SportBrain

» see sportbrain.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

You clipped it to your waistband in the morning and forgot about it. It counted steps, speed, mileage and calories, and it could pick up the signal from an ordinary chest-strap heart rate monitor if you wore one. At the end of the day you dropped the tracker into a cradle called the SportPort, and the SportPort dialed out over the house phone line and pushed your day into a private page on sportbrain.com, where you could graph it, compare it against strangers, write in a journal called the SportFolio, and collect points redeemable for discounts. There was a snap-on plastic cover, the SportFace, so it did not have to be gray.

SportBrain Inc. announced all of this on 2 October 2000 from Sunnyvale, California, at $99.99, and the press release calls it the first wireless personal fitness assistant. The CEO and co-founder was Andreas Bibl, the money came from SOFTBANK Venture Capital and TechFund Capital, and the third name on the investor line is Ronnie Lott, the NFL Hall of Fame safety. Bibl's quote in the release is about the CDC's obesity numbers and the Surgeon General's thirty minutes of walking a day. The company's own press page by the end of that year was a wall of clippings from the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Time, USA Today and Ladies' Home Journal.

It sold about 36,000 of them, helped along by an appearance on Oprah. The daily target the site pushed was 10,000 steps, roughly five miles, which is the number every tracker has used since. Michele Hickford, the chief marketing officer and another co-founder, wrote a message to users on the site every day, and when she joked about passing a million steps the mail came in by the sackful. Bob Martin, who ran web engineering, told CFO magazine that the average user logged in more than four times a day and that new orders kept arriving from the friends and relatives of existing owners.

The revenue model was the problem. The $99.99 was all SportBrain ever charged, and the web service, which was the actual product, was free with nothing in place to change that. When the money ran low, customers who called themselves SportBrainiacs wrote in asking to be allowed to pay a monthly fee. By then there was nothing left to attach a fee to.

The device was North America only, needed a phone line to itself for a minute every evening, and cost a hundred dollars in 2000. In my house in Turkey that year the phone line was the internet connection, which is the detail that tells you who this was built for: an American household with a second line and a reason to count its steps. I was sixteen. The idea that a gadget would file a daily report about my body to a website arrived here about twelve years later, on a wrist, from companies that had never heard of this one.

~ the case file ~

~ the page, and the day it was written ~

The Internet Archive's first capture of the end is 22 September 2001, and the page title is just "Sportbrain, Inc." The heading says "SportBrain, Inc. is out of business". Underneath: the company was not able to obtain new funding and has shut down its operations, and has made an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors to Sherwood Partners, Inc. The rest is a claims process: mail your most recent invoice to a Los Angeles address and submit a proof of claim form on time if you want to collect anything. Two paragraphs hold out hope that a buyer of the technology might offer service to former customers, and the last line invites anyone interested in buying it to email with "SportBrain Technology Purchase" in the subject.

The capture is from September but the file is not. The archive stored the origin server's own headers with it, and that page's last-modified is Wednesday, 1 August 2001 at 05:23:11 GMT. Nobody in the trade press gave SportBrain a shutdown date, and CFO's piece about it ran on 17 September, six weeks after the notice had already been sitting on the front page.

~ the year of apologies ~

Then something odd happens to the domain. In January 2002 it is answering again, and the text says SportBrain has "been restructured", with full web access and downloads promised to registered users within the next few weeks, plus better features and the old workout data preserved. Click a country first: U.S.A. or United Kingdom. The copyright line now reads SportBrain Ltd.

The weeks did not arrive. In April the page is a dated update promising to be up and running by May or early June. In July it is a letter beginning "Dear Reader" that apologizes for the delay in posting further details about SportBrain's return, explains that the delay exists because they want the news to contain only substantiated facts, and promises to keep people informed even if it is just to say that no news is good news, "rather than silence which is worse". A later block apologizes for the lack of information and then apologizes for the apology, before promising that the real posting will go up in the next few days, hopefully before the weekend. The last capture of any of it is 24 November 2002.

~ the second life, in court ~

The patents outlived everything else. What they described was the loop the product had actually shipped: capture data about a person's physical activity, send it to a remote server, compare it against other people's data, hand a result back. By 2016 that was a description of the entire wearables industry, and the patents sat in a holding company whose business was asserting them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation counted around eighty companies on the receiving end, with Apple's Watch among the targets. One suit went after a line of Guess smartwatches.

In February 2018 the Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated every challenged claim of U.S. Patent 7,454,002 in an inter partes review brought by Unified Patents. So the ledger on SportBrain reads: ten months of a product that 36,000 people loved enough to volunteer money for, a year of apologies from whoever bought the name, and then a litigation docket over the description of a thing that had stopped existing fifteen years earlier.

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