Week in Review–January 1st, 2017

The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter and Facebook, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!

So with that, let’s get into the action!

DCRainmaker.com posts in the past week:

Here’s all the goodness that ended up on the main page of DCRainmaker.com this past week.

Saturday: Week in Review–December 24th, 2016
Monday: The Didn’t Get What You Wanted $500 Gadget Giveaway
Monday: 5 Random Things I Did This Weekend
Friday: CycleOps Hammer Trainer In-Depth Review
Sunday: The Didn’t Get What You Wanted $500 Gadget Giveaway Winner!

Sports Tech Deals (new ones!)

The fitness companies want you to lose weight. And spend some money.  Albeit, less money than you would have had to last week.  The non-Garmin ones kicked off today, joining Garmin.  Here’s all the weight scales

Fitbit Aria WiFi Scale (23% off): Down to $99 from $129 [Clever Training or Amazon]
Garmin Index WiFi Scale (13% off): Down to $129 from $149 [Clever Training or Amazon]
Withings Body Cardio WiFi Scale (40% off): Down to $107 from $179 [Clever Training or Amazon]
Withings Body Composition WiFi Scale (40% off): Down to $77 from $129 [Clever Training or Amazon]

My full WiFi weight scale show-down is here!

Note that in general for weight scales I recommend you pick whichever one your on already from a platform standpoint.  Given these prices are all fairly similar, it’s less of a chore to decide.  Also note that normally I wouldn’t recommend the Garmin one (simply because of price) unless you really wanted the additional metrics, but at this price point, it’s probably worth it to not have to deal with the conversion mess of trying to get the Withings and Fitbit data into Garmin Connect.

If you have no loyalties to any of the above brands (meaning, you don’t already have a device from them), then I’d likely get the Withings one given the price point and it has the most connectivity to other platforms than any other brand.

While we’re on the sales front, Garmin has a bunch of other devices on sale, largely activity trackers in various forms:

Finally, note that Garmin permanently dropped the price of their Fenix3 series this past week (all models) by $50.  Though, not substantially.  Given CES is nearly upon us (this week!), I don’t think this barely tangible drop is worth it.

YouTube Videos I Published:

Here’s some YouTube goodness that I published this past week:

Stuff that I found interesting around the interwebs:

Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet.

1) Fitbit has dropped it’s lawsuit against Jawbone: Not that it really mattered much, Jawbone isn’t actually a player in this game anymore.  Sure, they could always announce something this week at CES, but given their current financial predicament, I wouldn’t expect the result to be any different.

2) Freezing ones balls off as a sport: Yes, for real – it’s not just for polar bear plunges anymore, but rather apparently an actual trainable sport. (via Coach Alan)

3) US looks to create fitness equipment tax deduction: This would be nice and handy.  Kinda reminds me of the fitness equipment annual credit I used to get in my day job.

4) Training log survey: The folks behind the popular (and free) Golden Cheetah are doing a survey to gather feedback on features.  Even if you’re not a user today, they’re looking for how you use your training platforms as a way to make their platform more user friendly (it’s open-source and free, so no commercial interest here from them).  One of my main critiques (ok, my only critique) of the platform has been the user friendly aspect, so hopefully this will help!

5) US State Department Races Around The World: This was actually more interesting than I expected it to be, and more impressive too both in numbers of participants in various countries and the diversity of countries that put on races. (via friends at State)

6) Bike Tech Hack Night (for DC folks): Cool stuff, it’s a cycling-focused bike related app/data/gadgets hacking night.  It’s being hosted by the annual conference put on by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.  Details in the link. (via Eli).

7) Apple yanks Withings products from Apple Store: Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a perfectly reasonable response to getting sued.  If I owned a store, and someone sued me, I certainly wouldn’t be keeping their products in there.  Too bad though, because Withings makes great stuff.  That said, I’m not sure this move hurts their wearables sales too much, but probably does impact their weight scale sales. (via Ian)

8) Training Peaks had 40 million uploads in 2016: I thought this stat was randomly interesting, along with knowing it had 25 million in 2015.  Will have to dig around and see if other platforms have shared their total upload stats.

Sports Technology Software/Firmware Updates This Week:

Each week I quickly highlight some of the new firmware, app, software and website service updates that I see go out. If you’re a sports technology company and release an update – shoot me a quick note (just one liners are perfect, or Tweet it at me is even better) and I’ll make mention of it here. If I don’t know about it, I won’t be able to post about it. Sound good?  Oh – and if you want to get a head start on things, this page is a great resource for watching Garmin firmware updates.

(I’m not aware of any updates that occurred in the past week for hardware. Seems everyone was – rightly – taking some time off!)

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Thanks for reading – and Happy New Year!