Category Archives: Internet

The Sniffer, March 18th, 2013: Trends in Self-Tracking and Connectedness

This time, our gal Cathi Bond mentions the Underarmour wearable band for runners that tracks your stats and your ‘willpower’ (via PSFK). Does wearing tracking devices like this improve your performance, or keep you motivated? We’d love to hear about it.

Nora refers to this cool visualization at the Smithsonian Magazine blog. Researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi found that any two pages on the web are connected by no more than 19 clicks. Quite cool to look at the hyper-connector ‘hubs’ in the visualization.

The Sniffer, July 13th, 2012: Trends in Online Services and Wearable Tech

Hey trendwatchers, in this podcast Nora Young talks about a possible move to push back on our info-overload online lives. New York Times journalist (who has also contributed to Spark) Anand Giridharadas writes about two trends in services: the immersive spend-your-time-behind-a-screen experience, vs. a move to quick check-ins that help manage your offline life. Designer Jack Cheng advocates for The Slow Web, making a similar call to keeping our online tools in check, serving us instead of the other way around. It squares with my (Nora’s) own sense that the real push in a market crowded with streams of information and apps galore, is in creating tools that give you real utility, and offer the space for you to create meaning in your life.

Cathi Bond this time brings you Terminator Pants! No, seriously, Delta 415 jeans feature a protective pocket in the front of your jeans so that you can store your cell phone and access it all the time. The design is inspired by fighter pilots’ G suits, apparently. Definitely a sign of the times in terms of the advance of 24/7 wearable tech. Would you wear them?