TomTom, Your Multi-Sport GPS Watch is Unfinished!

Although the overall wearables market, according to Reportlinker, as reported recently by MarketWatch, “will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% from around $5 billion forecast for 2013 to $9.2 billion in 2014 and more than $30.2 billion forecast for 2018.” , the sport watches have been around for a long time now. My old Garmin Forerunner 305 finally died after close to 8 years of constant use!  However, because of the heated wearables market, the sports watch products need to really compete in this new era, and need to produce well designed and thought out products in order to either retain old customers or attract new ones. I recently bought the TomTom Multi-Sport with the heart rate monitor (the chest strap kind). I train for triathlons, and while I was waiting for my production ready Bia, which was not quite ready yet (I’ve been a loyal supporter and field tester), I needed a replacement for my old Garmin. TomTom has been a real disappointment, and I really wanted it to do the job! Competition is a good thing! In case of the TomTom, unfortunately, the Cons outweigh the Pros! I would not recommend this to any of my triathlon friends! It’s like the TomTom product management got just so far, and then quit and shipped it with bunch of features just not fully baked! Pros:

1. Good visibility display and intuitive way to go from one sport to the next on the watch. User Interface is well thought out.
2. Easy bike mount. I like how you can take it off the wrist band and easily put on the bike and then back on the wrist. Well designed. The wrist strap is also comfortable.
3. Quick satellite connection, don’t need to wait forever
4. Easily connects and transfers data from watch to MySports TomTom smart phone app!
5. Nice integration with MapMyFitness – automatically transfers my works out from TomTom app.
6. Good battery life! Lasts for a very long time!

Cons:

1. Swimming – no GPS tracking in open water, so as a triathlete, this is really disappointing. I swim in the ocean, and this is a must have. I didn’t even think about checking before purchasing, because if it tracks running and biking, why would it NOT track swimming?
2. Swimming again – it counts pool laps, but badly. It doesn’t track when kicking with kick board, or doing some other drills that don’t necessarily involve a regular stroke. Swimming portion is not well implemented for either open water (which it doesn’t do at all) and lap swimming also.

Software/Website – You would think this was a website designed for Kindergartners! Can’t manually edit the workout data on MySports.tomtom website. Can only edit some of the data that was transferred to the MapMyFitness site. Swim data in particular – on MapMyFitness I just delete the workout and enter it manually because the only data that is useful is the time it took to do the workout. Can’t edit the distance when doing open water swim – would like to be able to at least change whatever the distance it calculates, which is completely wrong. I don’t even know how it can calculate the calories burned if it gets the distance wrong by about 100%. Can’t manually change number of laps swam – either on the watch or on the website, so the distance here can’t be adjusted in any way. Total time v. actual work out time – this is very frustrating. The Garmin Connect website reports both the Total Time (the total time of the given workout, including stops, etc), and then subtracts time used for stops and breaks, and gives you these as averages as well, so you get the following as an example for a bike ride: Total Time 55 minutes Actual Time 50 minutes Total Average Speed – 15 Mph Actual Average Speed – 16 Mph Here is a detail page from Garmin Connect that shows the various stats: I wish TomTom calculated these as well. It can’t be that hard to do, just delete the time you’re not moving and then run the calculations the same as Garmin does. MapMyFitness should do it too, and they don’t! Bottom line for a triathlete who is interested in keeping track of the swim workouts either in the pool or in open water, this is useless. Wish I knew that before buying. To TomTom product management – I don’t know how you could not get few swimmers together to give you their opinions and suggestions! And that you didn’t really do a good competitive analysis for the types of reports you should provide on the website. As I stated before, it’s as though you got done part way, and then just gave up and decided to ship before really finishing all the features, and then took repurposed MapMyFitness to have fewer features and look like something drawn with crayons!

Internet of Cars

In San Diego Car2Go has become very popular in the last couple of years. The other company offering similar service is Zipcar. In both cases the underlying premise is that you can use a car on as needed basis, which if you live in a city, seems like the perfect way to leave the city without having to buy a car.

For me, the obvious evolution of this concept would be if I could be able to have access to different cars for different uses. I may want to own a small car for getting around, but select a car as a service to get a mini-van or a SUV for when the kids come home and we want to all go to Disneyland, or get a small truck for that trip to Home Depot, and then get a luxury vehicle for when we want to attend the Opera that one time a year!

Today’s younger generation, like my son who is 22, aren’t that interested in car ownership. They see the ever increasing gas prices, and insurance costs on top of what a new or slightly used car costs, and it’s a turn off for them. They no longer see having a car as a status symbol. They live in the digital world, and expect things to be available on demand and on as needed bases. For them the idea of Internet of Cars is obvious. That’s probably why Zipcar grew mostly on college campuses.

With all the recent telematics developments and the idea of the Internet of things and the connected cars, the use based insurance and Google’s self driving car in addition to the Car2Go and Zipcar, I think we are closer to the realization that car individual ownership may be a thing of the past.

But then what? What will that mean to the auto insurance industry and car manufacturers who today depend on you having more than one car per family? And who will they sell cars to? Will Verizon Wireless and Sprint be selling you the next telecommunication device which will drive itself to your home and all you have to worry is your one data plan?

I, for one can’t wait!

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/01/forget-the-internet-of-things-here-comes-the-internet-of-cars/

GPS Spoofing – potential problems with drones and NYSE

In case you haven’t heard yet, the US government will be using drones to monitor our movements, well ok, the idea is to monitor movements of those trying to cross our borders or other illegal activities, but I suspect that regular citizens will be caught on camera much more often than “the bad guys”.  But guess what? It turns out that the GPS signal is one of the biggest security vulnerabilities we have encountered in a long time, and those signals can basically turn a drone into a missile. Here’s the full story of how a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s hacked into a drone’s GPS.

But this is just part of the story, and Fox News should have followed up with these researches on their other, and in my opinion, more important findings of what this vulnerability means. It turns out that you can also use GPS Spoofing to mess with the time stamps of financial transactions on the NYSE and NASDAQ. Here’s the link to that research paper:

http://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/images/stories/files/papers/summary_financial_sector_implications.pdf