It was the first weekend of the year and I was done with my workout at the gym, heading back to my locker.  I noticed the locker door was half open and there was no lock on it.  I quickly looked inside and as I had feared my iPhone and some cash that I had in my wallet were gone.  Yup, someone had thought they needed them more than I did.  Of course they didn’t know me, otherwise they would have known I needed the phone and the cash at least as much as they did, if not more!  This triggered a sequence of events, not the least painful of which was the process of replacing my iPhone.

I had just extended my contract last June when I bought the new model and that meant I was not eligible to buy another one at the subsidized price.  I decided that it was best to cancel the contract, as I no longer had a phone, pay the early termination fee, and look into all available options, including buying another iPhone and signing a new contract.  As a side note AT&T employees were very sympathetic as to what had happened to me, but the company was not in any shape or form offering any relief.  From a business point of view I could completely see their point.  At the same time from from the angel of let’s help an old customer who is caught in an unfortunate situation they were not coming through.  Understandable, yet disappointing.

I have had a couple of phone lines with Sprint, for other members of my family, and that was were I decided to look into.  Taking advantage of their 30 day return policy I tried their Blackberry Tour for a few days.  While it is an outstanding unit, with all due respect for Blackberry users, I found it very awkward to use.  My productivity (and I am using the term rather loosely here!) was clearly lower.  In addition, it was lacking some key applications that I was using regularly on my iPhone.  But the killer was this one huge issue with emails getting truncated if larger than 32KB.  I could not believe that Blackberry had determined that mobile users need not receive emails that are larger.  To put this in perspective, my iPhone had a capacity of 32GB, that is million times larger than 32KB.  This Blackberry itself had come with a 1GB memory module, and if more space is needed one can buy an 8GB memory module at a local electronics store for 20 bucks, so why this limitation?  There are many complex topics that I don’t understand and at the moment this appear to be headed to that large list.  And if all this was not enough, for me, using the keyboard or the pointer was like doing a root canal without novocaine.  The delete key was the most often used key, by far.  Even dialing a phone number was a challange.  The little rolling bar (the mouse, if you will) was so hard to use that once I gave up picking California and accepted Colorado.  Blackberry was not for me.  The Blackberry at $100 plus an additional $20 for an 8GB memory module was not much cheaper than a16GB iPhone at $199.  I returned the Blackberry and picked up a new iPhone from the Apple store.

As I was driving home I received a call from the store.  They told me Sprint wanted to talk to me before disconnecting the line.  The Sprint rep was polite and persistent.  First he tried to convince me that the Blackberry was a good option for me, but eventually reluctantly accepted that I was not happy with it.  He then offered an Android phone, something that I had not thought about.  I was not prepared to return my newly acquired iPhone.  As a compromise he offered me to go back to the same store and pick up an HTC Hero Android Google phone and try it out for free for a days.  He added a few dollars of credit to my account to compensate for service fees during those few days.  Why not, I thought.  I like playing with gadgets and this was a good opportunity for me to learn about Google Android operating system.  I picked up the phone, forwarded my AT&T line to the Sprint line, and left my iPhone in the box, and instead used the Android phone.

Within minutes of use, I started loving it!  It had a similar user interface to iPhone.  The screen, although a little smaller, was brighter and the contrast was outstanding, making it visually very appealing.  I immediately started using it intuitively without much help.  As soon as I logged into my Google account all my contacts and calendars were downloaded to my phone.  I was getting all of my emails, untruncated.  I found many of the same apps that I was using on the iphone and I was almost back to where I was with iPhone.  And there was more.  The Sprint Navigation was a real turn by turn GPS, unlike iPhone, and the Sprint TV was icing on the cake.  I could watch the NFL channel while walking Toolie, my dog!  And if all that was not enough, the 5MP camera could take gorgeous pictures that looked as good as my old Canon.

There were some drawbacks, though, and as I used the phone more I noticed more of them.  The phone reception was not very good, at least not at places that I was using it.  The GUI didn’t feel totally responsive and smooth.  Clearly (in my opinion) the CPU was overwhelmed by what it had to do to deliver all that functionality.  My Yahoo! email account wouldn’t work reliably if the WiFi was turned on.  While many apps were available for Android, I could not find a good (and free) Google Reader app.  And this is Google’s own system?!  That was a negative for me as probably the number one app on iPhone.  I also learned that Hero was three releases behind the latest Android OS (it was version1.5 where there already 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 systems out there.)  And lastly there was the battery life.  I always complained about iPhone’s battery.  On average (checking my emails 2-3 times an hour, 20 minutes of talk time a day, listening to podcasts for about 90 minutes a day, checking scores and reading news for a couple of hours a day, …) my iPhone could go through the whole day if charged overnight.  Sure, there were occasions that with heavy usage I needed to recharge after 8 hours, but those were exceptions.  I was lucky if HTC lasted 6 hours.  On a Friday I fully charged it around 4pm and later when I tried to check my email around 11:00pm I noticed it was dead.  Not sure when it had died, but a full charge not lasting 7 hours with virtually no usage at all, in my pocket, was not going to cut it for me.

After searching though internet I found out that most of these issues were reported by others too.  There was a work around to improve the battery life.  I tried it and it worked, although the battery life was still a little worse than iPhone.  Undoubtedly many of these problems could be resolved with the upcoming software updates, patches, and the in next generations of more powerful hardware.  But future solutions couldn’t solve my today’s problems.  That was a letdown for me as I really liked the Android operating system and badly wanted this phone to be good.  It is possible that the more recent releases of the Android based phones (Nexus One for T-Mobile and Droid for Verizon) might have already addressed many of these issues.

So reluctantly I returned the HTC Hero and went back to my proven iPhone.  I still am in my 30-day return window and might at the end return the iPhone too, use an old not-very-smart phone (I have an OK Sony-Ericsson phone) without a contract, and wait for the next wave of Android and iPhones which are coming out in the next 3-6 months.

By the way, after this incident, I am taking only a $5 bill with me to the gym for emergencies and nothing else.  I also have a note in my pocket that reads:

To the person who has opened my locker and is reading this note without my permission,

I apologize for not carrying enough money or other possessions to make your adventure worth your while.  If you are the same person who also took my iPhone in early January 2010, please consider returning it.  My phone number and the address are in there, but you can also leave the phone with the front desk.  I have nothing to give you in return for such a nice gesture but it will bring you good karma, I am sure.

By the way, would you be kind enough to lock my locker so others are not tempted to look inside?  I greatly appreciate your understanding and if you leave me your name and phone number I will do the best I can to see you are locked up too.

Regards,

The previous iPhone owner

And that is the way I see it.

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At the turn of the century, Sun reached its high noon, and then the decline began. The company that had only had one money losing quarter since going public in early ’80s (and even that one bad quarter was the result of a poorly planed IT transition) started losing money. A trend that pretty much has consistently continued to this date. They started shopping the company earlier this year as the management didn’t seem to know how to return to profitability. IBM was in the news as a serious suitor, but reportedly they lowered their bid once they looked deeper into the books. It is hard to imagine that IBM had any real interest, at least in the long run, in the fundamental technologies that Sun had developed, namely SPARC processors, Solaris OS, and Java. Although one would never know for sure, I thought IBM was only interested in Sun’s customers, with the idea of transitioning them to their own products over time, and in the meanwhile making money from support and services, and also by selling them what Sun already had developed, abandoning any new developments, to lower the operating expenses. Sun didn’t like the lower bid. Then Oracle showed up with a higher offer, which Sun almost immediately accepted. The deal cleared the shareholders vote and the department of justices’ scrutiny in the US. Europeans on the other hand decided to investigate further the implications of the deal, more specifically, the faith of MySQL, which was now owned by Sun. Oracle has been primarily a database company and there is an apparent conflict of interest if (more like when) they own Sun and therefore MySQL, which has its roots deeply planted in the Open Source community.

Even before the public announcement of the merger, Sun’s servers, their primary source of revenue, had been losing market share. Their SPARC based systems have historically been more expensive than x86 based systems, often significantly. In addition, the maintenance cost of datacenters with Sun hardware have been higher, mainly due to higher required skill set system administrators and the IT personnel. The added uncertainty of the future of Sun hardware after it is acquisition by Oracle, has caused great concern among its customers, which in turn has caused an accelerated exodus to IBM, HP, and other competitors. In an apparent attempt to stop or at least slow down this movement, Oracle recently stated publically that it has no intent to stop any Solaris and/or SPARC development. The market, however, doesn’t seem to be taking their words as facts, and many want to see them in action first. The cost of developing new processors have being skyrocketing and other processor vendors like AMD and HP have been or are departing such expensive undertakings. Many of Sun’s customers have a hard time waiting for Oracle’s execution of those promises and delivery of new products, before deciding to stay with them. And that phase cannot even start until after Oracle takes over the daily operations of Sun’s business and even then the evidence of their commitment to SPARC and Solaris will not be apparent until some later time.

Once that happens, if ever, the bleed might stop. In the meanwhile SPARC roadmap is becoming less and less viable for enterprise customers. What makes it worse is that the shift from SPARC to x86 has been a way road even in the years past. It is safe to assume that the departed customers will be gone forever. As the target market shrinks, so does the likelihood of the SPARC business making enough money for a positive return on investment. When will the size of that market reach the point of no return? Will the customers confidence restored before then? Will Sun bleed to death before Oracle can do anything about it? Will Oracle have the guts to create uniquely optimized packages based on SPARC hardware and Oracle software, knowing that it likely will alienate many of its hardware partners and customers? Will some combination of events help Sun rise again? Time will give us the answers. On the surface though, the prognosis doesn’t seem to be promising.

I am just an observer, but that is how I see it.

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The term virtualization covers many related products and technologies. The one that seems to be getting the most attention is the server virtualization. A new 4-socket server, using 4-core CPUs, each capable of running two threads per core, can run a total of 4 x 4 x 2 =32 separate streams of code simultaneously, and at the same time might cost even less than a high end server 10-years ago, that had only one socket, with a one core per CPU, that could run one thread per core at a time. Using virtualization, in some instances one new server might be able to replace 10-40 of those old servers. This can bring a tremendous amount of benefits to large datacenter. With less number of physical machines, the floor space is saved, monthly electricity consumption for power is reduced, and the savings in cooling costs means even less electricity plus less building maintenance costs. Less hardware can also increase the overall reliability as there are less equipment to breakdown. The uptime can also be improved since virtualization is well suited for live migration, moving a (virtual) server to another virtual machine on another physical server, in case of a planned or unplanned outage. While this is all good, virtualization also comes with its own issues. For example, if there are 20 virtual machines on a physical server, each of those virtual machines will require a separate instance of the operating system. Not only that means lots of money for the 20 OS licenses, the repetitiveness will require more resources (memory for example) and is less efficient. If the applications running on those 20 virtual machines could all coexist in a single larger system running on the entire physical server without virtualization, only one instance of the operating system would have been needed and the overall solution could have been more efficient. And the licensing cost would have been 20 times less (ignoring any potential volume discounts). The primary players are VMware (many different products), Linux and Citrix (Xen), Microsoft (Hyper-V), and Oracle (their brand of Xen).

In another variant of virtualization the desktops (the end users’ systems) are virtualized and are run and managed in the datacenter on servers (instead of running on the user machines directly), yet giving the end users a full PC desktop experience. To do this the basic server virtualization technique is used to create lots of “desktops” for the users in a corporate environment. The user systems are typically very low cost (maybe cheap laptops) since most of the software is run on the server and not on the user machine. The benefits are lower total cost of ownership and lower support cost since everything is on the server side and managed centrally by the IT department. Some argue that with the lower hardware cost there might not be as much savings one the end users’ systems. In addition, there might be other ways of centrally managing the user environments, and also the user experience, while good, might not be as good as running the applications directly on the users’ machines. Another drawback is total the loss of functionality when disconnected from the datacenter, for example while traveling.

The technology that the end users are best familiar with is the desktop centric virtualization (sometimes called desktop virtualization), where one creates virtual “guest machines” on the operating system running on their desktop (or the “host machine”). Each guest machine resembles a separate system where the end user can install an operating system of their choice. The Apple Mac users often use this kind of virtualization to create a Windows machine as a supplement to the Mac environment. (Many PC owner wish they could do the opposite, but as of this writing Mac OS, by design, does not run on a non-Mac system, without hacking, and even then there are claims that it would be illegal.) Other widely used scenarios include running a “test” environment without worrying about the side effects of crashes and/or viruses, running a Linux guest on a Windows or Mac OS host, or running older version of OS (Windows 3.1 for example) for applications that don’t run on the newer versions of OS. The best known virtualization software include Parallels, VMware Fusion, and Sun VirtualBox for Mac OS, and VMware Workstation, VMware Player, MS VirtualPC, and Sun VirtualBox for Windows. My favorite is VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems (soon to become Oracle!) which is free, and for the most typical usage it is as good as its commercial counterparts.

And there are other virtualization technologies, such as application virtualization and storage virtualization. The first (generally) refers to running applications on a server and streaming them to user desktops (displays) and the second one refers to taking a larger storage device, typically a networked storage, and virtualized into several smaller storage devices.

What is next? I could be in a minority, but I see virtualization only as an interim (exciting) technology for now. I believe it will be just a somewhat invisible tool and an under-the-hood function in the future. I believe eventuallly the operating systems themselves will directly provide some form of software partitioning directly on top of the host OS. In fact the future is now as Solaris already does this. It is called “Containers”. With the software advances (and maybe with some additional hardware assist built into future CPUs) all operating systems should provide something similar or even better. It will address a good part of what virtualization does today, in my opinion. Also as the operating systems continue to become more resilient and reliable, it will become more logical and feasible to run many different applications on one large system with less concerns over the negative side effects. Doing so is a more efficient approach and will cost less. I also believe that at some point in the future there will be a new operating system (maybe some derivative of Linux) where it can natively run Windows and Mac OS applications, by wrapping a translation layer around them. If (or, when) that happens, it will replace Windows and Mac OS as a Super OS (I am calling it SOS). The user interface(or the desktop) for SOS will be user selectable (just like Linux does it today) and it will not be an integral part it. It will also function as the browser. The users get to choose a Windows style, Mac style, or some newer style desktop environment based on their preference. What Google is working on, the Google Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, could be a step in that direction. I also think such OS should (and will) have a separate “policy” module, where users can customize the tradeoffs between control and ease of use. (Some believe Mac OS is heavy on the ease of use, by taking away control from the users, while Windows offers more control by compromising the ease of use and potential for misconfigurations.) As for virtualization, as it matures, why will it be any different than disk drive partitioning technology? Can it not be some extension of the firmware (BIOS, in most of the PCs)? Today there are companies who are specialized in developing BIOS and similarly in the future there will be companies who will specialize in hardware virtualization layers. Today disk partitioning is just a function within the operating system and there will virtualization functions within future releases of the operating systems (actually many have started doing it already.) Today we don’t read much about BIOS or disk partitioning, and there will not be much to read about virtualization in not so distant future.

Now, the concept of describing a physical system and representing it as a virtual machine, through a set of files has other applications. Such a representation makes it possible to recreate a system on any hardware by reading in those files. While today this is part of virtualization, I believe this kind of hardware abstraction will have a life of its own. The operating systems can be designed to creating Solaris-like containers from those files. Or they could be directly processed by the bare hardware (via some built-in firmware), in the same way a disk image is processed at the boot time. It can lead to a hardware agnostic future, making life easier for all the computer users.

And that is how I see it.

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Like many other technology advances, in the first phase the cloud computing vendors needed to provide the pieces since there was not much else in place. As a result the current vendors each have their own solution that to a large extent is not compatible with others, making migration or multi-vendor configurations difficult or impossible.

Deltacloud, a new open source project within Red Hat, announced recently, is trying to solve that problem by providing a “cloud broker” that would convert the communications between the consumer end and the cloud end of one vendor to another, making the interoperability possible (see the diagram). There goal is to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds.

While Deltacloud is a young project and more than likely will face other competing products, the problem that it is attaching, the interoperability, is a major requirement for users, developers, and IT departments if the cloud computing is to grow rapidly. Eventually, there will be a very small number of (or ideally just one) standardized means of connecting to the cloud services (also referred to as API or Application Programming Interface), but in the meanwhile, this translation layer is the next step before the standardization of APIs.

To a large extent, after it is all said and done, to the end users, this will be transparent and invisible. At the end the average user is interested in the end-services that can increase their efficiency and productivity. The lower total cost of ownership has been the primary selling point of cloud computing. But the low cost has been the norm and not a new trend. In my opinion cloud computing needs a killer application to become a difference maker, otherwise it will remain as yet another step in the ever evolving technology quest.

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I think the time has come for what I refer to as “Flash as a Computer” or FaaC. I must admit it is not entirely a new concept, but my twist to it might be somewhat different, or at least it is not based on what I have read or seen anywhere else.

We have all seen the flash memory cards, right? Those little memory modules that we use in cameras and increasingly in camcorders. Their capacity is getting large enough (I have seen 64GB in stores) that they are now comparable in size to the disk drives in some laptops. And that comparison triggers the thought that maybe the entire computer environment can be saved in one. In other words one way or the other one might be able to hold most if not all of the setups and unique data that is ordinarily on disk in a laptop in a large capacity flash memory card. Then why can’t we have a new generations of computers and laptops that can read the settings and data off these flash memory cards and make the computer act as if it were our own computer. If instead of carrying my own laptop I have a flash card that I can take with me and stick into any available computer in a hotel, in the office, airport, or wherever, and if that computer could act just like my own computer, it would be very convenient, don’t you think? Probably one would have one FaaC for home computer and one for the office, and maybe for practical reasons, these FaaCs could be made the size of credit cards. I found the idea intriguing.

But is this practical? One potential approach would be to replace the boot disk of one’s computer with a portable flash memory card. Since there are many different chipsets out there and such disk would not necessarily work everywhere, however. So what if we can create a virtual system on the flash and that way it would work on any computer that can load that virtual system. And if the ability to load a virtual machine is built into the hardware (it is technologically doable today) then we have a solution. And there can be a few enhancements too. For example there could be a storage hierarchy. Sensitive or archived data can be stored on a secure local disks. These storage devices would be accessible only locally, some at home, some at work, etc. Once disconnected they would not be available which is desirable. At the same time it would reduce the required store space on the flash memory card. Some other data, the ones that are not very sensitive and also not necessarily needed all the time can be stored remotely via internet (also known as “in the cloud”). These are internet based storage spaces like “SkyDrive” offered by Microsoft. An example of files that could be stored in the cloud is the old multimedia files that we no longer listen to or watch on a regular basis, but we don’t want to throw them away either. They would be available only when online, and that could be a reasonable tradeoff to further reduce the need for larger flash memory cards. The files that are used frequent enough can be stored on FaaC and they would remain available all the time. A clever piece of software could monitor the file usage and make sure the most recently used one (the last 30 days?) are moved to FaaC (actually copied and kept synchronized with the original files). In addition, before getting on the road one could manually “take” additional files and data that might be needed while offline, on FaaC.

Software licensing would be the next issue. Currently when there are two computers at home and five users, there are only two licenses (of Microsoft office, for example), one on each computer. Would they need 5 copies with FaaC? The cost could be a problem. There needs to be some way of associating all those FaaC with the available licenses (two) and be able to have only two of them authorized at any given time. This is possible, using some sort of internet based authorization, but what happens when the machines are offline? May be they can check out a license before going offline? No matter what, the software vendors need to embrace the concept and come up with workable options and solutions.

So what does it take for this to become real? The hardware vendors need to agree on and implement a hardware based virtualization, software application vendors need to sort out the licensing options, the operating system vendors (Windows, OS X, Linux, as a minimum) need to make the FaaC concept and the overall storage hierarchy work seamlessly and transparent to the users, and the businesses, hotels, airport lounges, etc need to all buy into this concept and deploy the base hardware and software. Somebody needs to pull the trigger and make others follow their lead. Somebody, please? To start with, maybe the Linux community could create a stripped down kernel that in essence would turn an existing hardware into a system that does nothing other waiting for a flash memory to be inserted into at which time it would look for and run any virtual machine it could find on it. This is not fancy, but is enough to allow people to take an image of their systems with them and run on other hardware. If the concept proves itself, I am sure money will follow.

And that is how I see it …

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Outsourcing, especially to other countries, started more than a decade ago (in its current definition). It was overdone and rushed, before creating the right processes and procedures to measure, monitor, manage, and adjust. There were some successes and lots of failures too. The failures slowed down the practice and in some cases even reversed the trend. As methodologies became more and more established and better implemented, and as the vendors learned to meet the needs of their clients better, the outsourcing started becoming the norm rather than the exception. and I believe this trend will continue.

From a bigger picture perspective, to remain competitive companies need to do things horizontally (focusing on their particular expertise and added-value) and outsource functions that are required to run a business but are not particular to their company. This is not necessarily bad for the workforce, although it does shift the jobs around. Also this does not necessarily mean jobs will move outside the countries, although in some cases they do, but for some other jobs there should be an increase via insourcing (if that is a word). This process, over time, should level the playing field.

This article is based on an answer I recently posted on Linked.

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Here are a few tips to get online, successfully.

1. Start with a website

There are quick and easy ways to get online and have a presence. Depending on the nature of your business, you could need a more interaction with your partners, clients, and prospective customers through your website, in that case you might want to consider getting professional help to create an original design that sets your company and business apart from the competition.

2. Get your own email address

As a business, your email address should not be from yahoo.com or comcast.net. Your emails should be originate from your own company domain address, for example John.Smith@HisOwnCompany.com. This goes a long way in establishing credibility with everyone you deal with.

3. Host your website based on your needs

You will need to host your website somewhere. There are many hosting companies but there are tradeoffs just like anything else in business. The primary factors include storage capacity (how much data you will have on the host), access speed (how fast the pages will load in the browsers), reliability (what percentage of the time the host is operational), flexibility, and cost. If your website is frequently unavailable and it could hurt your business, especially if your revenue is generated directly from your website (for example if you have an online store.) On the other hand if the site is merely a displays your name and email address, it might not worth an extra $1000 a month to go from 99.9 uptime to 99.999 uptime.

4. Update your contents

People are more inclined to visit your website often if the content is always fresh and changing. The more they come to your website the higher the likelihood of transacting with. Also search engines (like Google) seem to rank you higher if you have a lot of visitors. This means when someone is “searching” for you (using Google, for example) your website will be among the first few that is shown and therefore more likely for new prospective customers to visit your website.

5. Consider advertising

It is not inexpensive but it could pay off if you have the right products or services. There are some simple solutions to get started. pay-You can check out Google’s Adwords as a starting point. It would charge you by clicks and/or impressions so in way a the cost is tied to benefits. You can also try direct email marketing.

6. Connect with your customers

Many small business use blogs and podcasts to broadcast contents to their existing and potential customers. You can influence them and they can see you as a subject matter expert when you share your knowledge, vision, and plans. You might feel you are giving away free information but the results often outweigh any perceived loss.

7. Collect data, analyze, and adjust

You can track how many visits your website gets, who they are, which page the start with, how much time they spend, which page they departure from, and many other useful facts. Such information can help you decide why people are attracted to your page and what they want, which in turn can help your maximize what you want to get out of your website.

8. Give customers what they want

It is important that the information on your website is easily discoverable, accessible, and usable. Pictures and diagrams are often better received than words. Also the main points should near the top or even in the title instead of several pages into the article.

9. Have a clear idea and implement it

There should be an objective behind everything on your website. If you are selling products online, help them easily find the product they are looking for, describe clearly (including pictures if applicable), and make the navigation to the order processing page seamless. On the other hand if the website is simply a “business card” put all the contact information on the first page in a clearly visible area such as the top 25% of the page.

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Anyone who has ever tried to control their weight can attest that such a tool could be invaluable. Bodybugg does not directly show how much is burned. It only collects and stores up to several days worth of data internally. Using a personal computer the data will need to be downloaded to the BodyMedia servers via a Java application that runs in a browser. By the way their website can track what one eats, which is then converted to calories too. In addition it can track body parameters (weight and various body measurements). And if that is not enough, depending on the goals, the websites puts together a suggested daily meal plans for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, as well as daily exercise routines. Overall the combination of Bodybugg and this website is a very powerful fitness tool.

When I started using Bodybugg which I had received as a gift last Christmas, I noticed my calories burned at night when I was sleep was very close what one would expect by just calculating the resting metabolism rate (RMR) for an average person in my situation. I always had experienced a higher calorie burned rate compared to everyone else around me and couldn’t agree with seeing an “average” metabolism. As I read more about the device I started picking up clues as how their website was calculating the results. Based on that I modified some of my inputs (age, weight, etc) to achieve the expected RMR (more on this in a later blog, maybe). After the adjustments I thought it did a reasonable job of helping me track my calories. After several months of usage, my weight was relatively close to what the tool was predicting so I was fairly happy.

There were a few things that I don’t like about it though. First, it does not show all the statistical data that I am interested in and there is no (known) way of downloading the data into a spreadsheet that I can use to do my own analysis. Also, I had to fake some data to make it work better. I would have preferred if it could allow me to enter the RMR directly (one can measure their RMR in a clinic) instead of them using an aver RMR based on age, height, and weight. Lastly, if their website is down (which happens a couple of times a month) one cannot use it at all. In other words there is offline solution. This can be problematic. Lastly, there is no way to enhance what they offer any further as there is no way to interoperate with other online or installed fitness tools. Whatever they offer is all get and there isn’t much else you can do.

So, while I like what they have done, they need to do more. There needs to be a solution for data portability. They need an offline application that at a very least can function for a few days before needing to interact with their servers. I wish they open up their APIs. That could allow other vendors (or even the end users) to use the collected data to provide enhancements and functionality beyond the current scope. And lastly, interoperability with other tools like heart rate monitors and GPS can take really Bodybugg to a different level.

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Aslo see these links:

• Review: BodyBugg
• My Boddybugg