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Apple and Nike Team up for iPod Shoe Interface
lyonsden writes "Apple and Nike are teaming up to provide runners a system to integrate their shoes and their iPod. A $30 antenna will connect an iPod nano with special shoes to provide pedometer functions."
A supersmall step sensor for your shoe with wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, iPod integration, timer, text-to-speach interface, "booster song with 1 keypress", recording all your trips and comparing them over the internet, and Apple and Nike behind it - I was expecting that gear to cost at least $50 to $80, and I'm pretty sure the people that are interested would have paid that amount without thinking about it - but only $29? That is one seriously low price. Wow, what happened, are they subsidizing this one or something?
And if they do, how do they make sure we are buying nike shoes? That step counter can be taped to any shoe, can't it?
Corporations like Apple and Nike promoting their brands through a synergystic crossover product? Get out of here! Next thing you'll tell me that they're going to get professional athletes and rock stars to promote this thing.
You realize that Nike hasn't run sweatshops for a long time now right? The factories in Asia used to be contracted by Nike to produce shoes, so Nike did not own them. After all the bad PR they moved in and took over the factories and now the people have very nice working conditions and earn a much higher than average wage compared to the rest of the countries over there. If you would like to end sweatshops, try talking to Adidas, Rebook, etc, which still do use sweatshop in Asia.
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To myself, who I'd consider to be a reasonably serious athlete, I prefer the food pods to GPS for a few reasons. They're typically smaller, but most importantly, they aren't automatically destroyed by large buildings or tree cover. Living in areas where I would run on trails surrounded by large trees, or in downtown with large buildings, I would constantly lose GPS signals and so my distance, pace, and maps of my runs would be way off in areas. The foot pods can be calibrated by you on a track to make them accurate to your stride, and are +/- 1% after doing that typically, which is better than my GPS was by far. Now they have downsides as well (elevation gain typically isn't measured), but they're better than losing signal for some of us.
What would be very cool is if it would attempt to match the beats per minute of your song to your actual steps per minute, so you could run to music at whatever pace you wanted to. I think iTunes has a BPM field, so you could probably at least have the iPod choose songs that were close to your pace (so you could have different pump-up, running, and cool-down music), but I don't know if you can easily alter the playback speed of an MP3 without altering it's pitch to do exact cadence matching. I wonder if it has enough processor overhead to do on-the-fly resampling.
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Intelligent first posts are now a 'subscriber bonus,' really. If you give /. a bunch of cash they let you see stories a few minutes early, and if you happened to have previously requested a mildly inappropriately labeled iPod from Apple (or known where to get text of an order like this) you're suddenly five steps ahead of everyone else.
As long as you know how to use a text editor, that is.
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The distinction is irrelevant. Nike dictates all the terms to the sweatshops that make Nike shoes and they are specifically culpable for their decision to stop doing business in Korea and Taiwan after those sweatshops unionized to seek out cheaper, more exploitative places elsewhere.
s /nike/
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshop
You are regurgitating Nike propoganda, which has been demonstrated to be false. Nike is not responding to bad publicity by addressing the problem, they are responding on the cheap by hiring PR firms to "shore up their image."