Apple and Nike Team up for iPod Shoe Interface

lyonsden writes "Apple and Nike are teaming up to provide runners a system to integrate their shoes and their iPod. A $30 antenna will connect an iPod nano with special shoes to provide pedometer functions."

Nike+Apple=???

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

What would happen if Nike & Apple got together? [shey.net]

Below is an email correspondence with customer service representatives at iPOD iD, an on-line service that lets people buy personalized iPOD shoes. The dialog began when iPOD cancelled an order for a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." [get the latest on this story at shey.net]

From: "Personalize, iPOD iD"
To: "'W. McFarnby (not really) [shey.net]'"
Subject: RE: Your iPOD iD order o16468000

Your iPOD iD order was cancelled for one or more of the following reasons.

1) Your Personal iD contains another party's trademark or other intellectual property.
2) Your Personal iD contains the name of an athlete or team we do not have the legal right to use.
3) Your Personal iD was left blank. Did you not want any personalization?
4) Your Personal iD contains profanity or inappropriate slang, and besides, your mother would slap us.

If you wish to reorder your iPOD iD product with a new personalization please visit us again at www.iPOD.com
Thank you,
iPOD iD

From: "W. McFarnby (not really) [shey.net]"
To: "Personalize, iPOD iD"
Subject: RE: Your iPOD iD order o16468000

Greetings,

My order was canceled but my personal iPOD iD does not violate any of the criteria outlined in your message. The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word "sweatshop." Sweatshop is not: 1) another's party's trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately.

Thanks and Happy New Year,
Wynn McF (not really) [shey.net]

From: "Personalize, iPOD iD"
To: "'W. McFarnby (not really) [shey.net]'"
Subject: RE: Your iPOD iD order o16468000

Dear iPOD iD Customer,

Your iPOD iD order was cancelled because the iD you have chosen contains, as stated in the previous e-mail correspondence, "inappropriate slang".

If you wish to reorder your iPOD iD product with a new personalization please visit us again at www.iPOD.com

Thank you,
iPOD iD

From: "W. McFarnby (not really) [shey.net]"
To: "Personalize, iPOD iD"
Subject: RE: Your iPOD iD order o16468000

Dear iPOD iD,

Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate slang. After consulting Webster's Dictionary, I discovered that "sweatshop" is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: "a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions" and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email.

Your web site advertises that the iPOD iD program is "about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are." I share iPOD's love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that "If you want it done right...build it yourself." I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and reconsider your decision to reject my order.

Thank you,
Wynn McF (not really) [shey.net]

From: "Personalize, iPOD iD"
To: "'W. McFarnby (not really) [shey.net]'"
Subject: RE: Your iPOD iD order o16468000

Dear iPOD iD Customer,

Regarding the rules for personalization it also states on the iPOD iD web site that "iPOD reserves the right to c

Re:Nike+Apple=???

[Aadain2001 (684036)]

You realize that Nike hasn't run sweatshops for a long time now right? The factories in Asia used to be contracted by Nike to produce shoes, so Nike did not own them. After all the bad PR they moved in and took over the factories and now the people have very nice working conditions and earn a much higher than average wage compared to the rest of the countries over there. If you would like to end sweatshops, try talking to Adidas, Rebook, etc, which still do use sweatshop in Asia.

Re:Nike+Apple=???

[DeadPrez (129998)]

You should have just changed your name to "child_labor" as that would be a more formal description.

Re:Nike+Apple=???

[bertramwooster (763417)]

Oh. I thought you were going to say Nipple. Never mind.

Re:Nike+Apple=???

[MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053)]

Intelligent first posts are now a 'subscriber bonus,' really. If you give /. a bunch of cash they let you see stories a few minutes early, and if you happened to have previously requested a mildly inappropriately labeled iPod from Apple (or known where to get text of an order like this) you're suddenly five steps ahead of everyone else. As long as you know how to use a text editor, that is.

Why?

[cephalien (529516)]

Not to be a prude about this, but what exactly is the point? How much do regular pedometers cost?

I know I've seen some for less than 30 bucks. Yeah, sure. There's the wow factor

(hey, lookee at my over-priced Nikes. Did you know I spent 30 bucks more and they can talk to my iPod? -- wow, I've gone to the couch and back six times in the last hour, logging 50 steps!)

But not much else. I love technology as much as the next person on /., but there's got to be a better use for it.

Re:Why?

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

What would be very cool is if it would attempt to match the beats per minute of your song to your actual steps per minute, so you could run to music at whatever pace you wanted to. I think iTunes has a BPM field, so you could probably at least have the iPod choose songs that were close to your pace (so you could have different pump-up, running, and cool-down music), but I don't know if you can easily alter the playback speed of an MP3 without altering it's pitch to do exact cadence matching. I wonder if it has enough processor overhead to do on-the-fly resampling.

iPhone + Nike = Shoe Phone?

[green pizza (159161)]

Sounds like a neat idea, but I'm waiting for the iPhone + Nike = Shoe Phone.

"This shoephone holds over 5 billion songs! ...
Would you believe 10,000 songs and 5,000 ringtones?"

Re:iPhone + Nike = Shoe Phone?

[Steve Cowan (525271)]

Pure speculation. All Apple + Nike development has until now been under the Cone of Silence.

Re:iPhone + Nike = Shoe Phone?

[Dhar (19056)]

Missed the joke by THAT much! *holds up almost-touching fingers*

-g.

Please remove your shoes....

[iXiXi (659985)]

Can you imagine these at the airport?

I'm waiting for the iPod - Toilet seat interface

[JudgeFurious (455868)]

Put your iPod in a clear transparent (and waterproof, just to be safe) case that adds a wireless connector which then uses Bluetooth to talk to your toilet seat. While you pinch a loaf it weighs you, takes your temperature, scans your dump as it passes the "sensor ring", and gives you helpful dietary suggestions along with playing a preset song that you've associated with one of a half-dozen air freshener options.

Big feet?

[truthsearch (249536)]

Brings new meaning to the question, "You know what they say about men with big feet, don't you?"

Big hard drives!

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Brilliant

[Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997)]

For the low low price of 99 cents a mile, you can use these fancy running shoes with built-in music. If you stop paying, they break your legs. The RIAA will love it!

Didn't the old iPods have this feature?

[Quaoar (614366)]

I mean, they had a pedometer...running 5000 steps with a first-gen iPod would cause the hard drive to fail... :)

Price too low

[Captain Perspicuous (899892)]

A supersmall step sensor for your shoe with wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, iPod integration, timer, text-to-speach interface, "booster song with 1 keypress", recording all your trips and comparing them over the internet, and Apple and Nike behind it - I was expecting that gear to cost at least $50 to $80, and I'm pretty sure the people that are interested would have paid that amount without thinking about it - but only $29? That is one seriously low price. Wow, what happened, are they subsidizing this one or something?

And if they do, how do they make sure we are buying nike shoes? That step counter can be taped to any shoe, can't it?

Re:Price too low

[kevinvh (652481)]

Read the fine print on bottom of the "rock n' run page".. it says:

    The sensor's battery is not replaceable. Battery life will vary
    considerably based on use and other factors.

So the $64M question is, how long does the sensor's battery last?
This could explain the low price.. $29 may be cheap, but if you're
buying a new sensor every year, suddenly it's getting expensive.

Nike + Apple

[i am kman (972584)]

And if they really joined forces, they'd need a new name. Hmmmm, let's see, something like: Nike + Apple = Nipple.

Yeah, I'd definitely buy one of those! Maybe two.

no way!

[basic0 (182925)]

Corporations like Apple and Nike promoting their brands through a synergystic crossover product? Get out of here! Next thing you'll tell me that they're going to get professional athletes and rock stars to promote this thing.

Integration

[AAeyers (857625)]

This must be part of the wireless patents Apple filed for a while back. I would not at all be surprised if this idea of wireless integration gets incorporated into more and more things. Imagine if you could carry your ipod with you all day and have it work automatically with your home stereo, shoes, car, etc. The ipod could become much more than an mp3 player, and could help collect data (pedometer, etc) and stream music to different sources automatically.

This seems like exactly the thing Jobs and Apple would pursue, a seamless system of wireless integration would perfectly embody their philosophies of style, power, simplicity, and having things 'just work'. It may be just a new shoe accessory right now, but I for one could see this type of technology evolving into new areas

Inaccurate, not useful to serious athletes

[MBraynard (653724)]

Pedometers do not cut it for distance measurement. Almost everyone uses a GPS unit these days. Interestingly enough, the only company still pushing a pedometer-driven system these days is Nike. At SOME point they are going to get on the GPS bandwagon but I'm uncertain why they are taking so long to get 'cutting edge in this area.'

OT - That banner ad for Crystal Reports just brought my computer to a crawl.

Re:Inaccurate, not useful to serious athletes

[cheinonen (318646)]

To myself, who I'd consider to be a reasonably serious athlete, I prefer the food pods to GPS for a few reasons. They're typically smaller, but most importantly, they aren't automatically destroyed by large buildings or tree cover. Living in areas where I would run on trails surrounded by large trees, or in downtown with large buildings, I would constantly lose GPS signals and so my distance, pace, and maps of my runs would be way off in areas. The foot pods can be calibrated by you on a track to make them accurate to your stride, and are +/- 1% after doing that typically, which is better than my GPS was by far. Now they have downsides as well (elevation gain typically isn't measured), but they're better than losing signal for some of us.

Sync Capabilities

[AgentOJ (320270)]

Looking at the links on Apple's site, it shows that the run data can also be synced with your computer once you get back from the run. The data includes stuff like speed, distance, calories burned, etc, so you can see your progress over a length of time. As a former cross country and track runner, this is the kind of information that we had to calculate manually (well, at least record the numbers and then crunch them) to get an overall view of our progress and goals. Also, it would be cool to have since I'd already be bringing my iPod on a run, and wouldn't need to bring a seperate electronic pedometer along (and I'd be willing to be the electronic pedometers out there that track the same information and sync with a computer don't work with Macs).

When they build the pedometer into the shoe...

[LaughingElk (139664)]

...it will become known as "The sole that times men's tries".

(sorry)

Nah, I think it's a pretty shrewd move.

[DwarfGoanna (447841)]

On both their parts. While joggers might not be a huge percentage of total mp3 player sales, I'd bet almost everyone who jogs anymore either has or plans to buy one. Apple may have just swallowed them all up. The data tracking function is probably a much bigger deal to those types than lardasses like er.. us realize. Nike gets to sell people another pair of overpriced shoes (probably moreso than usual) and horn in on Apple's brand recognition. Nike might be big in the shoe racket, but those Nike branded Phillips players didn't exactly take the world by storm.