The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter and Facebook, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!
So with that, let’s get into the action!
DCR Posts in the Past Week:
Here’s all the latest on the site, as January plods along:
Monday: A Closer Look at Garmin & Qualcomm’s Satellite Chipset Partnership
Tuesday: Week in Review: January 10th, 2023
Friday: Strava Raises Prices But Can’t Tell You How Much It Costs Anymore
YouTube Videos This Past Week:
Here’s what hit the tubes over on the You of Tube, definitely don’t forget to subscribe there to get notified of videos the second they hit!
Stuff I Found Interesting around the Interwebs:
Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:
1) Strava Says They Know Price Hike Is Confusing: Yet, despite that, still haven’t done anything about it. What’s crazy is this story isn’t going away. The snowball is only getting bigger. I can see it in views, where my YouTube video has dramatically gained speed in views/hour over the last few hours (very rare for the weekend), and same goes for other media outlets starting to pick it up again.
2) Drone mounted Apple Watch Ultra used for gunshot detection: They can use multiple Apple Watches on drones to triangulate the exact position of gunshots. Crazy stuff using two categories of products I often review, to cover safety issues in a totally unrelated area.
3) Apple found to have infringed on Masimo patent: It’s a rare day that Apple loses in court around fitness patents, but this is one of them. Of course, virtually every optical HR sensor and related sensor company in the industry has gone after Apple at some point for something. In this case, it’s specifically around the SpO2 side of the patent that Masimo is protecting. Assuming the judge ruled correctly, at least Masimo actually has legit tech used in countless products here. Meaning, this isn’t just another run of the mill patent troll IP case.
4) Twitter HQ auction has some awesome bike desk things: No, not like a trainer desk. But like a self-charging bike desk thingy. Look, you just have to check it out yourself. Supposedly these things sell for $4K normally – which is outlandishly nuts. But bidding starts at $25 as the company tries to raise money after cratering itself.
5) The regulatory maze behind health tech vaporware: A good explainer into why all the health tech things you saw announced at CES may take years to show up (if ever).
6) Apple Watch MicroLED concepts outlined: This is still, optimistically, at *least* a few years away according to rumors, but, in case you’re wondering what it means, this will answer it.
7) A Fuel & Hydration App is Looking for Beta Testers: Dive into the link over on Slowtwitch for more details on what they’re doing and the type of endurance athletes they’re looking for.
8) Skydio adds new keyframing, panorama features: I haven’t quite had a chance to take them out yet (winds have been sustained at 50-100kph all week, which makes panos basically impossible). But things look to be settling down in the back half of the week.
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With that, thanks for reading!
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Strapping an 800 euro watch to an 700 euro drone and it is so cool. Not so sure! there are so many more ways to do this better and cheaper using a GPS-flight controller for a self build drone. But I think the boss needed an excuse to have the company pay for his new watch.
One of the things to keep in mind though, is that while a self-build drone is far cheaper for the hardware, it’s the software automation that these companies are after. With the DJI SDK, they can trivially automate the flights of drones (including this one). And they can do it with already existing 3rd party apps.
So in the case of a scenario like this, I suspect the the idea would be to have drones on automated flight paths/locations, which something like Litchi would be an exceptionally good app for (costing basically nothing in this scenario).
Whereas doing a homebrew of the flight controller app side would be a ginormous time suck that likely would never reach the same reliability levels.
Which is probably why they didn’t use the Mini 3 – a far better drone for this scenario. That drone still isn’t supported by the DJI SDK (DJI drags their heals on this). The Mini 3 with a Plus battery is getting about 45 mins of flight time, whereaeas the Mavic Air variants are half that at best (and the Mini 3 can easily lift any Apple Watch, I’ve stuck full GoPro Hero 11’s on it).
100% this. I have to demo IoT at work, and while a lot of my colleagues wasted months messing with Raspberry Pi (ultimately to fail, given the time suck), I used a Garmin watch and wrote an app in an afternoon that sends every bit of sensor data out to the cloud for analytics and real time shenanigans. Job done, and most of the support is from Garmin, not from me. This has been especially helpful with the handful of people who have since reached out to use the code, I hand it over and I’m done, no ongoing support
Apple’s thing is a bit more than just patent infringement. They also poached Masimo’s employees, apparently.
Boring week ! 😕
I saw Strava gave statements to several sites. They ever give you anything more? Or did they put you on their “Do not call” list? 🙂
They actually gave everyone the same silent treatment up till that point. It wasn’t till my prodding that I finally got them to even admit they were hiking prices (the statement I included in my post, which they then waited 30 mins and published externally on their press site).
Then, about 6 hours later when it all exploded after I posted, their new VP of Comms (just hired two weeks ago), stepped in and started providing a new set of PR responses (which the Verge got).
I haven’t heard from them since. My guess is we’ll see Strava start to do something today. As is always the case over the years with Strava (or any other company), I’m hard on them when they do purposefully stupid anti-consumer stuff, and I’m fair on them and cover it when they do cool stuff. They’ve had largely a good two-year run of good coverage. I’ll continue to cover cool new things as cool, whether or not they call me back. However, as with really any other news site, if I’m now on the do-not-call list for embargoed news, and everyone else covers it, then my likelihood of covering ‘old news’ is pretty low.
In other words, balls in their camp.
Thanks for the reply. The whole episode is so surprising and disappointing. When Gainey and Horvath came back, it really seemed like Strava was back to the “old Strava”. As you noted, they made a lot of great improvements over the last couple years and seemed much more focused on delivering the features people wanted.
A week ago they sent out the year-end email about all that happened in 2022 and “looking forward to a bright 2023”. They even said, “Nearly all of our revenue that supports our operations and building the future of Strava comes from you. We appreciate you!”. They could have easily used this opportunity to explain the price increases, why they were needed, and what they would go for. Instead they play these games and it just makes them look so bad. 🙁
I will probably keep subscribing. I don’t necessarily use all the features. The heat maps for route planning are probably the most useful. And I do want them to succeed. Hopefully they learn something from this.
Re the first story about Garmin and sat comms in phones, I think it pretty clear that the upcoming S23 range have that chip in it – the advertising for the launch shows the graphic design for the UFO/Space ship.
Interesting picked up in a few places, but hadn’t seen it loop back here.
Totally agree, though, the only catch though is that the S23 range is set to be released in a week or so, yet, Qualcomm’s noted “starting in the second half of 2023”.
However, it’s possible that Qualcomm was specifically referring to the functionality being lit up, rather than the chipset itself.
I suppose we’ll all soon find out…
More info on the Masimo patent dispute with Apple…
link to ocbj.com