ejain

Being able to access the history is nice; could be useful when combined with data from other sources...

The API appears to be well thought out--except for the epoch timestamps without time zone offsets :-(

> I think dogpiling Intellectual Ventures is striking at the branches, and not at the root.

Unfortunately the branches are protecting the roots with millions of dollars in lobbying [1]...

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/paten...

Agree, but "identity" and "unique ID for a person" are two different concepts.

A person can have multiple identities, and not all identities are associated with specific people.

I don't recall seeing sugar being marketed as "better than fat". Companies just upped the sugar when fat fell out of favor, because junk food that's neither fat nor sweet won't sell...

It's weird how the term "tribe" is now used to describe just about any set of people that has at least one thing or interest in common, even just temporarily...

One of the things that keeps me out of the healthcare space is that you could build the most amazing tool, yet it wouldn't catch on because no one has enough time or incentives to start using it (and you're not playing golf with the right people).

That said, PicnicHealth looks nice, and I wish them best luck! The pricing seems a bit high for someone who doesn't have health issues and just wants to keep track of regular tests, but I find it easier to trust a paid service than a company with a surprise business model.

So if you forget to open the windows often enough, you suffocate? :-)

The limiting factor right now isn't the lack of clever algorithms or computational power, but the lack of data that covers enough people over enough time with enough depth and quality. Also, more of former can't make up for a lack of the latter, even if it's sexier, especially for a company like Google.

They should consider partnering with these guys: http://www.nature.com/news/medicine-gets-up-close-and-person....

There's a lot of data that can be collected without much knowledge of experiment design, consider e.g. all the sequencing projects.

The problem is that if the data ends up in inconsistently formatted spreadsheets or poorly conceived custom formats, the effort required to extract the data for analysis later (especially across multiple projects) can be prohibitive.

Lost me at "we've requested funds to employ a bioinformatician for the lifetime of the project". More realistic is "I'll have a grad student deal with the data".

One of the local institutes just dissolved their bioinformatics group because they couldn't convince enough research groups to hand over grant money. They'd be part of the grant proposal in order to secure the grant, but then the money would end up being spent elsewhere...

If you feel the need to ask for better evidence that you wouldn't be wasting your money, then this product isn't for you--you're clearly already smart enough ;-)

Having control over your data and paying someone to host the data are not mutually exclusive.

InsideTracker and WellnessFX are two companies that offer direct-to-consumer blood testing at somewhat reasonable prices. Another company called Cue [https://cue.me/] is working on a device that would let you do certain blood tests at home.

It would be easy to have your "cover" blown, e.g. by a friend (who sees your real name) innocently mentioning your real name in the reply to one of your posts that's visible to a larger circle...

Don't forget the "vibrant" colors...

Vessyl's reluctance to answer questions about the sensor they are using is a big red flag for me. I'm guessing it's some kind of photospectrometer? It's hard enough to build consumer gadgets even when using off-the-shelf sensors...

The other issue is that knowing how much liquid you drink is not as interesting as knowing how dehydrated you are.

See https://zenobase.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/360890... for a list of services that aggregate health and fitness data.

The screencasts at https://www.youtube.com/user/zenobase should give you an idea of what you can do with Zenobase; if all you need is a nice dashboard showing recent data, there are simpler solutions like TicTrac.

Incidentally, this would also change the balance in the senate...

There are several existing services that aggregate and visualize fitness and health data, for people who are too lazy to build their own site :-) I'll plug mine here: https://zenobase.com/

Don't know about enterprise gamification in general, but in the context of health, gamification is just taking off (especially in places with employer-based health insurance).

Pomodoros, sprints and CrossFit are not games, just structure (that many people find useful).

To be fair, Goggle's motto isn't "be a force for the good", but "don't be evil".

You can have an accurate step counter at a low price. The problem is that the step counter is being sold as a device that knows how well you sleep and how many calories you burn.

Here's another company going after the last mile, i.e. blood testing at home: https://cue.me/

This could be really useful for anyone working in this space; I'm hoping Google Fit will have a Web API as well, so it's not just an Android lock-in scheme.

Granularity is the key here.

I run a small self-tracking service (zenobase.com), and would love to let my users pull in some "metadata" from their email (e.g. the number of messages in the inbox, or the number of messages sent by hour). But I don't want my users to trust me with unrestricted access to their email.

Nice, but I'm very reluctant to give any third-party access to my mailbox. Most sites I use let me reset my password by email, so this is like handing over the keys to the castle.

Neat, but they sure are protective of "their" data: The API does not allow access to historic data, and you are not allowed to retain data (even in aggregate) going back more than 10 days.