The ergonomic NIKE+ FuelBand captures and displays four different metrics: time, calories, steps and NikeFuel – a new metric that will be the ultimate measure of your athletic activity. NikeFuel is a proprietary technology that measures your activity through the movement of your wrist. NikeFuel motivates athletes to do more with a NikeFuel score that makes movement fun, meaningful and comparable, letting you compete with athletes of all levels in most activities. The more you move, the more NikeFuel you earn, whether you’re playing basketball, throwing a Frisbee or going for a run.
The Basis Band is a health tracking watch with optical sensors that track your heart rate, an accelerometer to see how active you are, galvanic skin response to measure your perspiration, plus ambient and skin temperature sensors. All that data gets run through a few Basis algorithms to create a picture of your health that's displayed in the handy-dandy web portal you see above. The dashboard is meant to make your data digestible so you can create (and meet) your health goals, and there's both game mechanics and social media integration to keep you motivated.
Every year, some USD 52 million is lost by users of New York City’s MetroCard payment system when they replace old cards that still have a small amount of value remaining. Aiming to put that leftover money to better use, MetroChange is a new system designed to capture that last bit of change on old cards and donate it to charity instead.
MetroChange has designed a kiosk to be placed at busy subway stations throughout the city — “especially those where tourists and occasional users of the subway transition out of the subway system, transferring to an airport or regional train service”. Commuters and travelers who have a small amount of unused value remaining on a card can swipe that card at one of those kiosks, where the value will be recorded and transmitted to a central fund. The customer’s physical MetroCard, meanwhile, is taken for recycling. Then, MetroChange’s central fund will be converted into real money each month and donated to charity.
Remember Columbia House? BMG Music Club? Back when people bought actual CDs, they were wildly popular. For a cheap price (10 for the price of 1!), members would automatically get new discs every month. No, you didn’t need all that music, but it sure was fun to get.
As much as we live online now, we still like getting stuff. Tangible goods. Things we can hold, use and wear. And lately, it seems, the web-savvy are gravitating towards physical products, partly in reaction to the ubiquity of digital. Just look at the “maker” movement (see On the Make in Think Quarterly’s People issue), the rise of DIY and the popularity of bits-to-its services like Postagram.
Thanks to eCommerce, we have access to more stuff than ever. And consumers have become a lot more comfortable buying online (aided by one-click ordering, free shipping and easy returns). The number of U.S. consumers buying online will increase 14.9% to 170.3 million in 2015, according to eMarketer. Between 8-10% of all queries on Google are shopping related. But there is so much available, it can be downright overwhelming. The paradox of choice is that too much selection makes it harder to select anything at all. It’s a problem of which the internet is both a cause and a cure.
That’s where a slew of new “push shopping” services come in. Including Birchbox, Shoedazzle, and Quarterly.co, these sites leverage eCommerce, online data and expert curation to help consumers make up their minds.
Unexpand article
Join the club. Consumers are signing up for a slew of new “push shopping” services that bring the best of the web to the real world. Words by Allison Mooney.
Those who don't love lego stand up!! ... I don't see anyone out there.
A nice book to gift to some of my geeky and non-geeky friends :)
I would definitely recommend that you download it if you have an iPhone ! :)
Read more about it here : http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/path-2-0-hopes-to-differ-from-other-social-networks/
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An Interaction Designer interested in designing conversations between people, technology and business.
