Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That’s the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online.
The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year’s worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis’s Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. “It’s amazing and there’s so much more you haven’t even heard,” he said about the company.
ReadWriteWeb wrote about Green Goose in February of last year (those investors should read RWW more closely, apparently, might have got better terms) when the company was framing itself as a tool for ecological and financial responsibility. It’s based in both San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.
The company seems to have shrunken its sensor design substantially and reframed itself as a health and wellness instrumentation service. It’s all about actualizing your intentions and measuring your behavior as a game, according to the service’s site.
Water bottles, tooth brushes, bikes, pill bottles and other objects can be turned into sensors that track our interaction with them and then publish that data online. All thanks to a simple sticker or other attachable sensor. It’s the simplest and most pleasing example we’ve seen yet of the widely anticipated trend called The Internet of Things.
All kinds of formerly disconnected devices will be brought online in the coming months and years, their activities and interactions no longer ignored by their users but now tracked, stored and analyzed for patterns, thresh holds and opportunities by web based applications and interfaces. A more measured world will in theory be a more rational, more just and more sustainable world. It looks like it may be a world with better dental hygiene, too.
The health angle is a strong one and the healthcare industry knows it. “Insurance companies are really trying to figure out how to reinvent all this stuff,” Web 2.0 forefather and sensor-lover Tim O’Reilly told me about Green Goose today. “They’re all looking for things like this that will drive wellness. The biggest question about it is whether it’s too early. As the old VC saying goes, being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. But this is defiitely on the right track.”
The Launch conference Grand Jury members on stage tonight thought so too. Shervin Pishevar and Jay Levy each said on stage that they’d put in $50,000 investments (pending due diligence), after host Calacanis and the crowd cheered louder and louder at the prospect of their doing so.
Calacanis had to admit that the conference’s front line selection committee made a mistake when it neglected to select Green Goose to present at the main event. Fortunately Grand Jury members found, selected and promoted the company from the demo platform tables out in the hallway. They’ll leave much happier birds.
