Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Interesting product! I love the idea of waking at the right point in my sleep cycle. It makes a huge difference for me. What I really love is the test-and-learn capability. Do I sleep better with higher or lower room temperature? On a firm or soft mattress? With or without a warm brandy at bedtime? You get the idea.

The manufacturers should consider bundling this product with the Sleep Number bed. What a great partnership. This would be the perfect tool to aid in objectively fine tuning your sleep number.

Worn like an everyday watch, SLEEPTRACKER® is ideal for anyone who wants to wake up alert and ready to start the day, such as frequent travelers across time zones, business people looking for an extra edge, students with fluctuating schedules, or busy moms who need to wake up easily.

SLEEPTRACKER^® continuously monitors signals from your body that indicate whether you are asleep or awake. Because you wear SLEEPTRACKER^® on your wrist like a watch, its internal sensors can detect even the most subtle physical signals from your body. SLEEPTRACKER^® finds your best waking moments, so that waking up has never been easier.

When you sleep, your body goes through a series of sleep cycles. The average adult experiences 4-5 full sleep cycles over an 8-hour period. Each cycle lasts about 90-110 minutes and comprises five different stages, as illustrated by this chart.

I somehow missed this first time around.

News Corp. is said to be talks to buy business social networking service LinkedIn, according to TechCrunch UK. If the deal were to happen, it would bring MySpace and LinkedIn under the same corporate roof. Full story here.

Mountain View based LinkedIn has approx. 12 million users and has taken $27.5 million over 3 rounds from investors including Sequoia, Greylock and Bessemer Venture Partners. The site has been faced with the rise of Facebook as an alternative business networking site, although as TechCrunch commenter’s enjoy pointing out: it’s not the same. LinkedIn is also an OpenSocial partner with Google.

I’m not yet tracking with the strategy here. I will say that I’m not too comfortable with Murdoch as a steward of that much personal information. How easy will it be for invested users to walk away?

More on this missed market opportunity with the so-called silver surfers. While reports show they are ramping up on Facebook and MySpace that may be largely due to the lack of alternatives!

Poak UK regulatory agency Ofcom released a report today that sheds more light on a market niche that is consistently ignored by Silicon Valley: The over-50 crowd. The report states, “‘Silver surfers’ also account for an increasing amount of internet use with nearly 30 percent of total time spent on the internet accounted for by over-50s …”

In fact it has been widely reported [1,2,3] that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder believes, “Young people are just smarter.”

Are online marketers and retailers missing this opportunity?

UPDATE!
comScore Numbers Unhinged from Facebook Reality

There is a big difference between the user demographic figures reported by Facebook (captured from their ad targeting system), and those tracked via comScore’s Media Metrix online measurement panel.

Looks like comScore’s extrapolated numbers are roughly 10 times larger than Facebook’s actual numbers. comScore reports 13.6 million US people age 35 or older using Facebook while Facebook reports 1.26 million — or less than 1/10th.

Nice little piece covering online trust over on UXmatters. Couple good nuggets in there on Link URLs, abbreviated URLs, and tiny URLs.

Social networking online is no longer the province of the young - more and more ’silver surfers’are joining in, Chris Stevens finds

Facebook, the social-networking website, has a reputation as the online space where hip young things hang out, swapping amusing anecdotes, ‘poking’one another, scrawling inappropriate messages on virtual walls, and posting embarrassing photos.

But increasing numbers of over-50s are muscling in on the social-networking arena, signing up to sites such as Facebook and its main competitor, MySpace in their droves. While some of the sites’ younger users are reacting as if dad just rolled up to the disco, the balance of power is shifting towards these so-called “silver surfers”.