1. Health
   • How much exercise do you get per week?
   • How much crappy food do you eat per week?
2. Energy Consumption
   • How much money are are you spending on energy and do you know the cost of your energy choices?
   • How much damage (carbon emissions) are you doing to the earth?
3. TV consumption:-)
   • How much time are you wasting?

Because we all just have one shot at life, these are actually are a lot more important then the @work metrics.  Measurement and analytic products in the business domain are well-established and long-ago crossed the chasm.  However, on the consumer side while there are niche products such as Polar watches there are no self-measurement products (needs a catchier name, but for now this highly descriptive will work) that have successfully crossed the chasm. 

Nike+ iPod is poised to cross the chasm and is starting to uncover the opportunities of a self-measurement age. There are a couple of things that they nailed in this first version that will enable them to cross the chasm:

1. Plugs-Into Existing Products
   • We don’t need to create new products from the ground up to measure these everyday activities we simply need to plugin sensors and displays into existing products. Contrast this to a product like Polar that is attempting to build niche products from the ground up that help athletes measure their performance.
2. Low-Cost
   • Once you’ve spent $400+ on an iPod and Nike sneakers buying an Nike+ iPod Kit for $29 is not going to break your bank.
   • This point is driven by #1 above.
3. Simple Setup
   • Just put the sensor below the insole of your sneaker and a small receiver snaps into your iPod — that’s it your done. See here.
4. ‘Thermometer’ Interface
   • Explains to the user how they are progressing or regressing with their runs.
   • Lightweight analytics that allows you to slice/dice your runs — for those of you familiar with Business Objects or Siebel Analytics there are hints of those types of experience here.   Below are my runs for the past few months as seen on nikeplus.com

What still needs some work:

• Positive Peer Pressure
  • Enable users to encourage and compete with each other. This is incredibly imporant because it keeps people engaged and provides a viral way to introduce potential customers to the product.
  • They don’t need to create a new social-network to develop this community and positive peer pressure. Rather tap into an existing social network at the point of registration (more on this for another post).

Beyond the value that this creates for users, it also builds lock-in for Nike and Apple — when I get ready to buy a new set of sneakers in a few months guess what I will be buying.

We live in a world of information overload and sometimes I wonder when do people actually do work (like write specs, write code, create designs, model revenue opportunities, etc.). Some of the major timesinks during the week:

information streams

*see techmeme, greader, facebook, MyY!, etc. people spend a lot more time then they willingly admit on this stuff — i estimate anywhere between 2-3 hrs./day (how ironic i don’t have the time to actually back into this number)

meetings

*depending on what you can do this easily 50% of your time at work (some work gets done here, but lets not overdue it)

water cooler chat

*shooting the shit with friends/colleagues at work

daily transportation

*1 to 2 hrs./day

social nourishment

*time with friends, family, etc.

eating

*at least 1 hr a day

sleeping

*5-7 hrs. a night

excercising or whatever it is you do to relax

*0-5 hrs./week

writing blog posts like this:-)

So — what is the solution? Simple –> self-instrumentation. Basically, if we had data that showed us how we spent our time over the course of a day, week, month I assure you we would quickly realize how much of our time is wasteful and would change our behaviors accordingly. The saying “you can’t fix what you don’t measure” is so very true and why not apply it to our most precious resource — time.

*make cars/trucks/etc.

*feed them (i.e. oil)

This list is basically all you need to get excited about the economic opportunity for alternative energy/clean-tech.

Crazy prediction of the day:

In 25 years 5 of these companies will be replaced by new alternative energy companies.

1. Walmart $351B
2. Exxon $347B
3. Shell $318B
4. BP $274B
5. GM $207B
6. Toyota $207B
7. Chevron $200B
8. DaimlerChrysler $190B
9. ConocoPhillips $172B
10. Total $168B
11. GE $168B
12. Ford $160B

See full list here

In a world of information overload there are few must reads, but if you appreciate what Warren Buffett has done then here is some really good stuff by Jeff Matthews…

Jeff has a series of posts entitled “Pilgrimage to Omaha.” I only read two posts in a series of 10 (plus 2 extras for intro and conclusion) and I am super excited to read the rest (that rarely happens)— here is but one of the many laconic and insightful points Jeff makes:

“Thus it is that whether he’s talking about food companies or airlines or newspapers or oil companies, Buffet has clearly made it his business to identify the single most important variable for each business—and knowing those crucial variables, he can determine whether the values offered in the stock market at any given time are attractive, or not. Without using a spreadsheet.”

• Unlike Google Trends or Flickr Camera Finder which rely on data that is directly provided by users on their respective sites the data on which Indeed trends is based on is based on their crawled data and therefore very suspect (full disclosure I did work in the Yahoo!’s HotJobs group).  Lets go one level deeper and look at the Indeed corpus and why it is not suitable for analytics and trending:
• Hiring managers and recruiters flood their job descriptions with buzzwords in order to rank higher on Careerbuilder, Monster, HotJobs, etc. hence generating hiring trends based on the occurrence of certain keywords in a job description won’t tell you that much and for certain keywords will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
• Aggregating job listings via a crawl (which is what Indeed does) is not easy and it yields tens of duplicates per job (every recruiter posts their jobs to multiple sites).

By the way Indeed is a pretty good job search engine, this trends feature is a bit out of place.  It would be far more interesting if they provided trends on what their users were searching for.

• I would have thought that the South American countries such as Brazil and Argentina would make the top 10.
• Would be interesting to see the per capita consumption of coffee — I would guess France and Italy would lead the way.  Then again with our Starbucks addiction…
• By the way if you are looking for some great coffee —not the Starbucks crap — then check out Peets