app currently offers the usual round-up of family safety functions: a geo-fenced alerting function to let others know when someone has arrived at home or school, for example, as well as an emergency alert button which, when triggered, sends out a message to a pre-configured list including family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who can rush in to respond.

Though these types of “emergency” alerting functions haven’t yet been seen to thwart any serious crimes – like kidnappings, for instance, families can still take advantage of the functionality for more common incidents, like a kid who falls off his bike or the little brother calling on his older brother for help with bullies, maybe.

Some of these ideas have been tried before, through apps like Life360, iHound, Norton Safety Minder, React Mobile, Rapid protect, and others. But Alert.Us also offers a few extra tools not all the apps have, including a family message board for the everyday missives between family members (can you get the milk?) – something which would somewhat compete with other startups like Tango or newly launched Hubble.

Alert.Us offers a battery monitoring function, too, which is one of its smarter features at launch. When a child’s battery is empty, the app alerts the parents. It’s such a simple idea, but it goes a long way to help parents to avoid the panic they encounter when a child doesn’t answer their phone. (It also helps with the kids who claim “oh, my battery was dead,” when it wasn’t. Gotcha.)

But back to the problem of getting kids to actually like the app? Martin tells us that will be the focus in the months ahead, and hints at plans to head into the Quantified Self space to add value on top of basic GPS tracking.

Alert.Us quietly launched two months ago, but the company hasn’t done much outreach or marketing. The cross-platform application has already added over 25,000 users (70 percent on iPhone) during that time, and now finds that active parents open the app six times per day.

The Paris-based company had a launch partnership with e-commerce site vente-privee.com to drive initial downloads, and on the first day after launch, the app climbed to number three in the French App Store, and remained there for two days. It also spent a week at the top of the Lifestyle category, Martin adds.

Parents can use the app on a trial basis for up to 900 minutes and/or 3 alerts, then it’s $6.99 per month ($64.99 per year) afterwards. To date, the app has converted 100 of its early adopters into paying customers, out of the 10 percent of the user base which has reached the end of the trial period.

Alert.Us is backed by $500,000 in angel funding, from an undisclosed group that include four “super angel moms.”

The app is available here in the Apple App Store, on Google Play, or for BlackBerry.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Services like HealthTap have proliferated over the last year as a way to let anyone with questions about their health connect with real, licensed physicians online and avoid the pain of waiting in line at the doctor’s office. While HealthTap and others are building up their health information databases to let people quickly find answers to a variety of health questions, the demand for personalized health information continues to grow.

While we use services like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter every day, these social networks are far from being the best places to ask health questions and connect with others experiencing similar symptoms, conditions, taking the same medications or receiving similar treatments — for privacy reasons, among others. That’s why Lyle Dennis, a practicing physician and neurologist, created HealthKeep — a social network designed to connect people with similar symptoms and conditions and help them better track, manage and understand their health.

HealthKeep provides a forum in which everyday people can post about their health and medical issues and search for potential treatments. Unlike most social networks, i.e. Facebook, the service allows users to register anonymously and does not collect names, which means that its HIPAA-compliant. Once members register on the platform, they can create “Health Timelines,” where they can share any new symptom, medication, diagnosis, doctor visit, procedure or test result. A la Facebook, the timeline is updated in realtime, stream-style, allowing users to view updates and graph their health at any point.

Once a user adds an element to their timeline, they are automatically linked to every other member in HealthKeep’s community that has shared that element. An announcement is made each time a new member is added to that group, whereupon the community can then discuss their symptoms and treatments and share information, all of which takes place within feeds dedicated to those specific items.

Members can create private profiles that can be viewed and searched for identification purposes if they so choose, while doctors have public profiles and can contribute to feeds of interest to them and the patients that follow them. Lyle tells us that, at launch, HealthKeep contains a profile for nearly every U.S. doctor (including name, address, phone number and fax), every FDA-approved medication and thousands of diseases, symptoms, procedures and health goals in its database. [Check out an example of a physician profile here.]

These profiles are subject to change when doctors actually claim their profiles, at which point they can change the picture associated with their profile, add custom content, and their profile will display everything they follow and post, and everything that other users are saying about them. As people add their doctors, Lyle hopes that “follower numbers” will grown, and once they hit a certain threshold, the startup will reach out to them to help provide more information on how to optimize their profiles.

As to the “following” mechanism on HealthKeep, Lyle says, “as a practicing physician myself, I see the fact that patients often like their doctors, they like to discuss them and recommend them to
others. So, following them on HK gives them a sense of community and they can actually relate and communicate with other patients of that doctor anonymously, through the system. In turn, it gives the doctor a public platform to announce to all his patients news items of interest or importance to them.”

The founder also said that he thinks that HealthKeep provides an easy way for both everyday people and doctors to stay connected to the latest news, research and findings as they relate to particular diseases or health categories. In the big picture, Lyle says that many doctors and MDs aren’t particularly active on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks, so he wants to help change that, while giving people their own “personalized medicine news feed.”

As to the opportunity going forward, the HealthKeep founder says that he sees the service as another approach to the Quantified Self movement that has taken off over the last few years, as its Health Timelines provide a personal health record through which they can keep track of and follow their health variables, both good and bad. At this point, people can enter and graph any element of their health information manually, but, next, the founder wants to begin connecting the platform with the APIs of fitness-tracking devices like Fitbit, Nike+ and Withings to automatically upload user health information.

“It’s easy to forget when and what symptoms we’ve had in the past, what a test showed and what a
doctor told us a year ago during an appointment. With HealthKeep, we want to give people a realtime, interactive social health dashboard that people can set up for themselves or for their children or grandparents.”

Up to this point, HealthKeep has been bootstrapped and self-funded, but as the platform begins to scale, the founder says the team will look to begin raising a Series A round later this year. While there’s plenty of room in the burgeoning online and mobile health space for multiple players, HealthKeep will have to contend with health and doctor-focused professional networking services like QuantiaMD and Doximity, as well as health information tools like HealthGuru, Quantified Self-style databases like Drchrono and mobile Q&A services like HealthTap — among many others. It will be an uphill road, but there’s plenty of opportunity if it can hit scale.

For more, find HealthKeep at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Last week, Backed or Whacked look at a trio of wristbands that can hold a buck, make a bun and prevent a burn all without any assistance from a successful mobile app platform. But as a host of digital fitness products has shown, the usually limited interfaces of fashion accessories can be boosted by pairing them with smartphones.

Whacked: Embrace+. The Embrace+ could be described as a smartwatch for people who would rather rave all night than know what time it is. The transparent band, to be available in three shapes, has embedded LEDs that illuminate in different colors depending on the kind of notification being received.

With 13 different services and alerts intended to be supported out of the gate, there’s a good chance that those with an active social (networking) life will find their wrists becoming a rainbow of a light show throughout the day. And if the unlimited colors aren’t enough for you, the band also offers options for the number and duration of blinks, light brightness and speed interval and whether to include a subtle vibration.

The Embrace+ campaign attracted interest, with nearly 1,500 backers ponying up nearly $84,000, but that represented less than half of its ambitious $220,000 goal. Almost immediately after it ended, the team vowed a relaunch at a new web address, but so far clicking it turns up a generic web-hosting admin page.

Whacked: WeLoxx. Those who have pursued the quantified self only to discover there is too much of their self to quantify for their liking have access to a whole battle of the bands to help them with calorie expenditure. These include offerings from Jawbone and Nike with more on the way from Fitbit and Samsung. But at CES, much attention was lauded on a connected utensil called the HAPIfork that keeps track of how often you shovel food into your mouth, coaching you to eat more slowly.

That’s the basic idea of the WeLoxx, which moves the sensor from the fork to the wrist and thus enables it to work with spoons, chopsticks or your grubby bare hands. The project, originating in Bern, Switzerland, proposed two different models for the WeLoxx — a more watch-like design, the WeLoxx 300, and band-like design, the WeLoxx 900. Both featured an array of traffic lights to signal how fast you’re eating. For the near term, though, we won’t be loxxing, as the campaign collected only $584 from six backers en route to missing its $80,000 goal.

Whacked: LinkMe. The LinkMe is a paradox. On one hand, or perhaps wrist, notification bands are supposed to be unobtrusive. The Embrace+’s light show may even be pushing it, but at least only you know how to decode its glowing rainbow.

In contrast, the LineMe wraps an LED billboard around that hand-joining joint. The advantage is that the band can display specific messages instead of just notification lights, possibly saving you more trips back to the 5″ LTE-packing behemoth weighing down your pocket. On the other hand, it could enable anyone close enough to your resting arm to read the digital sweet nothing intended just for snookums. The creators, New Yorkers Matt and Colin, would counter that you can set up a system of abstract characters to get back to the Embrace+ level of abstraction.

The LinkMe would last about two weeks on a charge and, like the Nike FuelBand, the LinkMe can default to a time readout when nothing private is being broadcasted to it. One month in, the campaign has raised only about $13,000 of its $100,000 goal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I thought it was impressive that Withings now offers an affordable home scale that tracks your body fat percentage and heart rate, but scientists have developed a tiny Bluetooth-capable blood monitoring device that resides comfortably under the skin, according to the BBC this morning. It’s likely to go into testing with intensive care patients soon, but it’s an example of how intense home health monitoring could get over the course of the next few years.

The device was created by a team of Swiss medical scientists, and is designed to be installed (that really is the most appropriate term here) in a patient’s abdomen, leg or arm skin, using only a needle. It can last for months, and reports back information about blood glucose and cholesterol levels, so as you might imagine it would be extremely useful for patients with chronic conditions like diabetes who are used to having to draw blood on a much more regular basis.

It’s not a new idea, but the Swiss team’s design is unique in that it can track a number of different markers at once. In other words, it’s the ultimately quantified self device for real internal cues. The immediate benefit of this tech is obviously for those with serious conditions, and that’s likely who will see the benefits in the immediate future. The team hopes to have it generally available to patients in need within the next four years.

But beyond that, it’s easy to see similar unobtrusive sub-dermal implants gaining traction with the growing number of people who seem to want to keep close tabs on their bodies and health. Cholesterol levels and other indicators that can be found by this type of close monitoring will also probably become even more interesting to current advocates of the Quantified Self movement as the population ages.

It may seem far-fetched to imagine a future where the general desire to know and track more information about ourselves in real-time extends to devices we wear beneath the skin, but ten years ago who could’ve predicted the rise of successful startups like Withings who have built a brand on home health tracking, or the advent of a device like the Basis wristband? Devices like this one might just be the next wave of health monitoring tech ripe for consumerization.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CES is an event filled with plastic, metal, and germs, so one tends to take notice when a booth is festooned with wood and apples. Such was the case when we stumbled upon Russian hardware startup Lapka and its array of cute blocks. The Lapka is a strangely beautiful product, and that peculiar sense of wonderment only grows once you figure out what the thing actually does.

Creative Director Vadik Marmeladov refers to the string of devices as a “personal environment monitor” — what starts off as a 3

After nearly a year in development, Lift launched its first mobile product in August behind an ambitious goal: Boost human potential by helping people achieve their goals. It almost sounds New Age-y, but co-founders Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby are serious about doing their part to change the world by unlocking our inner achievers.

The founders aren’t alone. From the get-go, Lift has been incubated and seed-funded by Obvious Corp., the hybrid accelerator created by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and early Twitter VP Jason Goldman. And now Lift is adding more believers to its support network, announcing today that it has closed a $2.5 million series A round, led by Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, who joined the co-founders and Ev Williams on Lift’s board of directors.

Obvious, SV Angel, Adam Ludwin from RRE, well-known personal achievement speaker and author Tony Robbins, Getting Things Done author David Allen, and Emmy-winning director and Twitter, Foursquare and Pinterest investor, Greg Yaitanes rounded out the startup’s series A investor list. In addition, Lift revealed today that it had extended its initial $600K seed investment from Obvious to include 4-Hour Body/Work-Week author and serial investor Tim Ferriss, Smile and Webshots co-founder Narendra Rocherolle and MessageBus CEO Jeremy LaTrasse.

So what is it about Lift that attracted these business development and personal achievement experts? In part, it’s that altruistic mission to help anyone and everyone reach their personal goals. Of course, many startups are trying to crack the behavioral design nut — to find the right incentivization and motivation structures that can unlock personal achievement, be it by offering monetary rewards or subjecting users to peer pressure. But no one’s quite figured it out yet.

Informed by a combination of psychology research, the Quantified Self Movement’s obsession with data-tracking, and good old-fashioned positive support, Lift believes it can outdo the competition by turning life’s chores into positive experiences. Said another way, people are much more likely to succeed in reaching their life’s goals — whatever they may be — if they work towards them incrementally, breaking them down into micro habits that are so easy to maintain we can’t help but build momentum … and one fine morning …

The other conspicuous appeal of Lift is its simplicity. Ironically, it took the founders almost a year of tinkering to design the right concoction of simple for Lift’s mobile experience. At first glance, there’s not much there: After downloading Lift, users can create or join “habits,” clicking Lift’s big button if they’ve met their goal that day. Plus, as Lift’s activity is all public, users can give (and receive) support to others in the community based on the successes of their peers. As the app tracks user progress, it populates its graphs and charts with your data, showing just how consistent you’ve been in sticking to your positive habits. That’s about it.

Initially, the co-founders added a bunch of gamification elements to the apps, but they quickly learned that users weren’t interested in badges or prizes. They just wanted simplicity. So, the team stuck to its guns, focusing on the creation of a simple, portable support community that can help you reach your goals by consistently reinforcing your most productive habits.

Since launching in August, Stubblebine says that Lift has helped users move towards 500,000 habits that run the gamut from diet and happiness to careers and relationships. As one would expect, the Lift co-founder said that the iPhone app has seen strong adoption from those who were already getting down with their Quantified Selves and believed self-tracking was essential to achievement but just needed a “small positive push.”

However, the most common support systems used today still have “uneven availability and validation,” Stubblebine said in a blog post today, and people suffer from too much choice. We shouldn’t be forced into choosing between 100 sets of advice, $100 support sessions, in-person meetings or fall back on the products that are the most aggressively marketed. Instead, the co-founders want Lift to be universally applicable, working just as effectively for dietary goals as for goals that are more within reach, like calling your brother on his birthday or drinking more water.

Lift plans to release a new version of its mobile app at the end of the year, which Stubblebine says will take big strides towards the universal. He also tells us that Android, web, and mobile web apps are on the radar, but that the team has really been focused on nailing its iOS product — so cross-platform availability is likely a ways off and it’s not yet clear which they’ll prioritize.

To that point, Lift’s new funding has allowed it to make a couple of engineering hires (including Matt Matteson on the iOS side, who was employee numero uno at Path), growing its team to six, with several more to be added in the near future. We’ve also confirmed that Plancast Founder and former TechCruncher Mark Hendrickson, who joined Lift as head of product back in March, has left the company to pursue his own entrepreneurial aspirations. Although Hendrickson was only at Lift for about 8 months, both he and Stubblebine confirmed that the departure was amiable.

It should be fun to see what Lift is cooking for its end-of-year release. The company has a strong support network of its own, thanks to its new capital infusion and backing from the guys behind Twitter, but it still has a lot of work left to do if it’s going to prove that it can find a significant, engaged user base outside of the data-happy confines of Silicon Valley.

For more, here’s Bijan Sabet’s blog post on the announcement. [Third image via the same post.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As the amount of digitally collectable data grows, we’ve entered a period of homebrew health, investor Esther Dyson holds. In an interview with New York Times’ John Markoff at Stanford School of Medicine’s emerging tech conference Medicine X last week, she elaborated, “People are buying FitBits but writing their own software and as we can make much better predictions, there’s a sea change” in consumer and employer involvement in wellness.

The founder of EDventure Holdings said her interest in “the most interesting unsolved problems in healthcare and human behavior” came in part from attending a conference for physicians and their families years ago. Tired of hearing their complaining about the brokenness of medical systems, she noticed how different the conversation would have been with entrepreneurs, technologists, and investors present. “In my business — startups — you would have had people excited about doing something instead of just being depressed.”

So how does one go about improving healthcare and wellbeing with technology? “My first reaction was to blow the thing up” and start over, she said, noting that industries that have tried to fix themselves from within — think telephone service — often fail to do so. “Ideas need to come from the outside, the way mobile phones were introduced and changed everything.”

Dyson said she’s excited to now see a market for good health that didn’t previously exist without ways to monetize positive behaviors. “People are used to paying for computers, not for their own healthcare,” she said. “People now pay online for music, so things may start to change,” especially with the availability of sensors and social networks.

Dyson said she has made 25 health-tech angel investments, from prediabetes tracking startup and RockHealth alumni Omada to Genomera, GreenGoose, Habit Labs, HealthTap, and Keas. “In theory, I invest in things that help people live better. In practice, I’m kind of susceptible to anything,” she said. Space travel investments are very much of interest, and she — only partially — joked that she wants one of her health startups to do well enough to send her to space. (She had trained as a cosmonaut in Russia.)

Dyson talked about her early years as a fact-checker and journalist, the need for healthier school lunches, and the decision to publish her public health data online. Genomics and information science especially excite the Quantified Self buff in Dyson, who was the third subject in the Personal Genome Project. “With medicine I realize that interacting things are much more complicated than the things alone, and we need to pay attention to the social cues and interactions around people that generate their behavior.”

Photo by Theo Rigby.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tim Chang is a managing director at Mayfield Fund. This is the second in a three-part series about the Quantified Self movement. Follow Tim on Twitter @timechange.

Assuming that each of us has a picture of the “real world superhero” we want to become someday, then the optimal way to level up and reach that goal begins with the ability to measure and score our lives. Thankfully, new technologies in mainstream gadgets like iPhones and the Nike+ enable this kind of measurement, and are fueling the so-called Quantified Self movement, starting with the continuous tracking of various aspects of our physical bodies.

Using sensors in our smartphones and other wearable devices, we can chart how many calories we burn, our body fat percentage, how many steps we take in a day, how long we sleep — even how many hours a week we spend commuting or sitting at a desk. Soon we’ll be able to access the same kind of statistics on our digital selves: Social reach and influence; tastes and preferences; achievements; credibility and reputation; habits; expertise.

All that information at your fingertips at all times theoretically allows you to carefully chart a path for improvement—and share your winning strategy and stats with others. On a grand scale, that makes for an interconnected world of healthier, happier people making much more informed decisions.

Make it Seamless, Make it Mainstream

The Quantified Self movement is made possible by ubiquitous, low-cost, and always-on connected sensors. The real key for successful measurement and tracking solutions is to make them seamless, meaning that there’s minimal friction and initial behavior change for the user. Consumers don’t want to wear clunky, ugly, embarrassing, or uncomfortable devices, nor will they tolerate products that require them to change their daily routines to input lots of stats or data themselves. If behaviors and signals can be measured in the background or with minimal disruption to existing habits, then users can be on-boarded easily and are more likely to accept the idea of being tracked continuously for long periods of time.

Once users are being measured and quantified, the data must be interactive and easy to understand. The users need to be able to look at their data in ways that are interesting to them, but also know what to do to influence their measurements and scores.

Basis cleverly embeds a heartbeat sensor in a watch (a form factor that’s already familiar to people and non-disruptive to wear) and then offers analytic tools that motivate them to make changes based on the data.

When I tried out the Basis demo, it overlaid my heart rate with my Outlook calendar and even told me which meetings (and people) were stressing me out the most (!). There were other surprising insights: I learned that when I hit stop and go traffic on Highway 101, my heartrate often spikes into the 90s from silent, internalized road rage. Those are the sorts of self-discovery insights that make the Quantified Self experience so rewarding. Numbers, presented with useful context, provide an immediate path to better control over my own life.

Zimride, a service that pairs up car drivers and commuters looking for rides, also uses the Quantified Self to incentivize users. If I frequently commute down to San Jose and I’m known to be on time, I build a reputation score through my riders that makes me valuable and desirable to other potential riders, who pay me for the trip. My punctuality is quantified, I feel good about myself by seeing my score go up, and I’m motivated to keep increasing my status and show it off. I can also see a running tally of how much pollution I have spared the atmosphere by eliminating another vehicle from the road.

Insight, Not Data, is the Key

When it comes to productizing these solutions for consumers, it’s important for entrepreneurs to remember to package their offerings not as Analytics, Data or Tools, but instead to sell Insights from the numbers. That’s where I think Quantification can move away from just efficacy and become about taking control of your own life. The emotional value of that is what people pay for.

Astrologists, fortune tellers and even management consultants remain popular today for a simple reason: Most people would rather be told what the big takeaways are, what they really need to worry about and what exactly to do next. This kind of “so what?” is ultimately more valuable in the eyes of the consumer. (Anecdotally, I’ve seen enterprises pay 10 times more for business insight reports and consultations than for self-service analytics tools).

Furthermore, the richer the data set one can draw from, the more interesting the potential insights to be gained, which leads me to my new business mantra: “proprietary data equals power, but insights equals gold.”  So while it’s important to build up a data set comprised of useful and complementary signals, it’s the “so what?” that allows you really make money from the numbers.

Hungry Games?

Despite the growing buzz and proliferation of new gadgets and apps in QS, I have found that much of the initial innovation and entrepreneurial activity has been around tracking physical activity (“calories out”).  However, I’m personally on a quest to tame what I think is the most elusive beast of all: “calories in.”  Most common medical problems stem from our eating habits, but there really isn’t an easy way to seamlessly and accurately capture the data about the food we ingest each day, short of implanting a sensor into the body to track caloric intake (which violates the low-friction requirement for an effective QS solution).

Many food-tracking apps ask users to input or tag each item they eat (too much work for most people), and some even attempt to identify nutritional data from photos (not accurate enough via automation). If we can’t find a seamless, automatic method to accurately quantify what we’re putting into our bodies, then perhaps we can leverage the interactive, social and fun aspects of Gamification to get users to play along and enter the data needed?

As an example, each day I play a game of “Foodville” with myself: I set a target # of points (calories) each day, and I get to spend them however I like for as long as I don’t exceed my 24 hour limit. As I’m about to eat or drink something, I think about the number of calories I’m about to spend on that item (usually glancing at the product packaging, or doing a quick Google mobile search to look up approximate nutritional info), and then take a mental note of my remaining point budget. At the end of the day, I feel great about meeting my target and advance one day closer to weekly Cheat Day, or else push off Cheat Day until I qualify again. Each week that I stay on plan I count towards my “winning streak,” which culminates in an Amazon shopping splurge that I treat myself to

Although it was a pain at first to look up caloric values for everything I ate or drank, I found that after several weeks I developed a sixth sense for nutritional data, and could pretty much ballpark the point count for most everything I ate.  As I got deeper into Foodville, I layered on advanced missions to maximize lean protein and fiber, and minimize net carbs and sugar.

It turns out that this is the same approach that Weight Watchers has been using for decades – I simply think about it as a game and try to layer in “boss battle” and “epic win”-style levels and rewards for myself.  Unfortunately, I’m only playing Foodville in my mind, and don’t have a simple, gamified app that I can share or play with others.  Perhaps a slick app encompassing elegant use of social and game mechanics would enable multiplayer modes, P2P pressure/obligation/guilt loops, use of Seven Deadly Sin motivators, progressive and adaptive leveling, and other tools to make Foodville palatable and easier to begin playing for mass audiences? I’m hoping to see clever QS + gamification designers team up to come up with such apps, and someday seeing the Top 25 charts dominated by titles like:

• Angry Burns: Spice
• Where’sMyWater(cress)
• Cut the Coke
• FruitSlicer
• Plants vs. Breads
• Food With Friends
• DrinkSomething(Sugar-Free)
• DinnerDash

Article courtesy of TechCrunch