A quick administrative note about the blog comments.  We’re glad you are reading and participating with us on the Fitbit blog.  But to keep the blog posts clean, we publish constructive or on-topic comments - and do our best to respond to specific questions via email.  Many of you have commented with specific feature requests. We are rapidly releasing new features and definitely following the Feature Suggestions in the Fitbit Forums.  While we can’t share our product development roadmap publicly, please know that we are listening and encourage your suggestions to make Fitbit even more useful for you!

As you may have seen in our recent Fitbit.com features post, the  <start and <stop functions on Fitbit aren’t just for sleep anymore! You can use them to capture any type of activity.  Walking to public transit, or taking the dog for a walk? Start your Fitbit and your activity will be logged automatically on the site.  The Fitbit Tracker will also display the steps, calories and distance for the duration of the activity, until you hit <stop.  And then head back to Fitbit.com and choose your activity from the more than 700 activities we list.

Walking Fido a daily ritual?  Save it as a favorite activity in your log and add it each day in just seconds! Click the star next to an activity in your activity log to make it a favorite.

Forgot to hit the <start button?  No problem, you can manually create or edit any activity.  This also works for logging sleep if you were wore your Fitbit to sleep but forgot to hit <start.  Go to http://www.fitbit.com/activities and click Activity Record.  Enter the start / stop time and we’ll analyze your data for you.  Bonus:  Activity records provide more detail than the normal daily graphs.

While you are out being active, our algorithms will also be monitoring activities to become even more intelligent at detecting and categorizing your activities. We’ll look at the steps taken and calories burned to figure out if you were logging sleep or another activity type.

In honor of Earth Day’s 40th anniversary this week, we thought we’d share some double-duty ideas to go green and get fit.  Need some ideas for making little changes that make a big difference?  We love the suggestions from Fitbitters in the It’s the Little Things Brag Book.

Need something new to get out of a fitness rut?  Try one of these earth-friendly ideas.

• Plant a garden:  Grow your own local, organic garden - mulch, dig and hoe and burn up to 350 calories an hour.
• Walk (or bike) to work. Give the car a break and arrive at work refreshed and alert.  You’ll get about 2,000 steps each mile.
• Work out outdoors.  Breathe in the fresh air and combine that walk or jog with some strength training - use a park bench, the steps, or the curb.
• Head to the park and remember what it’s like to be a kid. Swing on the monkey bars (combine with pull-ups for some extra points), race your kids to the tree & back, or play a pick-up game of soccer.   (Soccer = appx 400 calories / hour, Running = 600 calories / hour, Strength training = 200 calories / hour)

As many of you might know, you can calculate your stride length when running and walking and input this in your profile to make your Fitbit data even more personalized and increase the accuracy to include variances based on your walking pattern.

Here’s a quick how-to:

• Step 1: Find a known distance to walk -  use the road, your yard, or the local track.
• Step 2: Set your Fitbit for a “trip” by depressing the Fitbit Tracker button until “Start” appears on the display and walk the known distance at your normal pace.  Depress the button again at the end of the known distance until “Stop” appears on the display, and record the number of steps [note: if you haven't yet received your Fitbit, you can manually count your steps]
• Step 3: Repeat Step 2, but this time, do so while running at your normal running pace.
• Step 4: Divide the number of feet walked or run by the number of steps. Feet/steps = Step length in feet.
• Step 5: Enter the results into the “Edit Profile” section on Fitbit

That’s it, you’ll get an even more accurate and personalize picture of your daily steps!

Many of you have shown us through your activity levels that you are a pretty self-motivated group, but some days each of us could use a little motivation from friends & family to stay active.

You already know you can compare stats and invite friends on fitbit.com, and now you can share your activity levels on Twitter too.  Set it up once, and we’ll auto-tweet for you.  In fact, here’s my tweet from earlier this week, tweeted while I was sleeping (with my fitbit on my wrist, of course).

And I woke up to an inbox full of encouraging messages to start my day off on the right track! Set up an auto-tweet and wait for the motivation to come to you. In your profile on the right hand side, use the Share on Twitter link to connect with your Twitter profile.  We’ll take care of the rest.

Facebook addict?  It’s easy to link your twitter and facebook for even more motivation.

You can also follow Fitbit’s progress on twitter and facebook - we’ll be sharing our favorite customer tips and success stories, announcing features, and generally getting and staying motivated with you.

Whether your goal is running your first 10k, an average of 10,000 steps per day, or 10 more steps than yesterday  - we’re busy behind the scenes reading your feature suggestions and building functionality into the website. Since Fitbit.com launched, we’ve launched 10 major new features to help keep you motivated and stay on track with your wellness and activity goals. Lets take a quick look:

Friends Have an email address? You’ve got a friend.  Invite your friends to join you on Fitbit.com for some friendly competition.  The account is free, and they can manually log activities & foods if they don’t have a Fitbit yet.

Leaderboards See your progress over time and compete with those friends.  Check out the last 7 days or 30 days and move up those ranks!

Stats See how you stack up to the competition.  Quick stats compare your key metrics (steps, active score, distance and active minutes) with the Fitbit community - break it down by age, gender or BMI ranges for even more motivation.

Drag and Drop [bloggers note: one of my personal favorites] Accidentally add that salad for breakfast?  No problem, with a quick drag of the mouse, your foods are back in place.  Unless indeed you did eat salad for breakfast, in which case, good for you!

Share your Profile Your profile can now be made public - so share your progress towards goals and see how others are doing.  Get and stay motivated.

Historical Graphs You’ve come a long way, baby! Need a little self-motivation on a dreary Monday?  Check out your historical graph and see how far you’ve come anytime you need a little boost to keep you active.

Fitbit “Trips” Start and stop aren’t just for sleep anymore.  Headed out for a power walk, or a quick run?  Set your trip monitor, choose your activity and we’ll calculate your caloric burn for you.

Sensitive Sleeper? Now we are too! We’ve added a new experimental sensitive setting that might work better for those of you for whom the current sleep setting does not work well (most of you should be fine with the default). We’d love your feedback on how it works for you!

Search for It You asked, and we delivered. Search the forums to see if your favorite feature has already been requested - and add your wish list.

And these are just the major ones - not to mention all the general site improvements and bug fixes!  And with your suggestions and our ideas, there’s plenty more to come!

If James’s last post shows our Fitbit team anything, it’s that we have the pleasure of an incredibly inspiring group of people using Fitbit! As James mentioned, I’ll be posting regularly to keep you up to date on our latest website features, Fitbit news and general health information, and I am thrilled to be here.

A little about me - I used to run a few marathons, and now spend most of my free time running after a toddler. You can learn more about me, compete and motivate me through my Fitbit profile.

I’m looking forward to conversations with all of you here, in our community forums, and in social media as we motivate and encourage each other to meet our wellness goals - and have fun along the way!

Hi all,

It’s been a while since our last blog post. Since then, we’ve been busy shipping units, but we’re still behind in fulfilling demand. A large portion of that has been due to one of our suppliers falling behind in delivering printed circuit boards in sufficient quality and quantity to meet our needs. To that extent, we’ve spent a lot of time finding a simultaneous second supplier of boards and we are bringing them onboard very shortly. A lot more of you should start to see your orders being fulfilled.

In any case, we need to make this blog more up-to-date. In order to make that happen, we’ve brought on someone who will be dedicated to customer communications, which will include this blog. Her name is Amy and she’ll be making a lot more posts and tweets to keep you all in the loop.

I also follow the forums and our customer support emails very regularly and it’s been very rewarding to see what a positive impact the Fitbit has made in many of your lives. We’ve only been shipping for 5 months and a few have you have already lost 50 lbs (!). Here’s a chart that you all might be interested in:

This chart is based on data from a random sample of 3000 Fitbit owners. It shows that for Fitbit users who start off living a sedentary lifestyle (<4000 steps/day), these users increase their activity levels by 50% at end of 12 weeks of using the Fitbit. You all are doing great!

We’re finally shipping these things!

Confirmation emails will start going out Friday, September 25th and first units will be available for shipping out of our warehouse on Tuesday, September 29th via USPS Priority.

You must confirm your order to receive your Fitbit. You’ll have 1 week to confirm your order. The email will contain a link to a confirmation page where you’ll also be able to securely update your shipping and billing information in case it’s changed. Your credit card will only be charged *when your unit ships*.

Not everyone will receive their confirmation emails on Friday. In general, you’ll receive your email when your unit arrives at our warehouse. 10% of orders will be fulfilled during the first week and all orders will be fulfilled by the end of October based on the current pace of manufacturing.

The website will be open to everyone on Tuesday, the 29th. We’ll be continuously adding new features to the website and device, so stay tuned to this blog.

Thanks everyone for your patience!

Hi everyone,

As a lot of you are aware from the heavy comment traffic on our last post, we’re doing a quick beta test to stamp out the last few remaining bugs.

Here’s where things stand

Fitbit firmware and desktop sync software. This is the software running on the Fitbit itself and the desktop software which uploads data from your Fitbit to our website. There’s 1 nasty firmware bug remaining and a bunch of lesser ones. We’ve selected 10 people to receive hardware to help us stamp this one out.

Earlier today, I think we came up with the fix for the nasty bug. The greater number of testers will help us get some better confidence that the issue is solved, but we probably to have these units running for at least a week, since we’ve found that it can take up to a week for the bug to come up. Sometimes, it will pop up within hours, but other times it can take a while. For instance, I currently wear about 5 Fitbits simultaneously and the bug only hit hit 1 of them after 6 days of use.

Also, the Mac desktop software needs a lot more banging. There’s only a few macs in our company, so it’s not gotten the coverage that the Windows version has. And hopefully, no one finds another major issue. Anyways, we’ll be Fedex’ing Fitbits to our hardware testers on Wednesday and I will probably add 2-3 more people who own Macs to test the hardware as well.

Again, these are free units you’ll be receiving. No need to return them (unless you manage to break it in a novel way, in which case our engineers will want them back to look at it; but you’ll get another test unit) and you’ll receive your actual Fitbit later.

Fitbit website. We’re also opening the website to testers. I didn’t want to state a date before we got all our production servers up and running. Now, we’re pretty close to finishing that task and so we’ll be opening up the site to 25-50 beta testers on Thursday morning 10am PDT. I’m just going through the previous commenters in sequential order and selecting people, while also making sure there’s a good selection of Mac users in there. I’ll be emailing site testers Wed night and if I can’t find your email, I’ll post a comment. I *think* we’ll gradually add more people over the week, but I’m not sure, yet. In any, case, I know a lot of you are eager to help us out, but I think we should be all set for now based on the existing commenters. We think the site is pretty stable, aside from minor bugs and known usability issues that we are addressing, but testers will help us shake out any last minute issues.

Some people have been curious about the stated specs and how the actual hardware is performing. Battery-wise, things look pretty good…between 5-10 days depending on your usage pattern. If you compulsively turn on the display 50 times an hour all day, then it’s going to be around 5 days, otherwise, it’s closer to 10. Wireless performance looks pretty good. While we stated 25-50 feet originally, we’ve found that the device can connect at that range, but to transfer large amounts of data, like 7 days worth of minute by minute data, you actually have to be a bit closer, like 15-20 feet with clear line of sight. That said, every time I sit at my desk, it auto-connects to the base and transfers pretty much immediately. It’s pretty cool. I have a hard time trying to prevent it from auto-syncing when I sit down.