Treeduck

Fitbit uses a 3D motion sensor like the one in Nintendo's Wii to track everything from calories burned to minutes slept.

(Credit: Fitbit
Amount of steps you took today: 3,451. Miles traveled: 1.4. Calories burned: 348. Calories consumed: 625. Then you went to bed at 12:05 a.m. Time to fall asleep: 23 minutes. Times awakened: 25. You were in bed for 8 hours 2 minutes. Actual sleep time: 7 hours 42 minutes.
The math is easy, sure. But never before has a device tracked so many aspects of an individual's physical movements to measure overall wellness. From caloric intake to activity levels (sedentary, lightly active, fairly active, and very active), Fitbit clips onto clothing or straps around one's wrist and uses a 3D motion sensor similar to the one in Nintendo's Wii to measure multiple aspects of one's physical self.
And much in the way services like Quicken encourage people to measure whether they are living within their means, Fitbit's Web site analyzes all this data and allows users to input goals. The device costs $99 plus shipping.
Perhaps most exciting of all is that Fitbit will now help each of us understand objectively how vigorously we engage in such activities as laughing, having sex, popping open that bottle of champagne, etc. Will Fitbit users suddenly do these activities more vigorously to maximize caloric output? This little gadget could be a far more romantic gift than current marketing suggests.

CVS Caremark announced Tuesday that it has broadened its pharmacy partnership with Microsoft to let customers download their prescription histories to their Microsoft HealthVault accounts.

Available since June 2008, the CVS offering has allowed customers to save and manage their pharmaceutical history online via Microsoft's HealthCare Web site. Now people can also add their prescription history by visiting CVS.com and logging into their HealthVault record.
Microsoft HealthVault is a free service that lets consumers store and maintain their health information in one single electronic spot. The site also provides health-related advice on losing weight, staying in shape, and managing health records for an emergency.
The service has been open to people who fill their prescriptions at CVS and those who use CVS's MinuteClinic, small health clinics where consumers can receive medical attention from nurse practitioners at select CVS stores. Customers who use the clinic can now also store their lab tests and other results into HealthVault.
"The expansion of the HealthVault and CVS Caremark partnership allows a greater number of people to easily manage prescription information for themselves and their families," said David Cerino, general manager of consumer health in Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. "This not only helps consumers take better control of their medication plans, but also enables individuals to provide their physicians with visibility to their prescription history for better coordination of care."
Microsoft isn't CVS' only health care partner. In April, CVS expanded its joint venture with Google to let customers store their health records online through Google Health.
With the push toward health care reform, other tech companies have also gotten into the act.
In May, Intuit, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, and other firms formed the EHR Stimulus Alliance, designed to push doctors and hospitals toward digital record keeping.
Originally posted at Health Tech

All human life is to be seen on Facebook. Which, for some, is not necessarily a good thing.
Facebook has removed a poll asking "Should Obama be killed?" But not before at least 730 people took part in the poll. The poll offered four potential answers to the question: "Yes", "No", "Maybe," and "If he cuts my health care."
The Plum Line, a Washington Post site, reports that the Secret Service has begun an investigation into who might have been behind such an imaginative exercise. It appears that a blog called the Political Carnival first noticed the poll and alerted the Secret Service over the weekend.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)
Facebook is increasingly becoming a popular forum for all kinds of hateful speech--from Holocaust Denial Groups to anti-Muslim organizations. Groups purporting to hate specific individuals have also found a home on Facebook, and the company has not found it easy to keep up with the amount of policing that is required to cover more than 300 million members.
However, this poll will represent for many an entirely new dimension in human dementia. It will be interesting to see how quickly the source is located and who that source might turn out to be.
Facebook's Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail that while the site doesn't comment on actions against individual users, "penalties for posting content in violation of our policies range from warnings to temporarily or permanently disabling accounts." He also confirmed that the site is working with the Secret Service but couldn't provide any details of their investigation.
As to the source of the poll, he said: "The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning (Monday). It was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content."

The Zune HD represents a big step forward in Microsoft's war against the iPod, but when it comes to accessories, there's just no catching up to Apple. Step inside any local electronics store and you'll find yourself wading through a swamp of speaker docks, cases, cables, chargers, in-car FM transmitters, and alarm clocks, all made for the iPod. Try looking for the Zune section, though, and you'll be sorely disappointed.
Fortunately, the handful of accessories made for the Zune are all surprisingly high in quality. The iHome ZN9 alarm clock, for instance, is one of the better bedside speaker systems we've tested, regardless of what MP3 player you plug into it. Same goes for the Kicker ZK500--the thing is a first-rate, floor-shaking speaker dock that any Zune owner should count themselves lucky to have.
Some accessories are uniquely Zune, though. The HD AV dock, for example, has no equal in the iPod world. With it, you can output 720p video from your Zune HD to your TV, as well as show off your music collection, flip through photos, and tune into HD Radio channels.

After a few hours on Tuesday of playing with the Zune HD that Microsoft sent me, I found a lot of things I like about it--the slim size, the Quickplay user interface feature that gives you immediate access to recently added and favorite songs, the big on-screen volume controls, and the Zune Pass, for example. But the Web browser seems like an afterthought.

CNET's Donald Bell had better luck with the on-screen keyboard than I did.

(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET)
I know that mobile Web browsing isn't the same as PC browsing, but I've used Safari on the iPhone for more than a year, and it's great--I actually read articles, for work and fun, on my bus commute to work. It's so good, I've been taking it for granted. Not anymore.
Microsoft says the Zune HD's browser is based on the mobile version of Internet Explorer, but it doesn't look like any version of IE I've ever seen. The address bar is hidden--you have to pull up on the gray bar at the bottom of the screen to get to it. The other alternative is to click on a small magnifying glass to conduct a search on the mobile version of Bing, which I found difficult to use. (No slam against the full browser-based version of Microsoft's search engine, which I like.) For instance, when I conduct a search on my employer's name, "Directions on Microsoft," Bing Mobile assumes I want news stories that cite the company, when in fact I just want our home page. There's a link on the Bing Mobile site that says "web," which I assume is supposed bring me general search results from around the Web, but when I clicked it repeatedly, nothing happened. There's also no auto-suggest or auto-complete for search queries--each time you want to search for "Chinese restaurants," you have to type the whole query in.
Regardless of how you're trying to navigate, the on-screen keyboard seems to require more finger accuracy than the fault-tolerant keyboard on the iPhone (probably because of the smaller screen). The back button is hard to hit--I kept selecting the favorites menu by mistake. Sites are also considerably slower to load, and the resolution doesn't seem to be nearly as good as the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a noticeable flicker on pages with white backgrounds.

Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.
The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.
Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.

(Credit: Nielsen)
Other players in the top 10 included AOL Search in fourth place with 333 million searches and Ask.com Search in fifth with 186 million searches.
Similar studies have also seen a boost in Microsoft's search business. An August report from ComScore discovered that Microsoft's share of the global search engine market lept 41 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. Bing was introduced in May, taking the place of Microsoft's Live Search.
Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off a "visual search" feature for Bing that returns thumbnail images for at least some search results. Microsoft reportedly will be debuting a Bing 2.0 sometime soon sporting a variety of new features.

Having conquered the Web's text-based ad market, Google is setting its sights on display, graphical ads--a market dominated by rival Yahoo.

The search giant on Thursday took the wraps off a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a public exchange that allows publishers to offer excess ad inventory they can't sell to advertisers looking for a bargain. Google said the exchange will meld the DoubleClick's ad exchange with Google's own technology.
"Better technology can help make display advertising work better for all involved," Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of product management, said in a statement. "We're focused on growing the display advertising pie for everyone. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a major part of that goal."
The newly revamped exchange will incorporate Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, as well as feature real-time bidding and a new API designed for ad networks.
Yahoo, which currently runs the largest online ad exchange through RightMedia, an exchange it purchased in 2007 for $680 million, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Google's dominance of the search engine advertising market has been fueled by text ads. In 2008, it completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in hopes of expanding its presence in display ads, to this date more the province of its competitor Yahoo. Display ads--banners or image-based ads--haven't produced the same return that search text ads have to this point but are still an important part of most Web sites.
Internet display advertising accounted for $7.6 billion in 2008, roughly a third of the $23.4 billion in revenue generated by all Internet ads for the year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Microsoft opened up its Hohm Web application on Monday to U.S. users, a site that gives people a starting point for cutting home energy use.

The launch of Hohm, still in beta, was marred at least for some people, including me, by a DNS problem on Microsoft's side, according to the Hohm product development team. An hour or two after the launch, a few other consumers on Twitter complained of sign-in problems that lasted a few hours.

Once that glitch was cleared up, I was able to finish creating a profile in Hohm for my old New England house. Overall, I'd say it's a useful service that meets its goal of being easy to use.

The "brains" behind Hohm's energy-efficiency recommendations is an existing database that Microsoft licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy. That means much of the basic information on how to save money on energy bills has been available for some time from the Energy Department and other sources, if in a disjointed and less attractive form.

I was able to create a nearly complete profile because I've been chipping away at my home energy use for years. (How many of you know what your home's air leakage rate is?) I also did some on-the-spot estimating, which I would expect most people would need to do.

In fact, some of the questions are incredibly detailed, such as what's the capacity of your refrigerator expressed in cubic feet? Rather than pretend that I'd be able to find the manual, I went online and got an idea of what a fridge like mine typically holds.

There are also some places where inevitably there will be gaps and guesses. For instance, I have radiators so I couldn't say where my ducts are located (in conditioned space or not) and being very precise about say, programmable thermostat settings, can be tricky. Also, there are a lot of questions which will no doubt scare some people away.

That said, it's a worthwhile exercise to run through the roughly 200 questions, even if you can't answer them. Why? It offers strong clues as to what matters most when it comes to cutting your energy bills. Whether your PC and monitor uses power-management features is significant enough for Hohm to care.

Man versus machine
But on your first visit, it's really the energy report that you're after. Although Hohm's recommendations perplexed me a few times, on balance it provided solid information.

Put another way, I'd say Hohm echoed the advice of the three energy auditors who have traipsed through my house over the past few years. It also features a "library" with generic recommendations to help people get ready for the summer and there are tips sprinkled on the News section.

Not surprisingly, the recommendations are extremely unglamorous: replace (more) incandescent bulbs, insulate boiler pipes, lower the temperature on the water heater, and so on.

A few things threw me off. Get a high-efficiency boiler for $1,000? Not where I live. But when I clicked on that recommendation, Hohm notes that's the do-it-yourself price and offers a ballpark cost ($8,000) for a professional job.

Hohm doesn't quite measure up to a knowledgeable human being. I paid for an energy audit, complete with a blower door test, this past winter and the recommendations were specific to my situation and very detailed.

But that's OK. Most people just want some good ideas on greening their home and Hohm does that. What I like most is that it creates a list, from which you can develop a plan. Because let's face it, nobody's going to weatherize their home in one weekend.

Monitoring products tend to focus on providing a real-time read-out of energy use. In its first beta version, Google's PowerMeter, for example, surfaces information on how much electricity individual appliances consume and provides daily charts.

Down the road, both Microsoft and Google are interested in expanding their products so consumers can participate in demand-response programs, where a utility can remotely adjust appliances to save energy during peak times. In the meantime, though, many smart-grid products are just trying to give consumers more detailed information than a monthly bill.

Because my utilities aren't providing a data feed to Microsoft, I wasn't able to view my electric and natural gas use without manually entering the data. If a feed were available, I think I would use it to get a better feel for seasonal changes and improvements I've made.

Actual consumption data would also create a far more accurate profile for my home, particularly when comparing to others. For example, I had solar panels installed on my house last year, which has slashed my overall consumption but that's not reflected in the model Hohm creates.

If there were a feature that I'd like to have, on first blush I'd say it's the ability to add my own items to the recommendations so I could treat Hohm like my to-do list.

Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially rolled out the new version, Silverlight 3, today. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform.

SIiverlight 3 launched a day earlier today on Microsoft’s servers, surprising the blogosphere. The new version has improved streaming capabilities, called Smooth Streaming. Here’s what Microsoft said about the new streaming function:

If the Internet bandwidth and video rendering capability on your playback device are sufficiently high, you’ll experience high-definition video playback of the sample content. You will also be able to simulate end user experiences under varying conditions by simulating drops and recoveries in bandwidth. If your actual bandwidth is below 3 Mbps, or your playback device is video-challenged, then you will experience the adaptive nature of Smooth Streaming without needing to simulate a bandwidth cap.

Microsoft is also extending Silverlight’s technologies beyond the browser by allowing developers to design and create apps that can run on the desktop. Microsoft will be announcing further details about Silverlight at its official launch of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 tomorrow morning.

The following post was written by a well known executive at one of the largest sites on the Internet. The author has requested to remain anonymous - not for dramatic effect, but because of the backlash he would receive from the SEO industry and possibly Google itself. He also doesn’t want his company associated with the post.

He is starting a discussion on the need for government regulation of the organic and paid search policies of Google, which maintains a commanding lead in search market share today. Or at least transparency in how search results are determined. There is clearly growing frustration on the constantly changing “border policies” that are created and enforced by Google and other search engines. It is a fascinating read.

Imagine, if you will, that the entire Internet is contained within a single continent. That continent is filled with countries, states and cities. Each jurisdiction is autonomous, relying on visitors to cross on to their turf to engage in commerce. Now, imagine if the only way to get into this continent involved just two methods: SEO and SEM. Let’s further imagine that the borders to this continent were controlled by a single company. Let’s also hold that the rules for search engine optimization listings and search engine marketing were not only defined but were completely controlled at the whim of this single company. Of course, we all realize that word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing also contribute to traffic to individual websites. That said, the primary methodology for all users to reach any individual website destination is still search, of either paid or organic listings.

Or suppose the paradigm is the streets of Los Angeles. Let’s imagine that in order to enter the city you had to pass through a single gate. And once you entered that gate, the streets you were or were not allowed to go down — and thus the businesses you were or were not allowed to visit — could be randomly blocked from your access. Blocked to a point where you might not even know they exist; whatever streets were available for you to traverse were in essence the only streets you knew where business could be transacted.

Whatever the scenario, it’s unsettlingly close to the situation that prevails today in search. It’s now conventional wisdom that search engine optimization, representing the organic result sets on any search query, is more voodoo than science. Through an uncontrolled set of factors search engines determine which listings appear at the top and bottom of any individual query. In addition, consumer behavior dictates the top three results on any search page are all that matter. If you happen to own an online business, unless you exist within those top three, the amount of individual traffic you will obtain from organic listings is very, very low. As the proprietor of that business you may hire search engine optimization companies to assist in increasing your rankings on organic results, with or without success. And at any one time, the controller of these borders (that is, the search engine itself) can change and manipulate those rules – and that can substantially decrease or destroy all organic traffic coming to your website, without notice and without your knowledge.

Search engine marketing now faces a similar challenge. Although anyone can open an account to buy paid search listings, the rules on each account are arbitrary. Accounts can be shut down at any time, without notice to the website owner. In other words, if you haven’t successfully obtained enough traffic to your site from organic listings and you decide to rely on paid search, you still face a situation where regardless of how much you bid per click you may or may not show up at the top of the paid results. That’s because paid results that are displayed on any query are not only determined based on the price the buyer is willing to pay. Unlike other auctions that are completely priced-based, these results are determined and sequenced not only on price but also on quality of advertising and click-through volume. For example, if company A was willing to pay $1 per click on a certain term and company B was willing to pay 10 cents but company B’s ad generated ten times as many clicks as company A’s, the yield to the search engine would be identical between the two.

The second factor is that the search engine can, at any time, determine that either company A or company B may or may not buy traffic within its index. And without notifying the company and with no path toward recourse and statement, the search engine can disable the paid search account from either business. Returning to the continent metaphor, this ends up looking quite a bit like free trade. Various businesses (call them sellers), operating within this continent, wish to conduct business with the rest of the world (that is, the population of buyers). The border — which in this case is the search engine — thus has complete control of who can transact and how often. And at its discretion, the search engine can decide to increase, decrease or completely disable access between buyers and sellers. Because search is the dominant methodology for consumers to find what they are looking for, whether a product or a service, the unilateral control that search engines wield enables them to control billions upon billions of dollars of consumer spend every year. It also gives them the ability to completely determine which companies become more successful — or less so.

The situation we face today is unique. Due to Google’s dominance — and the fact that it controls such an enormous amount of consumer behavior through paid and organic search listings – the company in essence governs commerce on the web. And any company that falls out of favor with Google, whether for reasons of bad practice or simple disagreement, can find itself at risk of going out of business.

This system also benefits the few in a host of other ways. Because the rules of organic and paid search change frequently – and remain undefined — agencies and other traffic brokers can win big; through their experience, they’re capable of reverse-engineering these rules. This means that, as this market matures, individual businesses have a diminishing chance to actually compete and gain search market share. That, in turn, puts them in a position of not only needing to hire an agency in order to find any traffic, but also making it more expensive overall to build businesses on the web.

I’ve worked with many businesses who feel they are playing in Google’s world — behaviors from product decisions to marketing strategies rely completely on appeasing these undocumented and often mystical Google desires. I’ve seen companies choose to not work with Google’s competitors for fear that by building those relationships, they’re damaging the ability to be indexed properly on Google and are anxious that result sets will be compromised. Many likewise believe that by having a monetization relationship through Google, they will somehow achieve higher quality listings through organic search. I’ve also witnessed companies who, in addition to using Google for monetization, have preferred relationships with purchasing traffic through Google Adwords. By supporting this dual relationship, they appear to want to live by two sets of rules – those that exist within the Adwords marketplace and those that apply to the Adsense product. And because they’re walking on both sides of the (Google) street, they feel they have a strategic advantage — as though the Adwords product will enable them to acquire traffic at both a lower cost and with a looser rule set than their competitors.

Here’s where the parallel to free trade breaks down. There are no perfect paradigms looking at free trade and import/export laws that exactly define or address this challenge. Neither would a secret relationship between the government and the search engines solve the problem. The only real solution is disclosure. Transparency. Those traffic generators that use rule-based algorithms to determine result sets must publicly disclose their methodologies. That is the means by which all businesses can compete freely in the organic and paid search marketplaces. If we lived in a world where Google didn’t hold sway over such a significant portion of consumer behavior, this kind of regulation wouldn’t be necessary. The market would be self-correcting, and we could trust the individual decisions of a healthy and competitive search industry. Regrettably, due to search dominance, the industry can’t be left to its own devices.