Goals and Vision

Goals:

1. Efficient “personal data analytics”,with focus on the human and humane face of data.

2. Drawing meaningful conclusions–fast and in a way that is easy for the end user.

3. Since personal data is involved–absolute trust has to be maintained between the end user and the venture.

4. Data Security has to be maintained and adhered to.

How do we go about doing it?

1. Grab Everything With An API :

If you want to use data to make lives better, you need to first get the data. It isn’t just your Withings scale weight or some pedometer data. If you want to find correlations to deliver insight, you need to get as much data as possible.

Every word written: email, docs, dropbox, sms, tweets, status updates.

Every piece of content created: mobile camera roll, instagram, facebook, vine.

Every piece of content consumed: amazon, itunes, netflix, spotify, rdio.

Every place you go. Every dollar you spend.

2. Avoid Data Entry, But Make It Easy

Things that don’t have APIs still matter. It is hard to track meals, caffeine, alcohol, sugar water, nicotine, sex, sleep and exercise. It isn’t a coincidence these things correspond with common goals to improve. We don’t track them, which makes control harder.

Tracking apps are narrowly focused around one thing (food tracking, but not sleep or anything else). Another problem is that the interfaces dive right into details at the expense of making recording anything at all too hard. This makes habit forming and on-boarding terrible. If you need to type, the interface is already too complicated. Most food tracking apps focus on getting an accurate calorie count, which is absurdly complicated. Each layer in that sandwich is going to take 20 clicks. We propose a simple data entry framework: click a button, and that event gets tracked. Here is an interface that would let you record caffeine, alcohol, sex, sleep, and meals. Each meal also shows portion size and goodness of food. What does good or bad mean? Whatever you want.

3. Mobile Matters

We can’t avoid building mobile apps. It makes connecting to valuable data sources easier. Think location tracking, messaging, movement. It makes data entry easier too, with a fast native interface a click away. Perhaps most importantly, it makes prodding users to do the right thing much easier, and that includes doing the requisite data entry. You can get creative with what you track too. Think battery levels, phone docking, alarm clocks to help track sleep, and many other things.

4. Emphasize Insight Over Visualization

Extracting insight from a graph is actually really hard, and many people find graphs confusing.. Many services in the space show graphs without highlighting what matters. This is distracting from the real goal. Graphs without the ability to manipulate data are worse than nothing. Control and agility means users can try to find their own insight before you’re sophisticated enough to do it for them.

5.Get Smart!(or get social!)

Getting friends involved is an effective way to hit a personal goal.