Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is seeking physiologists to join its team, according to a new call for job applicants discovered by 9to5Mac today. The position on offer is for a “User Studies Exercise Physiologist,” and seeks a candidate who will be responsible for creating and conducting studies “related to cardiovascular fitness & energy expenditure, including calories burned, metabolic rate, aerobic fitness level measurement/tracking” and more.

At the very end of the listing, Apple also notes that the right candidate will not only need to gather and research this kind of data, but also “apply relevant knowledge to the design of products and their testing/validation through user studies.”

The new job listing comes hot on the heels of a report earlier this week from 9to5Mac about Apple hiring a sleep research expert away from Philips, and the Jan. 31 report from the website about Apple working on a new dedicated health app called “Healthbook” for possible inclusion in its next major iOS iteration, iOS 8. 9to5Mac speculates that these, combined with recent reports that top Apple execs are meeting with the FDA, confirm the company’s intent to enter the health and fitness product market, and that an iWatch riddled with biometric sensors could be the first such device to come to market.

So far, Apple has kept mum on all speculation regarding a potential iWatch or any upcoming changes to iOS 8. But Apple CEO Tim Cook did at least acknowledge that “the wrist is interesting” and “natural” in terms of the wearable category, but also that there’s nothing really compelling already out there in the market to convince an average consumer who doesn’t wear something on their wrist to invest in wearable tech. I’ve argued in the past that the problem with current wearable tech is that none of it offers something you necessarily miss deeply when you forget it or it runs out of battery for a day; Apple may be trying to change that with all this focus on health-related hires, research and development.

At this point, there’s no question in my mind that Apple has wearable tech far along in the product pipeline. But unlike competitors including Samsung, it will never release anything half-baked, so it could be a while yet before we see anything launch, despite the growing number of signals that point to an iWatch’s existence.

Image courtesy Todd Hamilton.

The Lumo Lift is the second product from startup Lumo BodyTech, and the second to help users with their posture. The Lumo Back was the first, and it raised around $200,000 in 40 days on Kickstarter. This time, Lumo opted to do the crowdfunding themselves, and the trajectory of the latest device has been quite different: Lumo Lift is at over $900,000 raised as of this writing, just under a month into the pre-order period.

That adds up to nearly 13,000 pre-orders, and totals about $32,000 per day raised thus far. The original Lumo Back campaign managed around $5,000 per day, or roughly one-sixth as much. Interest isn’t really waning the way it has a tendency to do with these kinds of campaigns, either – between Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, there were 3,149 pre-orders in total, which was close to on par with the very first week after a couple of weeks of slower, but still strong interest, as you can see from the chart below.

“It’s going well for a couple reasons,” explained Lumo founder and CEO Monisha Perkash in an interview. “Lumo Lift really differs from other wearable tech because it’s customizable to different fashion tastes. It’s really wearable tech that’s more than just tech: It’s fashionable tech. Also […] it focuses on bringing out the more confident, more attractive, the healthier you and that requires both staying active as well as good posture and we’re the only solution in the market that can do both.”

Interest in the campaign has produced some interesting demographic insight, too. Lumo has found that the majority of pre-order interest is from male customers, who are responsible for just over 67 percent of all orders. The U.S. is the big market for the Lift, unsurprisingly, with 86.7 percent of all orders, while 92.5 percent of sales come from the combined English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. White is the most popular color choice with 54 percent of purchases, while 26 percent preferred black and silver trailed both with just 20 percent.

The difference between the initial campaign and this one is staggering – Lumo Lift will almost certainly exceed $1 million in pre-orders, likely before the week is out, which is five times what the startup accomplished on Kickstarter for the Lumo Back. I asked Perkash about how the two experiences compare.

“There are pros and cons of going in either direction [Kickstarter vs. self funding],” she explained. “What we’ve found is that because your customers interact with you on your website, you end up having a closer relationship with your customers. You can engage them more without having a third party between you, and you can also develop your own brand and messaging, […] and make it consistent with what you want to communicate.”

Perkash says Lumo is still happy with having used Kickstarter in the beginning, since it helped them reach a wider audience with a brand that people didn’t really know to begin with. Also, she says that going alone a year and a half ago when they first started out, crowdfunding was still a relatively new concept, so there wouldn’t really be an opportunity to build a big following using your own platform vs. partnering with someone like Kickstarter.

Despite massively exceeding their initial expectations, Perkash says that she doesn’t anticipate any hiccups with initial production, since they’re confident in the manufacturing system and relationships they built with the original Lumo Back. There are only three more days left to get the Lumo Lift at its discounted price of $69 before it goes back to $99, so we’ll likely have a better idea of what kind of initial shipment volumes they’ll be facing once that price change starts to affect pre-order demand.

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Last year, NASA held a recipe contest for cooking on Mars. Ordinary civilians like us were invited to submit recipes based on a list of available ingredients—heavy on freeze-dried produce and various meat-flavored "textured vegetable proteins"—to be cooked and judged by crew members of HI-SEAS.

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