Many of our systematic users had one wish. That they need to share their tracks with others. So we introduced the public profile where groups explicitly marked as public by the user are available for others to view (but not to edit). This facility has been used by groups of people to watch their joint activities. Now they have another request! Is it possible to share our tracks instantly with others, over Twitter or Facebook or even Linkedin?

We asked a few more questions and here is what we found.

We have all known that a good way to reach a goal, goal in any field, it could be writing so many words per day, or reducing the number of cigarettes per day, or increasing the regularity of exercise routine, is to have ‘company’. Announce the goal to a few close friends or family, keep them informed about your progress and let them egg you on when you need a push. Many of our AllTrack users are using Twitter for precisely such a purpose and they want to be able to hit two birds with one stone.

Of course we were happy to receive such specific feedback. Our Technical Team got down to work and we now have AllTrack linked up with Twitter.

Here is how this works: You can select any Category of items that you track and make it twitter-visible. Once selected, any tracks to this category, in addition to being saved by AllTrack are simultaneously tweeted. Your friends and well wishers can watch over you, and if they don’t hear from you, or when they find that you are not sticking to your goals, can give you a gentle reminder. And more importantly, the fact that you have made your commitment public, encourages you to stick with the commitment.

Some of our customers had this devious motive: They want to track the movies they go to and the minutes they spend dancing in Salsa parties and other such fun things. And to annoy their friends by linking these tracks to Twitter! Of course they are just keeping track of their routine activities and have no intention to annoy anyone.

We are happy to announce the AllTrack linkage to Twitter. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and get AllTrack-Tweets work for you!

Of course we have a band of dedicated trackers to whom discipline is a habit. We want to recognize them and to egg them on to exceed their own high standards. And to use their examples to inspire others to become disciplined trackers.

We have introduced the Tracking-Points or T-points system. To track and reward you for systematic tracking. For every track you send, you earn a T-point. If you consistently track the same category three days in a row, you get two bonus points. Your accumulating points are displayed in your dashboard. Very soon, we will have the top scoring Trackers ranked and recognized on the Homepage. With scoring and ranking in place, surely it is not too much to expect that real rewards for dedicated trackers will follow. Watch this space!

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Alltrack was recently featured in the Mint. Seema Singh, a science journalist who wrote the piece, has introduced a much friendlier term for Personal Analytics: namely, Self Analysis. Indeed this is precisely what we do all the time. We want to do better in all our endeavors and the first thing in this process is to be able to analyse our past actions to see how we can improve in the future.

The new dashboard of AllTrack has features that enable detailed analysis of all the tracks. So if you have not yet made AllTrack a habit, please check out your tracks in the new  Dashboard right away.

Let me walk you through the AllTrack analysis tools. When you login to your AllTrack account, you land on the Dashboard. The Dashboard has three components: a Recent Tracks widget, a Summary (yellow, PostIt-like) widget and a Analysis view that has a collection of analysis widgets, one for each group that is being tracked.

The Summary Widget gives a quick count of the number of groups and tracks. There are also links to the raw tracks in each of the past three months. The Recent tracks view enables the obvious and also allows for editing of the recent tracks, including deletion as well as change of the date and time of a track. I am sure many of us forget to send the track of a late night expense (or a drink) and send in the track the following morning. The edit feature allows you to slot the track in the right date and time.

The most interesting part of the Dashboard is the Detailed view. This view consists of a collection of widgets, one for each group that is being tracked. There are four types of groups, one for each of the three major facets of everyday living, namely, expense (default type), time (clock on the top left), and habits (a thumbs-up sign) and one for Notes (a red pin).

Tracks of all the types can be analysed using the same set of tools. We can either look at the group as a whole, or the collection of items within the group. We can find out the total, average, minimum, maximum and the count of entries for the group as a whole or for each item. We can look at these values over various periods: year, month, week, daily or just for the current day.

We can compare for instance, the total expenditure on groceries across six months, in the case of the monthly view, or six weeks in the case of the weekly view. Many exciting combinations are possible, and it is better to go to your dashboard and explore than read long boring explanations like this one. Go ahead give it a try!

Let me just talk about two neat features that we recently introduced: one is the QuickView feature that gives a three-day snapshot of all the groups being tracked.

The second is the Trends feature that allows one to see the trends of an item over several days. For instance, if you are tracking your blood pressure, there are two values, the systolic and the diastolic. You might have tracked them using a track like ‘bp- sys 150 dia 90′ on a daily basis. The Trends view shows nice graphs of how your blood pressure has behaved during the current and past six months. 180 days of information is summarised in six smooth graphs. Mousing over the curves shows the actual values. Your doctor would love to see this graph. Again, give it a try, and let us know what you think.

Filed under: General, Self Analysis by manohar  No Comments »

Some time late last year, in the course of discussion on the positioning for AllTrack we came up with the term Personal Analytics. Personal Analytics, as we described it, is the process of using large amounts of personal data snippets to extract or infer traits about one’s personal habits, preferences and so on.

We were quite excited, but a quick google search revealed that ‘personal analytics’ was just about warming up as a topic in the US. It was good and bad! We didn’t invent the phrase, but the fact that we have a service that addresses an emerging need was good.

We dug deeper and found that most emerging solutions for personal analytics were based on the assumption that the users are heavy users of computers, gadgets and the internet. None of the solutions address the ‘last foot’ issue: how to get that important data logged? The key issue is that each piece of data by itself is not important enough to motivate you to open a browser, assuming you are in front of a machine, and if not to go to a machine and power it on, just to add a note that you had your fourth cup of coffee that evening! However, collectively such data can give you insights about your coffee drinking habits and its impact on your productivity, for example. But here is the major caveat: unless you relentlessly collect every one of those small pieces of data the aggregated insights or patterns are difficult to extract.

Here is where AllTrack’s simple use of SMS on the ever-handy mobile phone has an advantage. The barrier to data entry, to coin a new phrase, is very low. Especially in India, there are several additional factors:
First, SMS charges in India are among the lowest in the world. Second the exploding (400 million Plus?) number of phones and users in India can all use AllTrack since every phone supports sending and receiving SMS. Third, the use of SMS itself has increased exponentially in the past few years and people are increasingly comfortable using text messaging.

A recent blog, Three things to track in your life talks about personal analytics. The author advises people to track three things: expenditures, time and habits. We couldn’t have written it better! These are exactly the three broad aspects that AllTrack enables its users to track.

Just as I am about to post this, I was referred to this excellent article in the NewYork Times Magazine on the Data Driven Life. It is a long article but worth reading. Here is a snippet to give you a sense of the article (with my emphasis):

“Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”

We are happy that AllTrack, India’s first mobile Personal Analytics service, is ready just in time!

Filed under: General, Personal Analytics by manohar  No Comments »

In india it is expected that more than 500 Million mobile phones will be in use by the year 2012. It is also estimated that only about 75 Million (depending on which report you read) broadband internet users are expected by the same time. And a majority of these internet users are not very sophisticated users, using the Internet primarily for browsing the web and for email.

Most of the 500 Million phones will be low end phones, with a gradual increase in the percentage of smartphones. This coupled with the gradual expansion of higher bandwidth at lower cost will increase Internet (browser) usage over the next several years. However, for a vast majority of these phone users, in the next few years, SMS is an excellent gateway into the Cloud.

SMS today is primarily used for sharing jokes and astrology, voting on TV contests and of course for endless chatting by youngsters using high-volume SMS packages offered by telcos. The potential of SMS as a means of accessing the Internet is not well exploited. At the time of designing the Simputer, our operative axiom was that the majority of people in most situations can benefit if they are able to send across  just a few bytes of data. This axiom is still operative except that devices (low-end mobile phones)  that can send across these bytes at very low cost through SMS are ubiquitous! There is no need for sophisticated phones with data connections running Internet browsers. SMS is adequate.

The challenge is to create services that are able to exploit the simple structure of texting to achieve complex ends using the power of  the Internet.

AllTrack is the tip of that iceberg.

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Finally we have arrived at a point where AllTrack is ready for expanded public view. And so we (the AllTrack team, to be introduced as we go along) decided to start the blog to share our inside stories. Let us start with a brief sketch of our journey so far.

The trigger for AllTrack was simply a personal pain, of Vinay, the co-founder of LimberLink. While building an extension to his home he was struck by the amount of disconnected detail that he needed to keep track of, especially the expenditure. Money was flowing out to all and sundry, in small and large amounts: the contractors of various kinds, labourers of various hues and suppliers. On top of this was personal purchases that he and his wife were making.

Of course, being a techie, Vinay has several computers and diverse pieces of software that could help keep track of this, but none of them was sticky enough for the task at hand. The main issue was easy access: one has to go to the machine, open up the software, and make the entries, every time some expenditure happened. Not easy.

Given that a mobile phone is always at hand, the idea of using SMS to keep track seemed like a good way of making sure that the tracking happened at the time of the spending event.

The first cut of this idea was to send each expense as an SMS to a fixed phone number and let all this data be aggregated and sent back via email as a spreadsheet. Sounded like a good idea to me. Immediately, as with all new things that we want to work on, we needed to choose a name right away. You can’t keep referring to “the SMS-based tracking system” etc. Many choices were considered: TeleTally, SMSTally (both given up since we may have some Trademark conflict with Tally), SMSAccount, AllTrack and TrackIt.

The name AllTrack was chosen with the strong understanding that the use of SMS has lot more potential than simply the tracking of expenditure.

While deciding the name, the availability of domain names was also checked out. alltrack.com was taken, but alltrack.in was available and so we decided to stick with it and bought the domain name.

With the name and the domain under control, we proceeded to design the first version of AllTrack.

The initial focus of AllTrack was to use SMS for both input of data as well as for querying the saved data. Summary information was emailed
weekly (every Monday) as a spreadsheet. More on this here: SMS as a gateway to the cloud.

We obtained a Virtual Mobile Number (9773621621) from ValueFirst mid August 2009. The the first version ready for limited trials by mid September. AllTrack was introduced via email to friends and well wishers who spanned a wide demographic range. The alltrack-flyer explained
the use of AllTrack.

Based on feedback from this initial users, the features of AllTrack were fine tuned. We did a larger scale test marketing of AllTrack during Diwali 2009.

The key feedback from this trial marketing was that users wanted to access their tracked data on the web. Just a weekly email of a spreadsheet was not exciting enough.

We took this feedback. In January, the Web Dashboard design and implementation effort commenced and we are now ready to let our current users really understand their personal analytics! And invite new users.

The new and improved AllTrack with a very nice web interface (even if I say so myself) is ready! Do give it a try and let us know what you think.

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