There are four major players in the fitness wristband business now: FitBit, Jawbone, Nike, and Basis. They’re jockeying prices and features to get your dollars, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. That’s why we’ve created the chart above to help you take the leap.

You should consider three major categories when choosing one of these geek-chic exercise buddies: price, device, and battery life.

Right now, the FitBit Flex is the cheapest, coming in at around $100, followed by the Up at $130, the FuelBand at $150, and Basis at $200. There are, of course, tradeoffs. The Flex can’t tell when you’re on an incline, and while Basis is twice as much, it can monitor other elements such as your sweat and heart rate.

Indeed, the Basis might seem expensive and pared-down on the chart, but it focuses more on what’s going on inside your body than the others. An optical sensor can detect your blood flow, which means Basis can watch your heart rate throughout the day. It also measures your skin temperature and sweat levels, bringing all of this information together to gauge the intensity of your activities. It also plans on releasing mobile apps soon, with Android coming first.

On the device front, if you’re an Android user, however, you’re probably not going to want the FuelBand. It’s only iOS compatible, and it seems Nike has no plans to come out with an Android version. Flex, Up, and Basis provide Android support, but only for some devices.

When it comes to which band can outlast the rest, Up comes in as the winner with its advertised battery life at 10 days. Flex follows behind with five days of battery life and FuelBand with only one to four days. Of course, these times will all depend on your usage, which may include sleeping, as both Up and Flex monitor your sleep patterns and will wake you up with an alarm. Basis will track your sleep, but you’ll have to rely on another device to get your butt out of bed.

You can also hook up your wristbands to a number of apps. While Up and Flex support many fitness apps such as MyFitnessPal and LoseIt!, FuelBand focuses on the social side with connections to Facebook, Twitter, and Path.

Of course, your decision will depend on what matters most to you. Is it the science? The cool charts and analysis on your daily activities? The price or battery life? Let us know which you choose and why you love it (or hate it).

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Fitbit began shipping its Flex wristband today, finding its place among established wearable (but expensive) fitness devices in the market.

Flex is Fitbit’s answer to big-name companies like Nike and Jawbone who have their FuelBand and Up wristbands respectively. Bracelets seems to be the form-factor of choice for many exercise enthusiasts as they are easy to keep track of and don’t get in the way of your workout. They become an accessory as opposed to another device you have to find a pocket for.

Fitbit’s Flex shares a lot of the same functionality as the FuelBand and Up wristbands. It will track your steps and calories burned, how far you actually went, and it will look at your sleeping patterns and make suggestions based off of that data. The difference is, it costs $100 in comparison to the FuelBand, which goes for $150, and the Up, which goes for $130.

It can also wirelessly connect to your phone or computer using Bluetooth 4.0. That means you won’t need to pull out a wire to view your activity data on your phone and can start evaluating yourself anywhere. Its social components keep you engaged through competition to see who can walk the most steps in a week as well.

One thing that’s missing, however, is the ability to track your “climbs.” That is, if you’re walking up stairs, the Flex won’t be able to tell that you’re on an incline and burning more calories. Fitbit’s other devices have this feature, but it’s curiously missing from Flex. For those who live in areas like, say, hilly San Francisco where Fitbit is headquartered, this could be a deterrent.

hat tip Engadget; Flex image via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mark Curtis starts by telling a story. The Egyptian king Thamus is visited by the God Theuth, who offers a gift to the people of Egypt, the gift of writing. To the God’s surprise, the king refuses the gift, saying that his people would lose the ability to remember if everything were written down. “For every step forward in technology,“ says Curtis, “you lose something and you gain something.”

Curtis is the co-founder of service design agency Fjord, which works with large companies like banks and mobile operators — the kind of companies we all love to hate but whose services we rely on every day.

Driven to distraction 

Curtis is also the author of “Distraction: Being human in the Digital age.” Distraction was published in 2005, but its concerns — how technology is changing our notion of space and time and making us prefer the distant to the close at hand — are even more relevant in the age of the smartphone.

“Technology distracts us from the here and now by opening up avenues of possibility to the rest of the world all the time. Those avenues are deeply distracting because what could be over there appears to be more exciting than what is in front of us right now,” explains Curtis. In the same way that it was 80 years after the invention of the automobile before countries started to make seatbelts compulsory, Curtis contends that we haven’t yet defined ways of counteracting the negative effects of technology.

“Technology has created a permanent fifth dimension in our lives – virtual space. Every time human beings have perceived a new dimension, it’s led to seismic changes in society. We moved from thinking in two dimensions in Medieval art to three dimensions in the Renaissance. In Dante, Heaven and Hell were in a direct line up and down. At the same time Copernicus and Galileo started to realize there was something called space, which completely undermined the whole notion of Heaven, because if space is infinite then where is Heaven? That fundamentally changed the way we see everything.”

Keep it simple, stupid 

That fifth dimension also creates a challenging design problem that Fjord is tackling by reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to absorb information. “One of my colleagues calls it ‘design for the glance’,” says Curtis. The device best designed for the glance is the wristwatch, and Curtis expects to see plenty of products for the wrist following the flawed but groundbreaking Nike+ Fuelband.

Curtis points to David Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he explains that the brain works in two ways. “System 1 is where I say to you ‘What’s 2+ 2?’ You know the answer immediately without having to think about it. System 2 is where I say ‘What’s 24 x 17?’ Your brain then goes into lockdown because of the cognitive effort.” Fjord is trying to design nudge services into the realm of system 1 rather than system 2.

Last year Fjord created a new mobile app for the Swedish mobile phone operator 3, which displays all the information about a customer’s bill and usage using simple data visualizations. “If I want to know my own data usage, my carrier says ‘You have used 320 MB out of 1,024 MB and it’s now Feb 25′. What do I do with that information? I immediately have to go into system 2 to figure it out.” 3 itself offered over 200 different subscription models. My3 displays a visual snapshot of usage and trends over the past six months as well as showing how the bill compares to that of a typical customer. Hundreds of thousands of customers now rely on the service.

Banks and payment companies are also starting to think simple. “Paypal and Square have been brilliant at simplifying, although largely for merchants rather than customers.” Fjord itself produced a new set of mobile applications for the Spanish bank BBVA that now have 1.2 million users. Recent usage statistics show that customers log in 21 times a month on the mobile apps versus three times a month on the web site.

Experience design is dead

The next frontier in service design is what Fjord calls living services, where the same service is delivered via a whole plethora of interfaces and becomes ever more atomized. “We are already seeing financial services clients saying how can we break up what they do into little chunks which other people can use in discrete ways. Spotify, for example, will deliver the service in my car, through my phone, through my PC, through my Sonos system at home mediated by Ford or Apple or Android or Sonos.”

This complexity means that designers can no longer entirely control the  user experience. “What designers can do is set the stage and assemble the props, and the customer will design the experience.”

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.

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Living in the technology and startup ecosystem, we are constantly bombarded with the latest hot new app, device, technology, or company. They get their 15 minutes of fame and then something newer, hotter, and latest-er comes along to replace them. But every now and then, something sticks around for a while.

Since it’s nearly impossible to sort through the noise when talking to my technology friends, I’ve taken to listening to family and friends who are far away from the tech scene – most of whom still don’t “get” Twitter, can’t understand what all the fuss is about with Apple products, and would be willing to bet that Sand Hill Road was on a beach in Mexico. Last year, those friends all seemed to suddenly discover and start posting photos from Instagram, music from Spotify was showing up in my Facebook Ticker, and I was bombarded with old friends from high school joining Pinterest. I’ll take those signs to mean these three have successfully crossed over to the mainstream.

Some of the products and innovations below may have been hot for a while in the technology ecosystem; they might have raised boatloads of money, and could even be airing fancy television commercials already. But it’s only when my mom asks if she should buy the Nike+ Fuelband for my dad’s birthday that I’m pretty sure we’re onto something.

Here are six technologies, products, and innovations I believe will go mainstream in 2013:

Nike+ Fuelband: Accessible health data in a cool package

Earlier this year I purchased a Nike+ Fuelband thinking it would be a great way to keep tabs on my physical activity. Since then, this black band with the the slick LED display has been a conversation starter for everyone from friends to total strangers. Several similar devices are on the market right now – Jawbone’s Up and the Fitbit are two I get asked about the most. The devices are all relatively simple in their functionality (think of them as glorified pedometers with some cool extra software).

These devices have the benefit of real-world virality, in that they do spark conversations leading to aspirational fitness fans getting into the action. Personally, I have been more active since I started tracking my activity, so I can certainly see how this personalized health technology will become a real trend — even more so than the current functionality. I definitely expect to see more bands, clips, and watches at the 2013 Koester family Christmas.

Evernote: Organization 2.0

For all the advances in technology over the past few years with smartphones, tablets, and laptops, it’s somewhat surprising that there isn’t a go-to application for consumers to keep organized. That’s why I’m bullish on Evernote. It’s been a darling of the early adopter community, and I finally started using it towards the tail end of 2012 as I struggled to manage my scattered notes, to-do lists, and photos of whiteboards. Enter the solution that helps keep all of those key documents organized and in a single place.

The reason I think 2013 is the year for Evernote is its slick-as-they-come iPad tablet application. I found myself constantly wanting to use my iPad when in meetings, but wasn’t confident that I’d remember to export the notepad notes. And it turned out I wasn’t alone. I soon spotted my legal eagle friends carrying tablets around for note-taking and likewise using Evernote to keep tabs. I think part of the reason it didn’t make the jump sooner was the fact that the pain wasn’t as obvious on a smartphone or PC, but Evernote really supercharges a tablet, and that’s why I expect it to truly go mainstream.

Flipboard: Your socially curated magazine

As I mentioned, my non-tech friends still don’t quite “get” Twitter. To me, Twitter helps create a socially curated (by me) news and conversation feed. Unfortunately, it’s a little too much noise, a little too much work, and a little too “insider-y” for many in the mainstream. Enter Flipboard. Without any real effort, Flipboard helps turn your Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or just your interests into a visually rich, magazine style application. It’s great on both smartphone and tablet but really shows off the underlying power of social curation.

My mom got her iPhone two years ago (primarily because she wanted to be able to show off her son’s app at bridge). She’s not an app person, but I was amazed to see her use Flipboard to consume Facebook content rather than the mediocre Facebook app. I asked her why, and her response surprised me: “It’s less work – Facebook on my phone was getting sorta boring.” While Facebook and Instagram are making consuming content easier on mobile, Flipboard seems to have nailed the casual magazine-flipping experience, all with a nice social curation. Watch for a big year for them.

Airbnb: Unique and affordable places to stay

As a big fan of the collaborative consumption and peer-to-peer economy myself (given that my company participates in the space), I’d always been amazed we hadn’t seen a new mainstream success after eBay and Craigslist paved the way. Etsy has made a great deal of progress and is growing wildly, but I expect Airbnb to go “mainstream” this year.

As the company matures at breakneck speeds, it’s started to tap into the right vein that mainstream can grasp and stomach. No more is this staying on someone’s couch; it’s access to a unique, personal, and affordable place where hotels probably won’t go. In some ways, it’s almost the anti-peer-to-peer messaging. It’s subtle in some ways but represents a major difference for non-early adopters.

Several college friends of mine were describing their trip to San Diego at the end of last year, and I was surprised to hear them say, “We booked this great beachfront condo on Airbnb – it was so amazing and cheaper than the hotels. Have you heard of Airbnb?” Uh, yup… I’ve heard of it.

Airbnb’s handling of the Sandy hurricane cleanup efforts, including donating its fees and helping increase properties for temporary rental, also showed how the company has the ability to become a key piece of a city’s fabric – which will be critical as the company looks to go from the cheap, non-hotel option to the one-of-a-kind, convenient stop.

Boxee: Web and TV become one (finally)

I wanted to say that Web-powered television was already here and mainstream, but it’s still amazing whenever I visit anyone’s home and see the number of cable subscribers. I keep expecting to see more Xbox units, Roku boxes, Apple TVs, or Boxee boxes out there – but alas, I haven’t. However, I think conversations are starting to happen where consumers are looking for more on-demand programming outside of what cable can offer. And that’s why I expect 2013 to be a year when Boxee goes mainstream (and though it very well could be the other delivery boxes, I’m going to put my bets behind Boxee).

Just why does this year (unlike all the other years it was supposed to be the year) look like on-demand, non-cable programming will make it big? I think the way television has changed in 2012 opens a huge opportunity outside of cable. Look at some of the most popular shows of 2012 and you’ll find stations like HBO (“Game of Thrones” or “Newsroom”) and Showtime (“Homeland”) leading the way. Meanwhile, original programming is finding its way onto YouTube.

Television consumption is amazing – normal consumers watch a large amount of programming. As programming moves outside of normal cable packages or outside of the cable realm completely, I expect consumers will turn to Boxee to get that program they’ve heard about.

My cousin said he watches 5-6 movies per week on Netflix through his Xbox before he goes to bed. Why? Because it’s free, its easy, and it’s on his schedule. Television programming remains one of the biggest guilty pleasures out there, and as must-watch content moves from cable, look for consumers to buy the boxes and devices that can serve it.

Brit+Co: Making our real lives like Pinterest & Etsy

It’s hard not to have a major online crush on Brit Moran, the founder and face of Brit+Co. She’s like a tech savvy Martha Stewart who makes life a little easier for the rest of us without making us feel bad for not having perfectly pressed pants, an amazing soufflé, or a home ready for professional photography. But Brit represents a much larger trend – technology showing off beauty of real life. Companies from Etsy (a beautiful marketplace for handicrafts or vintage items) to Pinterest (a design-inspired site for collecting images) are offering a way to showcase beautiful design and imagery. But Brit and her site (okay, let’s call it an emerging empire) seem poised to help take that to our real lives.

I think Brit+Co is poised to go mainstream this year because the huge fan bases of Etsy and Pinterest are looking for their Martha … and who better than Brit? She’ll be a featured guest on the “Katie Couric Show,” which I expect to introduce her to the masses. I’ve watched my female college and high school friends liking her on Facebook, which seems a sign of things to come.

Eric Koester is a serial entrepreneur and most recently founded Zaarly.com, a peer-to-peer marketplace to discover hand-curated local service providers. You can read more at http://www.ekoester.com.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via ►Peter Parkes/Compfight cc

Ashok Kamal is cofounder and CEO of green social media marketing company Bennu.

When I told VentureBeat I wanted to write a piece about the rise of green gamification — the use of games to make sustainability fun and rewarding — they were skeptical. They’ve seen a lot of green-themed apps hit the market, but many are poorly designed and largely ignored attempts by brands to “greenwash” their image.

But amid these half-baked products, there’s actually some real, solid progress at the intersection of two of today’s most disruptive business forces: gamification and sustainability. And for those of us eager to see the masses go green – whether to save the planet, or just save money – it’s good news.

The growth of green gamification is being accelerated by forces ranging from the government’s Green Button promotion of energy-use data to the digital generation’s strong desire for smartphone apps that allow them to manage resource consumption.

Much as Nike+ Fuelband is turning exercise from a chore into a cool activity, a suite of green web and mobile apps are transforming the way people approach environmental stewardship. From startups such as Leafully to corporate alliances that increase energy efficiency, gamification is emerging as a powerful weapon to advance sustainability.

Whether working out or conserving water, actions become rewarding when they are measureable, engaging, and shared.

Not only are people driven to gain status and recognition by social sharing, but also there is positive peer pressure to avoid being a laggard. Do you want to be the house on the block with the worst recycling rate?

The Zynga of green gamification is Opower, a software player that processes big household energy data into a gamified interface that helps people reduce their power consumption and utility bills. The company partners with utilities to analyze data in over 50 million homes, and it closed out 2012 by saving users an estimated 2 terawatt hours of energy, or $200 million.

Greenbean Recycle is a Boston-based startup changing the attitude and behaviors about recycling on the campuses of some of the nation’s best colleges, including MIT, Harvard, and Tufts. [Disclosure: I'm an unpaid member of the company's advisory board.] Greenbean’s game mechanics, such as intercollegiate challenges and recycling lotteries, have resulted in up to a 40 percent increase of the recycling rate.

Moreover, Greenbean is cracking the code of one of recycling’s main hurdles: how to get people to recycle non-deposit bottles that don’t pay a redemption value. By posting leaderboards and rewarding the top recyclers, Greenbean’s collection is 30% non-deposit materials that would normally be destined for overcrowded landfills.

Other new green gaming companies that have raised millions of dollars in venture funding include My Energy and Practically Green, both of which use the social web to calculate environmental footprint metrics and reward users for their performance.

Even historically static sectors, such as academia, nonprofit, and small business, are embracing innovation through green gamification. Ocean explorer and activist Philippe Cousteau, in conjunction with Dr. Jeffrey Plank at the University of Virginia, have developed a massively multiplayer online game to simulate the impacts of human activity on the health of the Chesapeake Bay (the largest estuary in the U.S.). Players of the UVA Bay Game take on the role of key stakeholders – ranging from fisherman to regulators – to learn systems-thinking and collaboration.

Philippe, Dr. Plank and I spoke on a 2012 SXSW panel with Intel’s Carrie Freeman, who asserted that corporations can leverage the UVA Bay Game model to solve business challenges such as balancing company vs. community water needs. The UVA Bay Game developers recently announced a partnership with The Nature Conservancy to launch a new version of the simulation focused on a major Texas watershed.

While small business owners are often pressed for time and money, thousands across the country have joined the Green Business Bureau (GBB), which offers a gamified online sustainability tool that helps assess, manage, and report on a library of 400+ green initiatives. [Disclosure: The GBB is a client of my company.] One GBB member, NewMarket International, shaved $60,000 off its annual budget by following the adaptive survey’s recommendations and reducing packaging waste, among other green achievements.

The GBB’s technology also powers green business certification for nonprofit Green America and Intuit’s small business supplier network.

Gamification is still in its formative years, evolving to exhibit more purpose and tangible impact. As the sustainability movement also matures, stakeholders are realizing the potential of green gamification. In order to propel green into the mainstream, we need to make it enjoyable, accessible, and rewarding.

The main reason people play green games is that they are fun. A more sustainable world is the convenient — and welcome — by-product.

Ashok Kamal is cofounder and CEO of green social media marketing company Bennu. He has worked extensively with Fortune 500 clients and startups to develop game-based campaigns that promote sustainability while creating enterprise value. He is a frequent public speaker at events such as the White House’s GreenGov Symposium, South by Southwest, Gamification Summit, and Sustainable Brands. In February 2013 he will be presenting a workshop with Gabe Zichermann on “Green Gamification by Design” at the GreenBiz Forum in NYC.

photo credit: gadl via photopin cc

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.

photo credit: griffintech via photopin cc

Lark, the startup that makes those nifty sleep-tracking, insomnia-curing wristbands, has just taken its product a step further. Today, the company launched a new wristband that brings diet and exercise into the biometic fold.

Called Larklife, the new product combines hardware and software to track personal health factors such as how many steps you take, how many calories you burn, and how soundly you sleep. That data is gathered automatically and passively by Larklife’s dual wristband hardware: one band for sleeping, the other for waking hours.

Food tracking has been built into a one-click process; just tap a button on your wristband, and you can enter your nutritional info on the free Larklife iPhone app at your leisure.

The system then analyzes the data and makes personalized recommendations for your health and wellness based on the input of a team of scientists and sleep, diet, and fitness experts. For example, if your Larklife nighttime wristband knows you didn’t get much real rest last night, the Larklife iPhone app will remind you to eat an extra healthy, fuel-packed breakfast to keep your energy level and concentration up.

The wristbands themselves were designed by Ammuniton, the design shop that previously designed the Beats line of headphones bearing Dr. Dre’s moniker.

Here’s what the system looks like:

In addition to providing instant recommendations for better health via iOS notifications, Larklife pulls in gamification elements to incentivize users by celebrating their accomplishments.

In some ways, it’s a bit like Nike’s FuelBand or the popular Fitbit lineup. But adding the sleep component is Lark’s secret sauce.

The original Lark product was a simple wristband that tracked your sleep, woke you with a gentle buzz from a small vibrating component, and proceeded to make recommendations to help you sleep better.

Larklife is available for $149; the company’s sleep-only coach sells for $99.

Lark was founded in 2010 by Julia Hu; the startup is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has taken a grand total of $80,000 in funding to date — not a huge amount for any startup, let alone a hardware venture, which makes the young company’s progress all the more impressive.

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

Private social network Path and lifestyle brand Nike have teamed up to make the road to a better you a tad more rewarding. The Nike FuelBand, a gadget you wear on your wrist to track your daily activity, now connects to the Path app to keep you accountable and motivated each day.

Path is the San Francisco-based startup that makes an iPhone and Android app for sharing private moments in the form of photos, thoughts, music, locations, and so forth with close friends. The experience, a foil for what’s become of Facebook and other social networks, encourages a type of intimacy that might feel extreme anywhere else.

The FuelBand integration is a perfect example of this. FuelBand users can connect their activity-monitoring devices to Path to automatically share a graph of their progress against their daily activity goal. The shared graph even highlights Path moments that contributed to the person’s progress. The idea is to channel the friend-love on Path to help FuelBand users stay encouraged.

To a non-Path user, this may sound like over-sharing. It’s too much information, you say. I too have no desire whatsoever to be exposed to the daily activity counters and goals of most of the people I know through social media. But on Path, the mini FuelBand progress reports seem natural and, dare I say, exciting to behold.

A Path friend, for instance, made the FuelBand connection yesterday, and when his first progress report appeared in my stream, I couldn’t help but smile and offer my congratulations — in the form of an emoticon, because that is the Path way — for the small feat of reaching his daily goal. It’s a little gesture on his part to share that moment with me, and a tiny gesture on my part to acknowledge the activity, but the end result is that I feel like I know him a little better. And with real friends, the accumulation of these little moments can be quite profound.

Keep in mind that you’re listening to a Path convert. After feeling overexposed on Facebook and Twitter, I was craving a social experience more personal, private, and genuine. I revisited the Path app about two months ago and haven’t looked back. With just 34 friends, I feel like I can be me, uncensored and real.

With more than 3 million users, Path is small potatoes as far as social applications go. The company has raised an exorbitant amount of funding relative to its size, so you’d be right to be skeptical about its future success.

But, anecdotally speaking, I can sense that Path is having a little moment of its own. For starters, I’ve introduced the app to my best friends (who don’t care about or follow tech news the way I do), and it’s become one of the primary ways we keep up with each other. And, strangely enough, a friend’s high school-aged son told me last night that he had downloaded Path.

Now with more fuel to create intimacy between real friends, Path seems headed in the right direction.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re tired of guestimating how many calories you burned walking around the living room, check out Nike’s new wristband gadget that tracks calories and movement.

The new Nike+ FuelBand, announced Thursday, is a direct competitor to Jawbone’s similar UP wristband. Jawbone suspended production of the UP in December and issued full refunds to customers after complaints of battery and synching issues. Like the Jawbone UP, the FuelBand is worn around your wrist and can be synched to an iPhone or PC to upload activity data.

“The NIKE+ FuelBand is a way for Nike to further evolve the exciting possibilities of merging the physical and digital worlds,” said NIKE, Inc. President and Chief Executive Mark Parker, in a statement. “Nike has always been about inspiring athletes, and the NIKE+ FuelBand will help motivate them in a simple, fun and intuitive way.”

Designed to measure your movement throughout the entire day, from walking and running to biking and ballet, the waterproof band also allows you to set daily goals. The FuelBand will notify you through its LED software whether or not you meet those goals.

So, what makes the $150 FuelBand different from the $100 Jawbone UP? For starters, the Jawbone UP can stay charged for up to 10 days, while the FuelBand lasts only four. However, the FuelBand has internal USB, which could make using the Jawbone seem like a hassle when having to use its required USB-to-headphone jack adapter to charge.

Although the FuelBand is heavier, it offers a polished user interface and web access for $50 extra. In theory, the FuelBand could make for a better experience, especially for previous Jawbone UP owners burned by issues with early models. The FuelBand is available for pre-order now but won’t ship until Feb. 22.

Athletes like Lance Armstrong have already endorsed the FuelBand, claiming the tool will help people meet daily and weekly fitness targets.