inspires people to exercise more, eat better and live a healthier lifestyle. The company’s newly introduced health and wellness monitoring tools make it easy for anyone to achieve a healthier lifestyle by automatically collecting data about a person’s daily activities and by presenting this data in a motivating and entertaining way.

The Fitbit Tracker is an ultra-compact wireless wearable device that automatically tracks and wirelessly uploads data about a person’s activities, such as exercise intensity levels, calories burned, sleep quality, steps and distance. It is as small as a pack of matches and clips securely onto any article of clothing or slips easily into a pocket. The Tracker uses motion sensing technology to precisely capture all moment-to-moment physical activity throughout the day and night. It also measures sleep quality to provide a holistic view of a 24-hour period. At the click of a button, calories, steps and distance are illuminated and displayed on the Tracker. In addition to these numerical measurements, the Tracker also displays a user’s progress toward their goals in the form of an avatar that changes as a user advances toward or falls behind their goals.

Data collected by the Fitbit Tracker is wirelessly uploaded to a Website where the wearer can see their information and track their progress toward personal goals. The Website’s motivational interface encourages users to share progress and lets people create groups made up of friends, family or co-workers to jointly work towards a common goal. On the Website, users can also log nutrition, weight and other health information in order to gain a complete picture of their health.

For more information go to : fitbit.com

Seekler he lists and review site that consists of wiki-like contributions from its users, has launched its public beta and has added a few changes to the site according to its private beta testing. We first mentioned Seekler here, and I got a chance to dig deeper into the site’s private beta, offering a fuller review here. Many of the changes that Seekler has made since I last took a look in fact were in regards to some of my suggestions.Seekler now enables you to add descriptions for the lists you create, as well as tags. In an effort to keep Seekler simple in design and navigation, the description and tags are collapsible according to your personal preferences. This was a pretty important distinction for Seekler, as the inclusion of tags and descriptions lets users know that Seekler isn’t just a site for creating “top 10 lists.”

Other new features include the ability to control the number of items viewed on a page, and an associated URL button beside list descriptions in order to access outside information (i.e. a link to a movie trailer on the IMDB page for a film on your list). Another interesting improvement made to Seekler is the inclusion of lists that are found on third-party sites. This is a feature often found on other review sites that are typically specific to product reviews.

’s this weighted crowd-sourcing approach that validates the information found on the primary site, by incorporating content found from elsewhere on the web, that’s been created by an authority on a particular subject. Combine this with user-generated content and Seekler’s wiki-like approach, and you’ve got a site that’s looking to incorporate as much content as possible in an easily searchable manner for visitors and contributors.

With the rising efforts for user-generated search engines, semantic search and Wikia’s own entrant into search engine territory, it’s difficult to imagine an aggregating resource tool that doesn’t apply all of these tools in order to make it searchable and easy to use for contributors. I still wouldn’t mind seeing the inclusion of multimedia as supplements for the online resource, as well as some additional automated tools for gathering, organizing and recommending information as well.

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Playfish

20 word description: Playfish develops and publishes video games on social networks. We’re backed by Accel and $4m in funding.

CEO’s 100 word description: Playfish develops and publishes video games on social networks. Unlike other social games companies our team’s background is video games - we’ve developed and published over 100 video games titles on other platforms (mainly mobile and casual) between us prior to Playfish. All our three titles so far are in the Facebook games top-10 (Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies). We have grown to over 7 million players in less than 6 months from launch. In the month of May we served over 300 million minutes of player engagement globally (10% YouTube’s stated monthly engagement).

We are backed by Accel Partners, our advisory board includes Atari CEO and long time EA veteran David Gardner. We are headquartered in London with offices in Beijing and Tromsø, Norway. We believe social games are the next really big growth opportunity for the video games industry and are working hard to be one of the leading companies in the area.

Mashable’s Take:Playfish is a game developing company that creates great time wasters on Facebook. So far with $4 million in investment funding and backing from Accel Partners, Playfish has published three games, all of which rank high amongst Facebook applications; Word Challenge happens to be my favorite.

Similar to Buddy Media and a few other seemingly platform-specific developers out there, Playfish is out to make compelling games that are highly engaging for users. Throw in an ad here and there, and Playfish can work towards becoming a self-sustained platform itself. Given Playfish’s collective team experience as video game developers for consoles, online and mobile platforms, it’s evident that Playfish is capable of taking advantage of most of the gaming and social media trends out there.

Playfish is a registered iPhone developer, so I do expect to see something in the way of mobile games once the 3G iPhone is released. It would be a good route to take, considering the need for the developer community to leverage devices like the iPhone to catalyze cross-device adoption and promotion of new models occurring around the casual gaming industry.

Big BillG finally makes his retirement from Microsoft official and goes to work on getting himself a Nobel Peace Prize. As a side note, just what do you buy someone like Bill Gates for a retirement gift? It’s not like a gold watch will really cut it. Anyway, back to the topic at hand - what happens next?

Well probably nothing and that is the problem. The fact is that Bill Gates hasn’t had much to do with Microsoft’s day to day operations for sometime; even though he is rumored to have stepped in on the Yahoo deal. In the area of software he might have been the company’s Chief Architect, but Ray Ozzie and Steven Sinosky have been dealing with that for some time. During this time, Microsoft’s stock value hasn’t gone up any appreciable amount, Vista is still a WinME wannabe and now they want to play in the computing cloud.

More than a few folks on the Web have wondered aloud recently if Steve Ballmer is even up to the task of running the company without Bill Gates in the background or if at this point we might even see Microsoft seriously consider splitting into separate companies. My feeling on the second is that while it might be a good idea, it is one that I just don’t see happening as long as Ballmer is at the helm. As to whether he is up to the job of singlehandedly steering Microsoft forward, he will probably have no problems as he is a corporate beast who works best with other corporations.

The problem I have with Ballmer being in charge is that I think this is the one single thing that will move the company to even more stagnant waters. He might put on a good show, what with throwing chairs around and ranting things like “developer, developer, developer,” but in my opinion it would have been better for the company if he was the one taking that long retirement walk today.

Obviously I can’t possibly keep the promise I make in the title, but with all the end of week hyperbole being bandied in the name of Twitter-bashing, I couldn’t say something else reasonable like “Twitter is still having problems,” and “A Few A-Listers Are Still Upset About Twitter.” All of this seems to stem from the fact that the replies tab has been disengaged for going on a week now.

Some folks have today very loudly proclaimed Twitter dead and that FriendFeed is the new reigning champion. As much as I’d love to see FriendFeed the new “it” thing (as I spend a lot of my days there recently), I don’t think we can quite proclaim the lifecycle of Twitter finished. As I said today (right after I shared the article to FriendFeed):

Look, I love FriendFeed as much as the next guy, but most folks aren’t power users to the extent that they rely on Twitter as a conversations channel. Beyond that, only a fraction of those are even aware of FriendFeed. This sounds good in theory, but when you look outside our little bubble, it simply ain’t true.

Folks are vacating Twitter.  They just aren’t leaving for FriendFeed (at least not in the droves that are being purported). Twitter’s traffic and unique visitor counts aren’t just leveling off… they’re dropping. All the major metrics point to an evacuation: Alexa, Google Trends, and Quantcast.  Compete’s analysis doesn’t show up to the day stats for people counts, but the following velocity trend graph shows some very negative numbers:

I’ve expressed my displeasure with the decline service here and there over the last couple weeks, most recently in response to an Google Share by MG Siegler (I responded on FriendFeed, of course).  MG had noted that, after a week, Twitter seemed to realize that it was a problem that the replies still weren’t working, and was pointing people to Summize for a workaround.  I said “I hate having to rely on the web version of Twitter, first of all, then having the reply tab bork, and THEN having to go to summize, and hit reply there and pray that twitter works. It’s why I only check Twitter once or twice a day now.”

It seems that I’m not alone. This time it isn’t just hype - Twitter is in trouble. The point was made earlier today that Jon Stewart’s brief mention of Twitter could be the height of its existence. I certainly hope that they get on the right track soon, because it would be a shame to lose an otherwise great service.