Withings
This is Withings “The Wi-Fi Scale”. It’s a bathroom scale that connects to the internet.
You step on and it recognises who you are before it weighs you, measures your fat and uploads the data to the internet. You can then access your stats privately (nicely visualised of course) alongside those of your family via a web control panel or via an iPhone app.
That’s not all. You can use it to publish statistics via a widget you can embed on your website or over Twitter. Yes, Twitter. You step on a thing and it tells the world how fat you are. Nice.
We’re going to see a lot more products like this. They’re expensive now, but they won’t be for long.
Something really useful would be if Withings (and all manufacturers of smart devices like this) adopted an open format so other things can hook into their data. I suppose a good example of this sort of thinking would be your Nike+ setup combining its data with your Withings via a data broker and a third party web service feeding off them both to visualise it nicely, helping to calculate a full fitness plan.
Exciting times. Hope we get it right.
