Fitbug, the online activity tracker and wellness coach, has filed a complaint against popular fit-tech startup Fitbit alleging trademark infringement and unfair competition and business practices.

Fitbug claims Fitbit has caused irreparable harm and damage to their company, and it has asked the U.S. District Court in Northern California to order Fitbit to stop allegedly using its Fitbit mark and conduct that causes confusion with Fitbug’s brand.

Founded in 2005, Fitbug combines activity-tracking devices with web and mobile technology that gives personalized weekly activity and nutrition targets as well as advice, feedback, and encouragement. The U.K.-based company started using its trademark “Fitbug” in the U.S. the same year.

Fitbug was one of the first companies in the fitness-technology market, combining electronic tracking devices with digital coaching to help people become healthy and lose weight.

The lawsuit alleges Fitbit created and distributed identical devices and services four years after Fitbug began its operations in the U.S. These actions, and the nearly identical names and marks, have caused confusion among consumers and are damaging Fitbug’s business, according to the suit.

Fitbug said that over the past year, the company has received numerous customer service requests from users needing assistance with their Fitbit devices, and media publications, social media, and potential business partners have confused their products as well.

According to the complaint, Fitbit has mirrored Fitbug’s logo, icons, photographs and imagery on the website, products, and packaging materials, going as far as including a blue dot over the letter “i.” Fitbug recently changed its logo and no longer uses the blue dot.

Fitbit uses similar bright colors, photography, silhouettes, packaging, and imagery on its product that Fitbug began using in 2006. Diagrams monitoring users’ food intake and energy levels are almost identical as well. Some images presented in the suit are shown below.

The lawsuit was filed on March 29. Fitbit has yet to respond to the allegations.

One is the remote control for my TV, another for my surround-sound receiver. One is for my blue-ray player, another is for the PVR, and yet another one is for no discernible purpose.

But if I wasn’t half the lazy idiot I sadly am, I could replace them all with a simple app on my iPhone or iPad, like Roomie.

We’re getting fairly used to our mobile devices being remote controls for the various aspects of our digital and not-so-digital lives. Your LG fridge has an IP address, can text you when food is going bad, and can be controlled by your phone. Home security systems that come complete with an app, and can tell you what’s happening in your home, are almost the norm.

OnStar gives your car a remote control too, and if it’s not exactly a James Bond-style actually-drive-your-car-by-remote app, it at least tells you the condition of your battery, how much gas you have, and lets you remotely unlock your vehicle. (Oh, and by the way, if you do want to drive your car by remote control, just buy the Chinese BYD Su Rui, an ordinary 5-seater sedan that yes, can be driven by remote control — at 1.2 miles per hour.)

Next week at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit 2013, we’re going to be talking about mobile as a remote control for life. Security systems, cars, homes, appliances: everything modern, seemingly, has a remote control.

Even you.

One of the things we’re increasingly using our mobile phones/remote control is to control ourselves. Sometimes with little devices like a Fitbit or an Up, but often also simply with our phones and apps like Digifit, which monitors and tracks our fitness and workouts. Others help us get better sleep, stop smoking, and walk more, simply by letting us set goals, and then holding us to them.

One, the Gain Fitness app, helps us to manage our fitness with one simple feature: the workout streak tracker. Although the app does other things, it tracks every day you do a workout, and every day you do not. Miss one, skip one, or avoid one, and your workout streak is broken, and you start back down at zero. Essentially, it’s a simple motivational trick to make yourself do what you know you really want to do, but sometimes don’t feel like.

In essence, a remote control.

More on devices, gadgets, the internet of things, and the mobile computers we call phones that are enabling this remote control trend at Mobile Summit 2013, April 1-2 in Sausalito, California.

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I’m going way out on a limb here, and cutting it off behind me.

But I have a theory. The more Samsung “adds value” to Android by customizing a version of it for the Galaxy line of phones, as it’s doing with its new Galaxy S IV, the more it will suck.

This is, of course, the company that sold 400 million freaking phones last year. And 57 million smartphones in just one quarter of 2012. Samsung seems, more than any other, to be the company that has shaved a few hundred billion off Apple’s share price.

But companies, like people, do best when they stick to what they’re good at. Better yet, what they’re great at.

And let me tell you, there’s no way that Samsung is great at machine language translation. And facial/eye recognition to drive smart document scrolling. And building app stores for hundreds of millions of global users. And tying Kinect-style hand gestures to phone functionality navigation. And building a personal health/self quantification system. And programming a voice-controlled smart personal assistant. And implementing a ticket-and-card aggregating Apple Passbook clone. And any of a thousand other software-based features Samsung is adding to its phones and laying at the pagan feet of the ruthless god called product differentiation.

No bloody way.

Not as good as Google, for the features that Google chooses to build, and are amenable to machine learning and improvement. Not as good as Fitbit or Up or other companies whose livelihood is self-quantification and health. Not as good as Kinect, or Leap Motion, which are focused on gesture control.

“Some of the features definitely didn’t seem to work all that well,” analyst Avi Greengart, who Samsung pre-briefed about its phone, told me today. “For the hover feature … you have pick the exact right distance from the screen for it to activate, and you select things you weren’t intending to select.”

Other features worked better, like a camera app that puts you in the picture while you take the picture, Greengart said, though he was most concerned about the sheer quantity of new features overwhelming consumers.

“A lot of it will drive people crazy,” he said. “But at the same time people will buy the phone so they can check it out.”

There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that Samsung is not a software company, in much the same way that Intel, though it employs thousands of software engineers, is not a software company. Another is that ancillary features added by a company that is primarily focused on using those features to sell more of that product are seldom as good as the features created by companies that focus on those things exclusively.

But the big one is that Google is getting frightfully good at software. Partly because it learns a million times a minute as customers interact with its solutions, and data drives its decisions, but also partly because it gets mobile in a way that few other companies do. Google currently has five of the top six apps in North America on any platform.

Do you really think Samsung can build a better mobile user experience than Google?

I haven’t yet handled, played with, or slept beside a Galaxy S IV. But the early reviews on that cool eye-tracking technology that auto-scrolls documents for you? It works “better in theory than they did in practice,” according to CNet. And that neat gesture phone control technology? It seems to “work intermittently.”

ZDnet wonders if this is innovation or gimmicks, and Gizmodo hits the nail on the smartphone head:

Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren’t things you’ll ever use. Which is really the S IV’s biggest problem.

In other words, Samsung’s over-the-top Broadway launch for the Galaxy S IV might be the perfect metaphor for a phone that has everything you don’t need: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

Now, we’re talking about unreleased hardware and software, and there are bound to be improvements before Samsung ships the Galaxy S IV to customers. But putting together a coherent, excellent operating system with well-integrated features is hard. Google went through multiple iterations before finally starting to get it really right perhaps a couple of years ago. Microsoft went through hell for years, trying to find its way in mobile operating systems.

Is it likely that Samsung, which is building on the Android foundation but chipping away at every piece of Google’s fingerprints it can while doing so, can get it right?

I think not.

“Look at the Samsung Galaxy S III,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen told me. “Everything that was good about the software came from Google, and everything that was annoying came from Samsung.”

Others that I’ve talked to agree, but still see a role for Samsung’s innovation.

“I agree that some of the software is buggy,” Rocky Agrawal, an analyst and mobile consultant who also writes for VentureBeat, told me. “If they would stick to the non-core things that they’re adding it could make sense … but to go in and mess up core stuff like keyboards and error correction, that’s just innovation for the sake of innovation. You should differentiate on things that matter.”

We have seen this movie before, during the 90s and 2000s, in a different industry: the PC market. Much as Android is to iOS what Windows was to Macintosh, Android vendors are to each other what HP was to Dell was to Compaq was to every other faceless PC manufacturer: a clone trying to be an individual.

And with every vendor trying to deliver unique value, a unique product, and a unique brand in a by-nature commoditized market, they get desperate. The result: software that adds a line item in the product comparison chart and a bullet point in the marketing blurb, but is really just crapware.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been that crapware vendor, sad to say, bundling a solution into HP’s, Asus’s, and even Intel’s offerings.

And my money’s on something similar happening here.

(Oh, and these user interface issues will be at the heart of our discussion at the Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the mobile industry’s leading players. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of ecosystem from Google, Samsung, Facebook across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and disruptive private companies.)

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

Because while it tracks your fitness activity, similar to a Fitbit, Jawbone Up, or Nike FuelBand, it also knows the difference between a sit-up and a push-up. In other words, it knows exactly what you’re doing, and it tracks it for you.

“The other devices are glorified pedometers,” Dave Scott, one of the four Amiigo cofounders, told me today. ”We’re the first fitness tracker which you can take into a gym and do jumping jacks or pushups or pull-ups … and it knows what you’re doing … and it knows how many reps and sets you’ve done of each.”

Amiigo fitness bracelet

I’ve had browser tabs open on the FitBit and Jawbone Up for a couple of weeks now as I’ve been trying to make up my mind on which one to buy. But one thing that’s holding me back is that neither of them actually seems really very smart.

The FitBit can tell me how many steps I’ve taken and stairs climbed, but it has no clue about my heart rate, or if I was  in the gym for 45 minutes. The UP will alert me when I’m too idle and will track my sleep patterns, but it wants me to tell it when I’m jogging or walking the dog or or in the gym.

And here I thought the whole point of technology is to do annoying, repetitive, and laborious things that I don’t want to. That is, in fact, the promise of Amiigo: According to the Amiigo founders, the gesture recognition technology can recognize 100 different activities.

“Because we’re using Xbox-like gesture recognition and we’ve included a shoe clip, we can track both upper body and lower body acceleration,” Scott says. “We know what you’re doing, and we’re automating that.”

That sounds good to me.

And apparently, to thousand of others on Indiegogo who have stepped up and ordered $347,088 worth of Amiigos, just two weeks into the campaign. But Amiigo doesn’t just know what you’re doing, it also knows how vigorously you’re doing it, by including a “pulse oximeter” sensor in the band that tracks both your heart rate and the oxygen content of your blood. Not to mention the skin temperature sensor.

Again, something that neither FitBit or Up do. And something that Nike’s FuelBand can’t do without an extra accessory.

All of the data, of course, shows up on the now-obligatory companion mobile app, which the Amiigo communicates with via WiFi or Bluetooth. And is shareable to social networks, where you can engage in fitness and activity contests with friends and acquaintances.

Of course, as with any crowdfunded campaign, you’re taking a calculated risk when backing a project. But the team of founders includes two MIT students and two alumni of a mobile marketing company. In addition, Scott says, he’s got working prototypes.

One more proof point that there’s something worthwhile here? In addition to the Indiegogo campaign, the team has apparently also raised a round of investment from a venture capital firm. The sum remains undisclosed.

Ever since the iPod Nano was slightly less Nano’d just a few months ago, there’s been increased speculation about an iWatch to replace it. Now there’s chatter about a new device — an iWatch, perhaps —  from Apple for specifically that purpose.

Nano is Apple’s smallest iPod with a screen, bigger than only the Shuffle, and the sixth generation has been used extensively as a watch with the simple addition of a wristband. At 1.55-inches square, the Nano was perhaps a little awkward but an excellent beginning — and perhaps a precursor — to the Pebble smart watch.

That’s no longer an option with the seventh generation iPod Touch, which sports a 2.5-inch multitouch screen and a longer, rectangular body.

Cue iWatch?

The speculation is that Apple will be releasing a product in the next six months, possibly with an Intel chip, that communicates with your smartphone via Bluetooth. If so, it needs to be much more than a watch, and much more than a way to communicate with the device that is already just a few inches away in your pocket.

In other words, it needs to be a personal quantification device for the masses.

There are currently 505 tools listed in the Guide to Self-Tracking Tools on Quantified Self. Jawbone’s UP, Fitbit’s err bit, Nike’s FuelBand, the Basis Band, the Zeo “personal sleep coach,” the Stresswatch, the Adidas miCoach and dozens more are devices built to measure, track, and encourage you to modify fitness activities.

This is more than a fad — it’s a movement. And while smartphones like Apple’s iPhone are often components of these systems, they’re just one component in an ecosystem that includes sensors, apps, online social experiences, and analytics. Apple could be so much more, if it wanted to play in this market.

As The Next Web mentions, 2013 could be the year when wearable computing leaves the geek and enthusiast community. And isn’t popularizing and improving emerging technologies what Apple does best?

The iWatch is just a rumor right now, but I’m hoping it’s more … much more.

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Childhood obesity is quickly becoming a top health concern, with one in three American kids now classified as obese. Pundits often point to technology as the problem.

But building on the mantra that what you measure, you can improve, nonprofit HopeLab and its “social enterprise” subsidiary Zamzee have introduced an activity meter for kids that, like FitBit, connects to a website to display activity, get “pointz,” and engage friends in fitness-increasing games such as “Escape from Alcatraz.”

Source: Zamzee.com

Gamifying health: Zamzee

And the research says that it works.

Today Zamzee released the results of a six-month study of 448 middle-school kids at the 2012 Obesity Society annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. The kids using Zamzee were 59 percent more likely to engage in moderate to vigorous physical exercise. Girls showed the biggest increase — 103 percent, and even obese children increased their physical activity by 27 percent.

Oh, and if kids should be worried about cholesterol, Zamzee users showed less LDL (“bad” cholesterol).

We’re pretty used to the story that technology is bad for kids. And perhaps that’s true, if it’s just TV and Xbox and PSP. But this study shows that monitoring and gamifying health works for kids just as much as it works for adults.

Zamzee is much cheaper than a FitBit or FuelBand, costing just $30. Richard Tate, a spokesperson for Zamzee and HopeLab, told VentureBeat that was the goal from the beginning.

“When we designed Zamzee, we were really focused on our purpose … we wanted a price that would work for anyone.”

Access to the Zamzee website for tracking and competing with friends and family is free.

HopeLab was founded by Pam Omidyar and is funded by her and husband Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

photo credit: robad0b via photopin cc

Weight loss gadgets have evolved far beyond simple pedometers. We now have Up bands, Fitbits, and FuelBands that track our fitness levels (and make us look like athletes even when we’re not). One of these devices is BodyMedia‘s FIT, a series of armbands that use medical-grade sensors to track health metrics.

Wednesday, BodyMedia announced a $12 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures. The company plans to develop devices geared towards diabetes management, sleep disorder treatment, and elderly care assistance.

The FDA-approved medical/fitness device comes in three models and tracks movement, skin temperature, sweat, and heat dissipation to give an overall picture of your health and daily fitness levels. It won’t track individual workouts, but it will help you monitor your overall daily activity, log meals, and keep track of your sleep patterns. FIT is mainly for people who want to set specific weight-loss goals, not just get off their butt more often.

FIT competes with the other health tech gadgets I mentioned above. Jawbone’s Up band, the Fitbit, and the Nike+ FuelBand all tracks sleeping patterns and daily movement — such as steps taken or stairs climbed — and come with health-tracking software. The multiple health sensors on the FIT have earned it the FDA Class II medical device label and help it stand out from the rest.

Existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet, Draper Triangle Ventures, Ascension Health Ventures, and InCube Ventures joined Comcast Ventures in the funding round.

Founded in 1999, BodyMedia has raised a total of $49 million in funding. The company’s headquarters are in Pittsburgh, Penn.