| Type | Private startup |
|---|---|
| Industry | Consumer electronics |
| Founded | San Francisco, California, United States (October 2007)[1] |
| Founder(s) | James Park Eric Friedman |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| Area served | USA |
| Key people | James Park, CEO Eric Friedman, CTO |
| Products | Fitbit Tracker |
| Website | www.fitbit.com |
Fitbit Inc. is a company headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Led by James Park and Eric Friedman, the company is known for its product of the same name, the Fitbit Tracker, a wireless-enabled wearable device that measures data such as the number of steps walked, quality of sleep, and other personal metrics.
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The Fitbit Tracker uses a three-dimensional accelerometer, similar to that in the Wii Remote, to sense user movement. The Tracker measures steps taken, distance walked, calories burned, floors climbed, and activity duration and intensity. It uses an OLED display to display this and other information such as the battery level. It also measures sleep quality: how long it takes the wearer to fall asleep, how often they wake up over the course of the night, and how long they are actually asleep.
A wireless base station is included to receive data from the Tracker and also charge its battery. When connected to a computer the base station will upload data to the Fitbit. From the website, a number of features are possible: seeing an overview of physical activity, setting and tracking goals, keeping food and activity logs, and interacting with friends. Use of the website is free.
The product was announced on September 9, 2008[2] at TechCrunch50 during the "Mobile" session. Fitbit received positive reactions during its panel from experts like Rafe Needleman, Tim O'Reilly, and Evan Williams who cited its wearability, price point, and lack of subscription fees.
The Fitbit Classic only tracked steps taken, distance travelled, calories burned, activity intensity, and sleep. It was designed to be a small black and teal device that could be clipped discreetly onto clothing and worn 24/7.
A new hardware upgrade was announced October 3, 2011[3], called the Fitbit Ultra. The new features included:
In October 2011, just a few weeks after the launch of the Fitbit Ultra, Fitbit launched a native app for the iPhone.[4] The app could sync between itself and a user’s account on Fitbit.com to update information. Users could log their food, activities, water intake, and weight, as well as track their fitness goals throughout the day even while offline.
Fitbit offers a free website that can be used with or without the Fitbit Tracker. Users have the ability to log their food, activities, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and glucose levels to track over time. Users also have the ability to set daily and weekly goals for themselves for steps, calories burned and consumed, and distance walked.
Fitbit allows users to set a Food Goal for themselves on the website or the mobile app based on a weight goal. The Food Goal tool has four different intensity settings users can choose from, and gives a range of calorie consumption to aim for each day. This number updates dynamically with any activities logged on the Fitbit website or synced with the Fitbit Tracker. It also gives a projected date for the weight loss which updates as the user logs their weight.
On August 9th 2011 Fitbit launched badges for various step and distance milestones. Step badges could be earned based on how many steps a user took in a single day, while lifetime distance badges gave users a badge based on how much distance they’ve logged since they started using the Fitbit Tracker. With the launch of Fitbit Ultra, they came out with new Ultra-only badges that can be earned for floor climbing, and launched new step and distance badges that anyone could earn.
Fitbit has won numerous awards, including runner-up at TechCrunch50 in 2008[5] and CES 2009 Innovation honoree and best in the Health & Wellness category.[6]
Starting in June 2011, Fitbit was criticized for its website's default activity sharing settings, which made users' manually-entered physical activities available for public viewing.[7] All users had the option to make their physical activity information private, but some users were unaware that the information was public by default. One specific issue which technology blogs made fun of was that some users were including details about their sex lives in their daily exercise logs, and this information was by default publicly available.[8] Fitbit responded to criticism by making all such data private by default and requesting that search engines remove indexed user profile pages from their databases.[7]