I’ve started running again 2 years ago, never been a rock star when it comes to running and never actually really got to learn how to run (and no it’s *not* straightforward).
In my case, using a heart monitor has been critical in getting to run up to 15km tracks. Indeed, the heartbeat tells you in which effort zone you are in and for instance I know that when i get above 176bpm I’m starting to burn out and need to relax a bit if I want to run much longer.
To evaluate the effort my requirements are then:

• heart rate
• distance / time
• elevation
• custom workouts
• social integration

I’ve had a Garmin Forerunner 301 for some time now and recently tried the Nike+ since I got my iPhone 4. Basically as a gadget geek I was counting on Nike+ to add to my running experience the “fun” and “social” and maybe replace the Garmin which had been doing a great job till now. Yes the Nike+ solution is way below my expectations. Whenever you do some speed workouts, alternating faster and slower pace, the distance measured by the podometer becomes totally irrelevant, the website (full Flash – kinda weird for an apple partner) is far from being ergonomic, I always have trouble navigating between my runs, the social aspects are limited to publishing to facebook or twitter and of course the soft on the mobile is not using any GPS at all thus no cool map to share online.

on the other side Garmin has released Garmin Connect based on Motionbased acquisition last year and while the service is far from funky it gives perfectly good stats and overview of the run to share.

Finally the fact that the Nike+ software is burnt in the Flash of the iPhone just makes it hard to update and breaks any hope of getting anything decent from this service. On the other side, iPhone has some other nice software such as runkeeper to try out which are taking advantage of the GPS to build nice track logs to share.

As I was having a nice summer evening near my engineering school I got an unexpected demo of a cool student project called “glip” – glips are connected bricks with a colored LED display built-in that can interact together to create animated patterns. Apparently those were created before the MIT’s siftables started buzzing around. Good to see that engineer schools still train resourceful actual engineers !

I’ve been using the iPad home since its US release and while I was really puzzled at first about what it’s good for now I guess I have a clearer view of why an iPad really is good for.
Let’s first start with Steve’s claims:

• The web : Really average experience imho, html5-optimized websites are rare while non-suported flas is overwhelming. All i all the experience is only partial and deceptive
• Productivity : pages/numbers/keynote are not really useful, this did not enable me to replace my laptop – FAIL
• Games : Excellent experience, games on the huge screen really rox. Also the bigger surface enabled new kind of cool games such as Harbor Master
• eBooks : apart from tech eBooks I hate reading on the device, readability is average and there is just too much distraction in the device soul to enable proper immersion in the narration. I still keep my beloved Sony PRS-505 (best form factor imho) – FAIL

Thus, Steve only gets an average mark on his predictions : 1,5 out of 4.

Now a few more have become clear from my experience of the device :

• Movies : using yxplayer makes it easy to upload DivX files without the hassle of re-encoding them to the itunes-supported format (and ending up in storing them twice on you laptop, once in divx, once in mp4 in the iTunes library)
• Educational games / Drawing : The platform is amazing for kids enabling lots of fun interaction. Red Fish is a splendid example of how this can be done.
• Rich Content : The wired application shows how interactive content can become and paves the way to more interactive books (would love to see school history books revamped to take advantage of the iPad)

As a conclusion, don’t buy an iPad if you don’t have kids – you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you do it’s probably going to be an excellent investment!

Last year I spotted this TED presentation of MIT’s David Merrill presenting a concept of connected and interacive dominos he calls “siftables”.

A year later Venturebeat reveals that the concept has bacome a company, sifteo, that just raised 9MUSD of funding.

Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them—piling, grouping, sorting—to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provide a new platform on which to implement tangible games.

This kind of interactive connected devices really prefigure the next generation of interactive connected games which are finally letting the technology in “things” without the need of dematerializing everything into a (mini-)computer.

I’ll save you the usual unboxing video – it’s as usual a perfectly packaged product, you wouldn’t expect less from Apple anyhow. I’ve been quite unsettled on the iPad from the start. It’s heavy, and there is no clear use case or killer apps yet on it. Nevertheless, I can feel something in the air, and needed to give it a first shot.

OK, web browsing is nice but this can’t be the killer app, especially since quite a lot of interactive site do not render properly on the iPad (wanted to book a hotel, and failed). The big screen size really enable a better use of the applciations, especially when those are redesigned for it, such as Evernote which is a real beauty to fire up and play with.

The eBook side is disappointing, the screen being highly reflective makes it really uncomfortable to use and at the end when it comes to reading text, my eBook (Sony PRS505) does a much better job. But where the iPad really blows mind is when it comes to displaying unstructured data such as comics or newspaper. The Marvel and Le Monde applications are simply mindblowing, and are truly reinventing their medium through the iPad, while keeping the paper experience present, they manage to fullty take advantage of the device to enhance the end-user experience. In the case of le monde for instance, I always found the reading of the pdf version on the PC lousy, and would stick to the full text articles instead, while the iPad app managed to bring those two worlds together again.

I expect the gaming to be something huge also, since the big screen will be very prone to social interactions around the device, yet I did not get a epiphany on this topic while trying out a few games.

After google PowerMeter a couple of months ago, it’s not Microsoft’s turn to unveil his home automation / monitoring middleware. Called “hohm”, it all focuses around energy-savings. As US is all about the Smart Power Grigs buzz, this is yet another ecosystem with its own SDK to support. Good thing is that this now means you’ll see in the next future plenty of cheap connected devices making their way in your home and giving you those beautiful dashboards we geeks love.

An amazin piece of geek tech : a wifi flying drone that you can control with your iphone accelerometers while watching the embedded camera stream on the display.
One can wonder what Parrot is doing on those geek grounds since their core business is bluetooth hands-free systems for cars.
Another connected device “Made in France”.

WaveStorm since 2003. I’ve been a very strong advocate of the connected devices space through

2008 and 2009 have been such exciting times with amazing new devices being released (Chumby, Spykee, Rovio, Nabaztag…) yet when you look at the big picture none of those devices really turned into a mass market success (my definition of a success in consumer electronics starts somewhere between 250k/500k units shipped – usually CE projects try to be break even at 100k units).

All those devices are amazing, their internals are beauty, the level of complexity to come up with such a level of integration is amazing, and those babies can really do anything and go way beyond what they were initially aimed at. And this basically is the key concern : what are they aimed at and who needs this ?
Disregarding the fact that setting up a connected devices is a real pain (WiFi pairing really isn’t a one-step process) few strong use cases have really emerged in the market as of today.

The main ideas that have been kinda working are:

• Home surveillance (WiFi cams, Spykee…) : probably the most realistic use case of the connected devices but still nothing really exciting
• Widget screen (Chumby, Ki’i Frame, Tabbee…) : nice gizmo but quite useless at the end of the day
• Interactive toy (Nabaztag) : annoying after a few hours….
• Home automation : been around for a few decades, and it’s taking forever to take off – market super fragmented
• Sensors (RFID reader, weight scales…) : seducing potential but weak gain in your daily life

So let’s face it, creating a connected devices is still quite expensive and at a 150/300 USD price range the use cases of connected devices are far from obvious and the value of those functions v.s. price point seem a non-match thus leaving this gadgets to be aimed only at the geek community.

The mistake everyone is currently making is to try and make “universal” connected devices thus buying expensive hardware to ensure some future potential. And even the customer gets fooled buying a device while projecting himself into potential use-cases he imagines but that will probably never happen.
The consequence of this universal design is naturally a higher price point.
Marketers should really try and do their job defining the core features, and narrowing as much as possible the product around those so this price point gets within the 50-100USD range and the use case gets more clear to the end user.
Also the software on those devices has always been the week side. A lot of effort is put into building the device to put in a box, but the software being kinda intangible gets often left behind or not polished enough.

If we can see cheaper hardware, more focused devices aimed at niche markets and better software in 2010, we may see this Internet of Things coming true.
To be honest I don’t think 2010 will be the year, we probably need another 5 years for the market and the technologies to mature so that connected devices could really be used by my mom at a price she would be willing to pay.

The Power management space is definitely getting super-hot lately. Another day another announce with PowerZoa introducingtheir line of “cubes” which are:

Powerzoa cube is a smart plug that fits between your appliances and wall outlets. The cubes measure your energy usage and sends data to a personalized website where you can schedule appliances to turn on and off automatically, saving electricity, lowering energy costs and helping the environment.

While the website is hideous, it’s quite remarkable they had bot a power meter and a BPL chip fit into such a tiny package. We’re finally getting to what we were foreseeing with WaveStorm in 2007.