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Exist
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- timdorr 13y agoInteresting model for the beta: What we're doing works a bit like a Kickstarter. We're asking supporters to back us for AU$60. Why charge for 1,000 places? The maths on 1,000 × 60 means two co-founders working full-time for six months. This is just enough time for us to get stuck in without worrying about the future It's also a handy, low number that means we don't have to worry about scaling a whole lot of data analysis just yet. Although, I think that should be on the front page. But I like it better than someone setting up a quickie Selfstarter install and waiting for money to roll in.
- girvo 13y agoOh that's a neat model. I'm going to hang on to that idea for my start-up (on the back burner, just had to take a permanent position due to my financial position).
- orofino 13y agoConnect literally five other services for a broader view This copy seems quite strange. Using literally in this context would traditionally precede an impressive number. "We have literally thousands of service intergrations"... or something.
- lukeqsee 13y agoI agree when read literally (pardon the pun). However, I think the point is that this is a beta product and features are limited; thus the term 'literally' is used ironically in this case.
- hueving 13y agoI literally agree with you.
- deft 13y agoYeah, to me it seemed like some kind of weird joke. I was confused when I read it. At least we know they aren't exaggerating when they say 5!
- bertil 13y agoI've seen enough of those app claiming to be platforms to say: five, actually working, relevant services, correctly pooled together is an impressive number. Not f*cking up the timezones would be a great improvement.
- Shank 13y agoThis is a really neat concept -- I always thought it was a bit arcane to sign up for disparate services (Fitbit + SumAll for tweet data) with no way to correlate them. The only odd part is the backer model: unless they have over 1,000 users on the waiting list who have committed to buying it, it seems like they should have a prominent button to pay and start using it somewhere, rather than email invite.
- bellebethcooper 13y agoGood point. We didn't plan on making the campaign public quite yet as we've been focused on giving people on our waiting list first dibs. Since everyone knows what's going on now, we've adjusted the home page to make the process of backing Exist more simple.
- sciguy77 13y agoHope they add support for the Narrative Clip. That would be quite a cool dashboard.
- bellebethcooper 13y agoExist co-founder here. The Narrative Clip is on our radar, but seems to be more of a lifelogging/journalling use case. For now we're focused on making your data useful but we have had a few people ask about the possibility of a lifelogging/journal angle so that could be where we end up down the track, who knows...
- duncan_bayne 13y agoHi :) I'd love to have some high quality biofeedback tracked, in particular for measuring stress and concentration levels (in so far as either can be neatly defined).
- bellebethcooper 13y agoThose metrics would be great to have. We already have a huge to do list of services to integrate, and I'd love to have some easily available ones like heart rate and blood pressure in there soon.
- djb_hackernews 13y agoSo, what is the deal with the quantified self obsession? Is it a young persons thing? Has it always been that way and I just missed out on it? Or is it a newer phenomenon that is catching on due to technology making it easier to capture data about ourselves? I'm really curious.
- bicx 13y agoI am starting to wonder if I'm getting old in tech years as well, and I'm just 27. It may be a draw for people at an earlier stage in life when being affirmed/noticed/accepted by a group of friends is really important to you (high school, college, etc...).
- tedks 13y agoIt's hardly new; people had commonplace books in the 1600's. I think QS is probably more popular in communities like hacker news because there are a lot of people here that understand: 1. Computers think faster than you 2. Computers remember more than you 3. You can use the above to solve interesting problems. Combine that with pervasive computing/surveillance and you enable yourself to remember arbitrary amounts of things and mine insights from them. Empirically, it's probably a young person's thing, because people tend towards conservatism with age, and the technology required is going to be something young people are more comfortable with. But there are plenty of older people involved in QS.
- yawz 13y ago1. Computers think faster than you Not yet. But they make calculations faster.
- nzp 13y agoNot really. I'd be impressed with a robot that could do bipedal gate (for example) as well as humans do, but the problem is lack of computing power. A human doing mental arithmetic is not at all representative of what and how much the brain actually does during the act.
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- mjewkes 13y agoI'm waiting for someone to make a life sampling application. N times per day, for M seconds, turn on all my phone's sensors and take a short video capture of my computer screen. Then upload that data (preferably to my own server, not yours). Every couple days, I'll log on and tag the data. At 17:56 on 12/05, I was sleeping, working on X, talking to Y, going to Z, etc. Sample 3-4 times a day for a year. Should get a really clear and interesting picture of your life after 3 months or so.
- bellebethcooper 13y agoHave you tried the app Reporter? It's going down a similar path. I think it uses 5 iPhone sensors and questions that you pre-set and just asks you to report at random times during the day. I've really enjoyed using it so far. http://www.reporter-app.com http://www.reporter-app.com
- bertil 13y ago+1 for Reporter, but also Narrative, for the automated photo part.
- aashishkoirala 13y agoHow do you figuratively connect five other services?
- Codhisattva 13y agoSounds like a start-up idea to me. "figuratively.io - a metaphorical API clearinghouse" YC15 if you want to co-found with me.
- bertil 13y agoYou need Powerpoint, a credulous VC and a good ability to peddle manure.
- gokmengoksel 13y agoGood luck! It looks like ahmetalpbalkan's personal-dashboard which is available at https://github.com/ahmetalpbalkan/personal-dashboard https://github.com/ahmetalpbalkan/personal-dashboard (Apache-2.0)
- n1ghtmare_ 13y agoIs this one of those things to see how many people are going to take interest in your project, when in reality you don't have anything at the moment ? I'm not sure why it looks that way.
- bellebethcooper 13y agoHmm I would hope it doesn't look that way. The screenshots are certainly not mockups—we actually have a tiny group of close friends using it already to help us test it out.
- n1ghtmare_ 13y agoSorry, it's just that these days I'm seeing a lot of places they do that kind of stuff (there was even a term for it - can't remember exactly what it was). Having cleared that, I gotta say, it does look awesome and I wish you best of luck :) !
- yataa 13y agoI think the term you're looking for is "vapourware", but these guys appear to be the real deal.
- normloman 13y agoHow many tweets you make? How many tracks you listen to? How is this data going to help you improve your life? Tracking your sleep is one thing. But most of this is just noise. The name Exist is creepy. As if, you don't truly exist until you can pigeonhole yourself into a couple of statistics. I swear, everyone here is mind blind.
- roryokane 13y ago“Everyone here is mind blind”? https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/ I agree that tweets and tracks probably won’t help you notice any useful patterns. But I don’t see the name Exist as creepy. I interpret it rather as a way of saying that this is very passive software, and all you have to do to use it is to exist normally, as if it’s not there. Like existence is the context of this software, not the product they are selling.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoShould've gone with thrive.io. I don't want to exist; quantify what I'm doing wrong, and how I can change it to achieve my goals.
- cryoshon 13y agoThat xkcd is good for a chuckle, but the problem is real. I dare you to try talking to a stranger on the subway regarding a topic requiring any kind of methodical or critical thought. You're going to get a lot of glassy eyed vacant stares, even controlling for the fact that they don't know you.
- benched 13y agoThat comic isn't one of xkcd's finer moments. It only works if all the people are coincidentally on their way to someplace like Mountain View or Redmond. You know damn right well that you're 'more conscious' than most people, and less conscious than Jeff Bezos.
- nobbyclark 13y agoDon't forget... > SHARE WITH FRIENDS Because highly personal data needs to be shared with your friends. Just because. Actually the real feature here would be "SHARE WITH MOM" for those mothers who always call to ask "Are you getting enough sleep?"
- spiritplumber 13y agoI will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
- visakanv 13y agohttps://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
- Kiro 13y agoNo-one is forcing you.
- colordrops 13y agoThat's what he's saying.
- Kiro 13y agoExactly.
- balls187 13y agoWhat resources do they need to launch exist? 30k per founder for 6 months seems like quite a lot of money.
- kapkapkap 13y agoPerhaps its a good way to validate the idea / test the market? I wouldn't pay a $1 myself, but if they can get 1,000 people to pay $60, more power to them.
- balls187 13y agoPutting up a high friction point seems like a unintuitive way to validate the idea. I'm taking the founders at their word--they need the money to launch their product. It just seems like they could do it for less--however I don't have much detail so I'd like to understand the money breakdown.
- wakeless 13y agoThese guys live in here Melbourne, cost of living is pretty crazy high. Sure, you could get away with paying yourself less than that, but 60k (less business expenses) puts them in the realm of basic office clerk. Maybe the startup founder's lot in life is to be poor while they are starting up, so could probably do it with less. But they are hardly overstepping the mark.
- balls187 13y agoThere are a few schools of thought with founder salaries for early stage startups (assuming you have money to pay salary). 1. Pay yourself the barest minimum you can to survive, which may be 0. 2. Pay yourself just enough that you're not worried about money. High founder salaries, especially in early stages goes against many investment theses.
- Rantenki 13y agoBig data for your personal life. Only one problem: Big data is amazingly hard to get valuable insight out of. Correlation is relatively easy, but causation? Not so much. Actually, even if the data isn't big, it's still _really_ hard to figure out causation. If exist.io does make it, It'll be because they figure out just ONE kind of reliable causative relationship they pull out of their data, and they figure out how too monetize that.... This is actually a pretty clever way to crowdsource THAT process though...
- jonnybgood 13y agoThis kind of tech reminds me of a story from Einstein's Dreams. It's a world of two kinds of people. Those who live close to the Earth living out there lives happily with no reservations and those who live at high altitudes because they believe the higher you are, the longer you'll live. Those who live at high altitudes measure the time they're at lower altitudes with stress and worry then haste back up so as to not get older. So busy quantifying your life, you forget to actually live your life. My 2 cents.
- josephagoss 13y agoThis is very true and something I think about a lot. I come from the perspective that knowledge is always good to have, however it's a balance. You want to experience life in the now and live to the full, so most of the time these services are getting in the way. I imagine as more computer 'clothing' comes out things like this will become more common because more knowledge at no more time expense can't be a bad thing.
- dimadima 13y agoSterile, cold. Existence is more than identifying the next self fulfilling prophesy. Also, by the way, correlation != causation. Live it.
- dschiptsov 13y agoExhibitionism and existentialism are not the same thing.)
- kristiandupont 13y agoBeing a QS geek myself and partner in a QS based startup, I am always interested in new products. However, it seems to me that 90% of people doing anything in this space have the same idea: track as much as possible and then try and see if there's anything interesting there. "44% more likely to check in when you climb more floors" -- big whoop! I suspect that this is exactly the level of insights that you are likely to gain from that sort of approach. You will discover that you are indeed less productive if you don't sleep well or that you tend to have headaches after drinking large amounts of alcohol. Exploratory data analysis is appealing because we like the idea of discovering something completely unexpected and revolutionary but I think confirmatory analysis (the boring one where you form a hypothesis and set up an experiment to test it) is much more likely to be useful.
- ejain 13y agoIf you prefer "confirmatory analysis" over the "correlate all the things" approach then check out zenobase.com (I'm the founder). The answers you get are as smart as the questions you ask :-) That said, I also just signed up for for Exist.io; the screenshots look great, and I'm curious to see where this leads!
- Aoyagi 13y ago>We all create data about ourselves every day. From task lists to fitness trackers to the tweets we share, our data is everywhere. So many assumptions.
- weego 13y agoI know about my lifestyle. I'm there as it happens. I can't help but feel things like this just lead to a general sense of vexation over details of little consequence.
- devindotcom 13y agoI'm with you - but I haven't found the alloy yet with which to form the knife that harms the "quantified self" "movement." Patience!
- mbrock 13y agoFuck knives. Let's just leave planet Earth. It's done.
- Kiro 13y agoIsn't this an unnecessary layer on top of what Jawbone and Fitbit is already offering?
- brador 13y agoAnyone wanna share some QS findings they've made that changed their life for the better?
- weavie 13y agoI strictly measure how much weight I can lift in the gym. This helps me to know if my program is on the right track or not. If things are not progressing upwards I know I have to tweak something. I not so strictly measure my food intake, but I know enough now to correlate certain diet choices with my effectiveness in the gym. Things I don't measure but would like to are various hormone levels and other health markers that could probably be worked out with a blood test. I take a number of foods and supplements that are meant to maintain a decent hormone profile - high testosterone, low oestrogen, cortisol etc.. But because I don't measure these I have no idea really if I am doing it right or not. Another thing I really should measure is my sleep. Although obvious that if I feel dog tired I won't be as effective, I really should measure how much of a sleep deficit I can tolerate so I can balance my work/project time with sleep time effectively.
- brador 13y agoMeasuring sleep - Lots of apps for that. What foods and health supplements do you take to get that good hormone profile? What foods have you found correlate to gym performance?
- weavie 13y agoThere are, but there's something about having my phone in my bed with me that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. High fatty foods are supposedly good for testosterone production. Lower glycemic foods and higher protein is good for reducing cortisol production. I have experimented with stuff like DHEA, Indole-3-carbinol and avena sativa for more testosterone and less estrogen. But as I haven't measured I can't quantify any difference it made. Higher carbs seems to make me stronger, but also makes me fatter and less energetic post lunchtime. I tend to move between high fat and high carb depending on what phase of weightlifting I am in, strength building or fat reduction. Something I haven't measured, but keep meaning to is how much of an effect total calories consumed has compared to the nutritional breakdown of those calories. It could be higher carbs makes me stronger because it is just an easier way to get more calories in. If I could measure these things more finely rater than just speculate I could work out how to optimise my intake.
- colordrops 13y agoI would have maybe paid 5 bucks for this, but 60? What?
- Lennington 13y agoStarted making something almost exactly like this just the other day. Although it's more aimed towards how my health/exercise/diet/work/social/mood bounce off each other. Stats like songs played, tweets, etc, don't really hold any value. Would like to see Exist support more manual entry, because a lot of the really valuable personal information won't be found in an API.
- aalpbalkan 13y agoI did something very similar on my website and called it Personal Dashboard. See it here: http://alp.im http://alp.im (p.s. It's open source)
- zapt02 13y agoDisagree with the pricing. This feels like a 10USD/mo service tops.
- _mulder_ 13y agoMicro-analysing ones life in this manner is wrong and counter productive on so many levels. Knowing how many tracks you listen to a day is interesting trivia only. Knowing how long you sleep for each night could be useful, but only if you have a problem with sleep and know, scientifically, what you're looking for. If you're consistently missing out on sleep and feeling ill as a result, you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this. And if you're not feeling unwell or having sleep problems, then you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this either. Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period. In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
- mattikl 13y agoA couple of years back I was working on a solution to track these kinds of things, and what you said is pretty much what I realized while at it. Tracking my sleep actually made me sleep worse because it placed more stress on sleeping. The less I think about it the better I sleep. What I find more important is tracking what you did in terms of achieving the bigger goals you have. But tracking might not be important here if you have a good system that makes you do work on regular basis to achieve those goals.
- loceng 13y agoIt's entertainment mostly, distraction. Is it all bad? It depends.
- rz7qpx 13y agoAgreed. The real value in this data is when it is grouped with 100s, 1000s or more people. One person's data is a statistical anomaly, group it in a significant sample size, then you get real insights. I agree with their page - selling data is gross, but that's where the value is.
- prof_hobart 13y agoI disagree - certainly about the steps. I use the Moves app on the iPhone, which tracks, without me having to think about it, how far I walk on a daily basis. I've found that it's motivated me to walk further than I used to. I have a choice on a daily basis whether to walk to work, catch the bus all the way or do some combination of the two. It used to be easy to convince myself that I was walking further than I actually did (things like "I only caught the bus half way today, that's almost the same as walking the whole distance"). But when I've got an app tracking me every step of the way, that's not possible. I can get to Thursday, check my app and realise that I'm several miles short of where I should be, so if I'm going to hit my targets for the week I'd better get walking. If anything, I'd love to be able to capture more stuff about my life automatically - it would be a lot harder to convince myself that the doughnut I've been given doesn't count because it was free (or whatever my latest lie to myself is) if I've got an app telling me otherwise. Most people lie to themselves about things like the amount of exercise they do, the amount of junk food they eat and the amount of alcohol they drink. If they could have the truth presented to them as cold hard fact, that would probably be quite an eye opener.
- fiatjaf 13y ago"We gather all of the data you create about your life" I don't see this being taken seriously, probably because it is impossible, because there is too many data, about too many things, and each action we take generate some "data" that can be tracked in infinitely different categories, so stop claiming that you'll do this.
- binarymax 13y agoWow so much dismissal and negativity here. I admit that some of these metrics are trivial and perhaps useless, but I think this is a looking glass into how life will be in the future. Everything in your life will be monitored and there will probably be interesting knowledge that surfaces. For example, I would like to know what foods I eat that effect my mood positively or negatively. I would like to know emergent routines that are detrimental to my health. I would like mountains of data to tell me if I am really happy in my life, and if not what I might consider doing to change that. Understanding these things for ourselves is difficult because we are completely biased and effected by short term noise. Is this service the answer? probably not - but starting somewhere is good.
- DanielStraight 13y ago> I would like mountains of data to tell me if I am really happy in my life Is happiness really found in measurable things? How am I supposed to measure how happy it makes me when my son grins ear to ear when I get home from work? Happiness, as far as I'm concerned, is found in contentment, love and purpose. I don't see a way to measure any of these things. And I certainly don't need a website to tell me if I have them.
- npizzolato 13y agoAgreed. I actually like these types of products, but I object to the idea that a massive amount of data is going to define whether or not you're happy. If you need to sift through a massive amount of data to determine that, then no, you're probably not happy. On the other hand, these products can help you achieve some "thing" that might make you happier. For instance, being fit might make you happy, and seeing how far you traveled each day may motivate you to walk further every day. But the amount of steps you walk shouldn't define your happiness. And if you try to draw happiness from that, I would guess it's going to be a failed endeavor.
- erichmond 13y agoI think what people are saying is that this concept has already been started by many companies already. It's just another take on a model that people who've tried QS for awhile already understand it's not the right solution. I had gotten into QS for a bit, but as others have said, once you start to use the products and follow the methodology, you start to see how what sounds great in theory doesn't work so well in practice. That said, I hope they do well, because, why not. I just know that this isn't as interesting to me as it would have been 6 months ago, having some experience in the space.
- munimkazia 13y agoWould have been an interesting experiment if it wasn't 60 dollars.
- seivan 13y agoMore buzz words.
- ingend88 13y agoFor Tracking your mood and getting recommendations, signup at http://quickmvp.com/howsyourday http://quickmvp.com/howsyourday
- ap22213 13y agoThis is a brilliant MVP. Does this strategy work?
- guyprovost 13y agoLove the fact that I was asked for my credit card info right on their page, not the credit card processor's web site! Huh ??!