Fitbit’s Latest Activity Trackers Feature Heart Monitoring, Smartwatch Functions

Meet Fitbit’s latest: The Charge, Charge HR, and the Surge. These activity trackers will sit atop the brand’s masthead going into 2015 and beyond. But don’t look for most of these products this holiday season. Only the $130 Charge will be available this year. The $150 Charge HR and $250 Surge hit stores in early 2015.

Fitbit had a tough 2014. After launching the flagship Fitbit Force in late 2013, the company trudged through a public recall of the product in the first quarter of 2014. Yet Fitbit pushed forward sans a true flagship product but managed to retain a dominating position in the growing activity tracking market.

The Charge is the rebirth of the Force. This time around, though, the wrist band is slightly different and textured. Unlike the Force before it, the Charge can display caller ID information from a connected smartphone.

The Charge HR packs all the goods as the Charge, but also includes a heart-rate monitor. Because of this addition, the battery life is only five days instead of the seven found in the Charge.

The Surge is big addition for Fibit. It’s more smartwatch than activity tracker and is clearly designed to appeal to fitness fanatics. The Surge also has a heart-rate monitor and built-in GPS capabilities that can track pace, distance, and elevation.

The watch’s large LCD face is customizable and can display Caller ID, text alerts and media playback. But at $249, Fitbit is competing with a different set of players including Samsung and Garmin. While Fitbit might rule the inexpensive activity tracker field, the brand could face hesitation from buyers looking for a premium product.

For some reason, Fitbit is not launching the high-end Charge HR and Surge until next year. Apparently it feels confident in its aging lineup to carry it through the 2014 holiday season. Yet in 2015, Fitbit will no doubt face stiffer competition as next year is shaping up to be the beginning of the smartwatch era.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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