Fitbug Orb fitness tracker priced at $50, can go up to six months between charges

FITBUG ORB OUTCLASSES EXISTING ACTIVITY TRACKERS ON VALUE, WEARABLILITY, PERSONALIZED CONTENT

At Less than Half the Price of Jawbone Up, Nike Fuel Band and Fitbit Flex Fitbug Orb Personally "Nudges" Users to Achieve Health Goals

Chicago, IL, October 16, 2013 – Activity trackers everywhere received a competitive kick with the launch of the Fitbug Orb, which at just $49.95 is the most affordable, feature and service-rich tracker on the market. Designed to expand the health tracking trend through more reasonable pricing, the Fitbug Orb is the latest innovation from Fitbug, a global leader in digital health and wellbeing solutions. Uniquely, it provides the device and advice people need to achieve their goals by combining technology that tracks movement and sleep patterns, with KiK, a proprietary digital coach that helps people set, monitor and where necessary, actually prompts them to act to achieve goals.

Unlike wrist-bound activity trackers, the discreet button-sized Fitbug Orb can be worn in different ways to suit individual styles or social settings. Whether placed on the belt, wrist, or lanyard, or clipped on or beneath clothing, the small sophisticated device tracks a wealth of information including, steps, aerobic steps/time, distance, calories burned, speed and even sleep - normally only featured on products with much higher price points. The Bluetooth Smart Orb then syncs this information to mobile devices[i] and the KiK digital coach platform.

A tracking device is just the first step to achieving your goals. KiK provides that added layer of motivation allowing Fitbug to set, track and manage personalized weekly nutrition and activity based targets. More than just a passive activity tracker, KiK leverages eight years of Fitbug global data and sophisticated algorithms designed by nutritionists and sports scientists to calculate realistic weekly targets for users to hit. When KiK sees a user is performing well it sends regular feedback, advice and encouragement via emails and smartphone alerts. If KiK senses a user is in danger of missing a goal, it will send a friendly "nudge" to get them back on track and is proved to increase results.[ii]

"Wearable tracking technology is one of the biggest health trends of the year. However high prices and lack of personal motivation to maintain fitness regimens means the full potential is yet to be realized" said Paul Landau, Founder and CEO of Fitbug. "As one of the first companies in this category, we have designed the Fitbug Orb and KiK platform to provide both the device and advice people need to get fitter, lighter and lead happier, healthier lives."

No other leading activity trackers can boast as wide a range of features, wearability and value as the Fitbug Orb. At just $49.95, it is less than half the price of other devices. Proving great things come in small packages its features include:

· Tracking of steps, aerobic steps/time, distance, calories burned, speed and sleep
· Free Fitbug app (iOS and Samsung Galaxy S4 Android smartphones)
· Dongle option available for users without a compatible Smartphone or tablet
· KiK, a personalized digital coaching technology that calculates goals on personalized pages and nudges users with feedback, advice and encouragement via emails and smart phone alerts
· Multiple wear options, such as a wristband, belt hook and underwear clip
· Multiple sync options, including Push, Beacon and Stream
· Three eye-catching color options, including white, pink and black
· No need for re-charging with batteries lasting for up to six months
· Connectivity to other leading apps including MyFitnessPal and Aetna Carepass

In addition, the Fitbug Orb comes with membership to the Fitbug health community which gives further access to food logging and progress tracking, plus a host of healthy recipes, wellbeing content, online games, advice from resident experts as well as the hottest wellness topics in the weekly Bugzine newsletter.

The Fitbug Orb is the latest addition to the Fitbug family of Bluetooth 4.0-enabled devices, which includes the Fitbug Go ($49.95), Fitbug Air ($49.95) and Fitbug Wow scales ($79.99), which may also be synced with KiK. The Fitbug Orb is priced at $49.95 representing the best value in the market when compared to other costly solutions and is available nationwide at www.fitbug.com, Amazon and other retailers.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/16/fitbug-orb-price?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000589
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What, Exactly, Is James Franco Doing?

James Franco has big plans, always.

Andrew Medichini/AP

James Franco has big plans, always.

Andrew Medichini/AP

What is James Franco doing?

People started asking this question, in earnest, somewhere around the time he went on General Hospital in 2009. Up until then, he'd been a young actor whose path was relatively normal: he was on Freaks & Geeks, and in Never Been Kissed, and he played James Dean on cable. He was in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, and then into Apatow country. Occasional forays into super-artsy stuff like films that showed in museums? No big deal. Nothing you wouldn't see from, say, Ethan Hawke or somebody like that. Swerves between, say, Pineapple Express and Milk, but that happens. Mork wound up in Good Morning, Vietnam, after all.

But then: General Hospital.

Appearances in mainstream stoner comedies are one thing, when it comes to changing up the highness of your brow and toying with the expectations people have of what you would and wouldn't do. But ... a soap? A real, straight-up soap? The same one Luke and Laura were on? Even knowing that he called the appearance a form of performance art, it continued to raise the question...

What is James Franco doing?

Right now, he's releasing his first alleged novel, Actors Anonymous, but we'll get back to that.

It's not like he needs another line of work. He has a band. He writes short stories. He hosted the Oscars. He was roasted on Comedy Central. He's taken many, many classes — and taught some, too. He makes offbeat art and appears in other people's offbeat art. He's played a hot guy on single-woman network sitcoms (both Tina Fey's and Mindy Kaling's).

At the time of a 2010 profile in New York Magazine, the question Franco predicted would be asked about him — and the writer told him was already being asked — was whether he was spreading himself too thin. But in fact, by doing so much, Franco may have achieved something that's almost impossible: he has no meaningful image other than as himself. There is nothing James Franco could do at this point that would move the needle.

What could he do that would seem out of place? What could he do that you really wouldn't expect? He wouldn't really surprise people if he won an Academy Award. He wouldn't really surprise people if he decided to take a one-day role in a Virgin Airlines video demonstrating seatbelts. He could show up in oil paintings, on a sitcom, as a Jeopardy! contestant, as the announced star of So Fast & Extra Furious 8, or in hard-core pornography, and nobody would really think it was anything other than a further example of Well, That's James Franco For You.

"I might be surprised if somebody else did that, but I can sort of believe it, coming from James Franco," is what a lot of us would say about literally anything he did with his career. Aside from something nefarious, even in his personal life, what could he really do now that would require a comeback, or a rehabilitation tour, or a second chance, or an audit of how audiences feel about him?

At times, he's seemed like the kind of guy who's obsessed with pretending he only touches the avant-garde — a self-styled intellectual who disdains everything that's not from art museums. But he's also perfectly happy to do Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Oz The Great And Powerful, two huge moneymaking films that have little connection to short films that wind up in museums. This year, he did This Is The End, a proudly stupid gross-out apocalypse comedy in which he and his friends play themselves.

Blockbusters, both self-consciously respectable and not so much? Fine. Obscurity? Fine. School? Fine. Art? Fine. Poetry? Fine.

And now he's published that "novel," Actors Anonymous. It's not really a novel; it's really a collection of ... stuff. Loosely — like, "XXXL shirt on XXXS body" loosely — based on the 12 steps of addiction treatment programs, it consists of short stories, snippets of scripts, and what it's hard not to envision as Things James Franco Wrote Down On The Back Of A Receipt One Time About Acting And Being Famous.

Among these snippets, there are flashes of insight — like, "I performed for money, and I performed for free. It's better to perform for money if you hate the director; it's better to perform for free if you love him." But there are also things nobody would pay money to read under normal circumstances — like, "There are some people that are very serious about their acting. But the ones that are too serious are boring and usually end up strangling their own performances." That would probably not make the cut if he said it in an interview; it's not really book material.

The fiction sections are stories about actors, but other themes tie them together: mostly, they are about young men driven nearly mad by some combination of generalized rage and a specific desire to have sex with, and sometimes to dominate and possess, women. They're far too inconsistent to be really satisfying, but they simmer with a sometimes intriguing frustration. Franco loves to intersperse signs that certain stories are autobiographical and that he's appearing in the book as "James Franco" or "The Actor," but there are also tweaked details that are meant to hold the reader at a slight distance and retain some sense of disorientation with regard to truth and fiction.

In other words, it's the James-Franco-iest book he could have written, because there's nothing to wrap yourself around. It's not very good, but it's not unambitious, and it's not lazy. It's about him but it's not, it's revealing but it's not, and in the end, it's interesting but it's not.

It's impossible for a celebrity to have an image that's a true blank canvas; we are far too voracious for that. But Franco has perhaps achieved the next best thing: a canvas onto which he's spilled so much paint in so many patterns that it ceases to look like anything, and anything you could add to it would look like it belonged there. And, of course, if you stare at it long enough, you can see patterns emerge and then recede — a poseur, a poet, something jarringly authentic, something painfully manufactured. Even, if you squint, the Last Honest Man In Hollywood, who puts out a book that demonstrates that like a lot of us, he has a certain number of sharp thoughts and an awful lot of mundane ones.

Lots of actors go high-low — the Steven Soderbergh "one for them, one for me" thing. But this is different; Franco has achieved a lack of definition that's unthinkable for a guy like George Clooney, no matter what combination of art-house movies and blockbusters he might make.

There was a lot of talk after Franco's Comedy Central roast about the number of jokes that focused on the idea that he's gay. If nothing else, you'd expect the people who were there to roast him, like Seth Rogen and Nick Kroll and Andy Samberg, to expect a little more from themselves than gay-panic har-har-ing like it's 1998. Even if they didn't worry that those jokes — 26, by BuzzFeed's count — would be offensive, you'd expect them to worry that after 26, they'd seem tired, as Aziz Ansari eventually pointed out that they were.

But maybe people who would normally know better remained stalled at lame gay jokes because roasts are usually focused on making fun of an image of the roastee that the audience will recognize, and Franco offers up less material in that regard than you might think. Hard to make pseudo-intellectual jokes at the expense of a guy who cheerfully made Your Highness. Hard to make dumb-stoner jokes at the expense of a guy who spends so much time pursuing advanced degrees.

It's really hard to know how much of this is on purpose. If it is — if this splatter-painting on his own image to achieve a certain imageless state is something he planned — it's nearly genius, but rather cynical. If it's accidental, it's almost sweet.

But the result is the same either way. He has a strange kind of freedom that comes from a very successful campaign of obfuscation, not so much about his personal life as about his sensibility. So he floats around, and he does what he wants, and none of it changes anything.

Franco has 13 projects listed on his IMDB page that are (or are rumored to be) somewhere between concept and execution — and those are just acting. There's also directing, writing, cinematography, and an unbilled job as the provider of morning pastries for the cast of NCIS.

That last one is a lie, but for a minute, you believed it.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/15/234075232/what-exactly-is-james-franco-doing?ft=1&f=
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Farewell, and thank you

It's been a pleasure. An absolute pleasure. Over seven years ago, I gave up nights, weekends, and nearly every waking hour I could find in order to write about technology for anyone who would read it. Engadget was but two years young, but I had every intention of helping it to last well beyond the ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/5SLrRFb6VTs/
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MIT's "Kinect of the Future" Can Track You Through Walls

The ability to passively track people within a given space is every retailer's dream (and every conspiracy theorist's nightmare). Those dreams recently took a step closer to reality with the debut of a new people-tracking system from MIT.

Read more...

Source: http://gizmodo.com/mits-kinect-of-the-future-can-track-you-through-wall-1443947631
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BitLock offers a bring-your-own-bicycle approach to bike sharing

Unless you're an enraged motorist, there's plenty of good to be found in the current push for big city bike sharing programs. BitLock is certainly in keeping with the spirit of such initiatives, albeit on a much more localized scale. The proposed product is essentially a standard bike U-lock that ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ZgGYgbAa6i0/
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A Free App Can Save Your iPhone 5C From Looking Hideous In Its Case

If you snatched up the colorful iPhone 5C and its perforated case before you realized what an eyesore it is, there's now a cheap and simple solution to the problem. The developers at LunarLincoln have just released a free app called CaseCollage that lets you create and print an insert that fills all those cheese grater holes with whatever images or graphics you want.

S

The wonderfully simple app lets you import images from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Picasa and arrange them in any design you like. You can also choose from a collection of graphic design elements, typography, or even just simple colors to pretty much create any design you like. When you're happy all you need to is print out your design, trim it down, insert it between your iPhone 5C and voila, your phone is no longer an embarrassment. [CaseCollage via Pocket-lint via SlashGear]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/a-free-app-can-save-your-iphone-5c-from-looking-hideous-1443840925
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Rights groups urge Justice probe of 1985 bombing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil rights groups and members of Congress are pressing the Justice Department to renew its investigation of a 1985 office bombing that killed Palestinian-American civil rights leader Alex Odeh and injured seven people.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jewish Voice for Peace and others have launched a petition campaign asking Justice to further investigate the explosion, which demolished the committee's office in Santa Ana, Calif. The online petition has about 10,000 signatures.

California Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez sent a letter to the department in June and is seeking other lawmakers to sign a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. The FBI identified suspects after the attack, but none were ever named or indicted.

"Whenever a leader for a civil rights organization is killed, it is the responsibility of our country as a whole— and a civil rights community as a whole— to stand up and demand that their killers be brought to justice and to insure that the U.S. Department of Justice does everything in its power to close the case," NAACP President Ben Jealous told reporters in a conference call Monday.

The DOJ, which has furloughed workers due to the government shutdown, did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Monday, which also was the federal Columbus Day holiday. In 2010, the FBI described Odeh's killing in an agency news blog as "an active, ongoing priority investigation" and noted a $1 million reward.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said Monday that he wants the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations to convene a hearing on the bombing.

"We're going to pursue it vigorously and we're not going to let any more time lapse," Conyers said. "We're going to continue to help all of the organizations that are involved build up more and more support for us getting to where we ought to be in terms of a horrific, violent crime that has, I think, been put on the back burner for far too long."

At the time of the attack, the FBI said they believed the bombing was the responsibility of the militant Jewish Defense League. An attorney for the group denied the allegations and asked for a retraction from the agency. The FBI also linked Odeh's killing to two other acts of domestic terrorism in Brentwood, N.Y. and Paterson, N.J. that same year.

Odeh, the West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was killed as he opened the door to his office on Oct. 11, 1985. The bombing occurred the morning after Odeh said on a Los Angeles television news broadcast that Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat was a "man of peace" because of his role in securing the release of passengers from the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in Egypt.

Odeh, who came to the U.S. from Palestine, was described by both Jews and Arabs as a nonviolent man who advocated compromise. According to the American-Arab committee, Odeh immigrated to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet and lecturer.

The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/rights-groups-urge-justice-probe-1985-bombing-205608305.html
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