On the quantified self:
Your Life as Data: The Rise of Personal Annual Reports | Mashable
Every time he drinks a cup of coffee, Dan Meyer makes a note on his phone. He does the same every time he opens a beer, turns on his TV or travels away from home. At the end of each month, he spends about three hours transferring these meticulously gathered notes into an excel spreadsheet. Meyer isn’t obsessive compulsive, he just likes data. Like an increasing number of data geeks, he uses his personal life as a project — compiling small events into a sometimes elaborate, graphic annual report each January.
reblogged from smarterplanet
Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called Vital Signs Camera that uses the camera to measure your heart and breathing rate. It detects subtle beat-to-beat changes in the color of your face to measure your heart rate.
We’re slowly living in the future.
reblogged from poptech
On Actualization: The Quantified Self, The Quantified Brand
As friends embrace UP, Fitbit and other health and habit-tracking devices, I went back to Gary Wolf’s TED talk on The quantified self.
The theory holds that if we want to do better in the world, we have to know more about ourselves. The act of observing, then monitoring (and broadcasting) our stats makes us more accountable… we become more accountable, we get more motivated, and ultimately become more likely to make better choices, more often.
So instead of a nagging spouse, a barking trainer, concerned friend, or that little inner voice telling us to put down the fork or pick up some weights, these digital devices empower us toward personal governance.
And they’re not just for staying fit, getting good sleep, or avoiding those empty calories. There are apps and devices that track our sexual encounters, heart rates, daily doses of drugs and vitamins, meditation, ovulation, defecation, errands and to-dos, spending habits, fuel consumption, books read… and most of them publicize these results either across social networks or privately back to us, with beautiful charts to make it all make sense and keep us on track.
While people are becoming more transparent thanks to the tools that encourage us to create, capture, and share our innermost data, open government and open brands are publicizing their wares but largely still controlling their message as much as possible. At most companies the PR or marketing department does the updating and tweeting, while Legal looks it over, scrubbing that post here, deleting a comment there.
Corporate and brand governance is still for the most part crafted and I’m not suggesting that need change. More, imagining if companies had tools and tracking devices to automatically quantify and publicize what they were doing.
Can that company with recycling bins on every floor of its HQ and the infographic on its website that shows how many trees they saved that year actually put weight scales on those recycle bins that automatically post that to their site? Perhaps a GPS on the waste management truck that arrives and carts the stuff off each week could be plotted via Google Maps?
If trust, transparency, and openness are qualities being embraced in hallways and boardrooms around the world, can unedited data streams be the future of corporate governance?
Would that make us trust brands even more? So what if they screw up once in a while or miss the target. My Fitbit can’t actually make me get up at 6am when it’s 40 degrees outside and go for a jog. But if this quantified self makes me more able to do better in the world, shouldn’t we be building quantified brands, too?
