Peter Petrovski

One of the biggest trends that has accelerated the growth of mobile devices over the last decade has been the marriage of technology and the liberal arts. These devices have opened up a myriad of creative avenues to the mass market, from painting applications, music creation tools and photography sharing and enhancement. 

This decade, the first in the post-PC era, we will witness a symbiosis of technology and biology in consumer devices. The continued advancement of sensors in small devices and high speed connectivity will enable technology to track our health and activity in every detail. 

As our population grows older, more obese, and our economy is strained, the need for technology to step in and provide self-monitoring tools will be crucial. It will be a lucrative market that will be flooded with startups looking to build wearable devices at the cross section of health, mobile and technology.

These products will enable us to better monitor our health. Friendly reminders to exercise, warnings about high blood sugar levels, and in extreme cases, automatically signalling ambulances and doctors when we need critical attention.

The Nike+ Fuelband is not the first of these devices that helps track our activity levels, but it’s probably the best. The device tracks your activity levels and converts it to a system Nike calls ‘Fuel Points’. You set your fuel goal each day through the iPhone app or Nike+ website, and the idea is to reach and exceed your goal each day. 

The more energy you exert, the more points you get.  It also tracks your calories and steps taken, which is great added context to the Fuel Points system, which is a more esoteric measurement not familiar to many.

However after a period of time using the device, you come to realise that it doesn’t matter too much how it calculates these points - you just want to keep beating your daily fuel goal.

The great thing about the Fuelband is that it acts as a constant reminder to stay active. Instead of sitting at your desk during your work lunch break, you now get up and go for a walk to ensure you reach your target.

The design of the band itself is very functional and comfortable. Rows of small, bright LED’s inform you of your fuel points used and other data. There is just one button on the front to toggle between the different data sets, and it also acts as sync button when held down for a few seconds. Yes, it syncs through bluetooth to the iPhone app, and this works without a hitch. You can also sync through the website using the USB cord if you want to do it old-school. In either case, all your activity data is pushed to the cloud.

The band itself is lightweight, yet it feels sturdy. I don’t feel like I’m going to break it if I toss it in a backpack or drop it on concrete. The band’s material is rubber which is prone to catch lint and scuff up, but I haven’t found it a problem. I hope in future hardware they make the band a little thinner.

The Nike+ service is accessible through the free iPhone app and the website. I find the app much easier to use, and syncing through bluetooth is far easier than plugging in through USB. The Nike+ service through both the app and website graphs your activity levels over time, includes various gamification mechanics and gives you the ability to share your results with your friends across Facebook and Twitter.

If you are interested in improving your activity levels, the Nike+ Fuelband is a great product. It will remind you to move, not through annoying notifications but simply due to it’s persistent presence on you wrist. The points system will drive you to keep reaching your daily goals, which serves as a great motivator. It’s also a beautifully designed product with it’s unassuming design, which contrasts with the futuristic LED indicator lights. Expect to get some attention when wearing the Fuelband.

There’s a lot of talk that RSS is done. Dead. You just have to wait a few weeks and a new post will swirl through Hacker News declaring this news reading technology defunct.

Not that there isn’t any merit to it.

Social media has become the defacto newswire of the Twitter Generation. Both directly through Twitter and Facebook and indirectly through aggregating services such as Flipboard and Techmeme.

Perusing news feeds is a great filter for uncovering great content and serendipitous discovery. All the articles, photos and video that people you value have declared worthy enough to share.

If you’re a content fiend like I am, you already follow a lot of accounts on Twitter. You probably have a Tumblr account. You’ve liked, tagged, favourited, read later and bookmarked more content than you know what to do with.

In this flood of great content, the little gems get lost. That cool design blog. That small blog that posts great music reviews. That blog by the former colleague that is only updated once every few weeks. You want to read every single post from these blogs, not just the random popular post that may somehow push through the flood and wash to shore.

These gems that maybe only you enjoy reading get lost amongst the cacophony of Fast Company, Techcrunch and Washington Post noise.

There is no tool out there to keep track of these posts better than RSS. More specifically, RSS feeds subscribed through Google Reader and using mobile apps like Reeder to read the feeds.

So when one of these posts bubbles up declaring that RSS is dead for the hundredth time, I’ll just go back into reading my unread items in Google Reader. Happily knowing that even in the storm of amazing content filtered by my friends, I can keep up with some of my favourite niche blogs. Even if none of my friends read them.

How do you keep up with your favourite blogs? Please share in the comments.

Yet another micro-social-sharing-mobile app has been released, it’s called Everyme. 

When I first read about it I had to groan. A Path clone? A copy of Google+ circles? Why do I need this when it’s already hard enough to get friends to join those networks. Even their websites look the same.

But then I started using it, and I realised it’s a little different.

A little useful, even.

What’s very clever is that it actually solves a real problem in a logical way - sharing with your close friends, even if they don’t use that social network. All without having to manually create friend groups, or as the app interestingly calls them - circles.

Everyme scans your address book, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and auto-magically creates circles based on your social graph. You can then tinker with them and add other circles to your heart’s desire.

The beautiful thing is that when you share to a circle, it will send the update to your friends’ email address or to their phone number as a text message. The emails look beautiful, and may encourage your friends to join the network without you having to nag. Amazing.

The visual similarities to Path are hard to ignore. In some views it looks like they took Path and tinted it a shade of aqua blue. Missing are some of the fun visual elements such as Path’s bouncy input ball and the spinning clock as you scroll through your timelines. This makes me a little sad.

However it makes up for the one infuriating problem with Path, in that in order for it to be fun and useful your friends need to be active there.

There are no Path-like photo filters in Everyme. Nor are there emoticons. You can’t share songs or post your Nike+ runs. In fact, Everyme doesn’t really feel like a social network at all, but rather a sleek group messaging app.

So even though at first tap it looks like a Path clone, after using it for a while you realise it’s something else. It’s an address book. 

If anything, it’s more of an iMessage replacement.

iMessage seeks to replace SMS, sending a text through the iMessage protocol whenever an iOS 5 device is detected.

But not everyone has an iPhone.

Path also doesn’t work unless you are in a clique of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or your name is Robert Scoble. 

Everyme allows you to easily send a message or a photo to a group of people, regardless of what network or phone they are using. You just send an update to a circle, a real friend circle not a Google+ nerdcircle, and know that it will reach everyone via the app, an email or a text message.

It will be interesting to see if the service takes off. For once though, I don’t have to beg all my friends to join yet another social network - it has value right from the start.

And it’s called Instagram.

In a status update today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company has bought Instagram for a tidy sum of 1 Billion dollars. Billion.

Besides the fact that this is higher than the market cap of the The New York Times, a 150 year old company, it’s also the highest price acquisition Facebook has made to date.

Instagram is a small startup that employs just 13 people. However, they have built a killer mobile app that people love engaging with. In contrast to Facebook, Instagram is a service designed to be mobile first.

Facebook have struggled to create an app people love. Their mobile experience is often bloated, buggy and currently has 2 stars in the App Store. With Instagram, they’ve essentially bought themselves a mobile strategy.

Combining this with the Instagram Android release, hipsters everywhere are crying into their chai lattes and ironic t-shirts.