This is such a perfect comment. You completely sum up their business in 11 words.
In the future, I hope they partner with hospitals/medicare to provide fitbits for free. There's immense savings in preventative medicine.
A lot of people don't see the potential for movement trackers beyond counting steps. By looking at the data, you can identify when a person is beginning to get sick or weak before they even feel symptoms.
I'm sure my company is not alone in offering a wellness program with incentives that include reduced health insurance premiums for increased/consistent physical activity and preventive care. How do they know you performed physical activity -- they issue you a pedometer or allow you to connect your Garmin/MapMyFitness/Fitbit/MyFitnessPal/etc account to the program. It's brilliant, and the $0-75/mo employees can save on insurance is a strong motivator, as is the $50/mo gym reimbursement (as long as you connect your account to the wellness system and visit at least 4x/mo), and other perks.
What I would really like to see is an open standard for data formatting, similar to the IPC 2547 CAM-X series of standards for industrial equipment output, so it'd be easy for 1) developers and 2) consumers to shop around without worrying about losing their historical activity information. As you mention, this is a serious consideration for everyone, and it's incredibly annoying to feel locked in just because you can't get your data out (or even better, out and then into the next system). A personal example: I really like Runtastic and I have a couple hundred miles logged over the last few months. However, it's a European company and not nearly as popular in the US as Endomondo, Runkeeper, MapMyFitness and a few others. This means I'm missing out on the social aspect, which itself is a motivator. I'd like to try out some other apps, but I can't import my Runtastic data. Argh. (Runtastic is really great, btw.)
> How do they know you performed physical activity -- they issue you a pedometer or allow you to connect your Garmin/MapMyFitness/Fitbit/MyFitnessPal/etc account to the program. It's brilliant, and the $0-75/mo employees can save on insurance is a strong motivator
I don't like it, and would not participate. Why should someone who is fit and healthy have to carry a tracking chip to avoid a $75/mo fee? Aside from the privacy concern, anyone with 5 minutes to devote to the problem can beat the system.
As a counter-anecdote I purchased 2 fitbit ultras, and the aria scales and had nothing but trouble with all of them.
The fitbit ultra has a design flaw that means that if you wear them in a trouser pocket and then cycle, that they can deal with the twisting flexing motion. This results in popping the plastic case open and exposing the internals (electronics) to the elements, thus rendering them useless in all but fine weather when you're walking.
The aria scales have a fundamental design flaw that makes them incompatible with small apartments/flats. They expect to be stored flat, and calibrate over several weigh-ins. If you really have a small apartment, and small bathroom (as nearly everyone in London that I know of does) then you need to store them upright and lay them flat to use them.
The effect of that is that they never calibrate and weigh-ins seconds apart where they have been upright in-between can vary by as much as +/- 1.5kg on every weight-in. This makes them absolutely useless as scales... even if the accuracy wasn't there, consistency would have still left us with a predictability that allowed them to have some utility.
I tried to `reach out` to Eric (the founder) in addition to the support people about both issues, including reproducible steps to demonstrate the design assumptions that rendered the scales useless.
I feel to this day that they released a little tested alpha product and not a finished one. All I got back was an automatic offer to replace with a new one, and later (I was insistent they had a design flaw and clear about the effects of it) an acknowledgement that they were not going to update the firmware of the scales to pre-calibrate each weigh-in (which is what every other electric scale I've ever seen actually does).
My investment in every fitbit product turned out to be a waste of my money and time.
My investment in time, trying to tell them the issues as someone who cared about them getting it right turned out to be a waste too.
I tried the quantified self with fitbit and their version of it failed spectacularly.
I now strongly recommend Nike and Withings to everyone who will listen. I should point out I run one of the largest cycling web-sites in the world and this testing was done very publicly, 36,000 cyclists now know not to touch fitbit. I wanted fitbit to win, and that was why I so cockily did tried their range publicly. Nike and Strava (with Android) are the big winners within that community, with a few nods to Jawbone Up. Fitbit was tried by others with similar experience to mine... everyone I know who touched a fitbit has given away, for free, their fitbit hardware. It's worthless to us.
Lets see, my wife has washed hers (got a "free" replacement) and somehow it ended up under the car and narrowly escaped crushing, and narrowly escaped washing a couple times.
Mine has been washed once and still works. The key seems to be immediate bake out in the dryer. Take it out of the washer and start fooling with it and its toast, corroded in a couple hours.
Its probably a little more disposable than exercise shoes. The Nike competitor is a good pairing.
The scale is out of place. I'm not sure how it can be value engineered to require annual replacement. So far, its just doing its thing.
If their business model revolves around reselling every year (or not) then one of the products has to go.
Probably all they had to do to secure funding was show stats from the bracelet model, where it was available for about 2 days and perma-sold-out since. Obviously there's demand...
That's why they are in business.