One of the sponsors at BlogHer '12 was Zamzee.
I can hear you thinking, "Zamzee. What the heck is Zamzee?" and immediately doing a Google search. So I'll save you a little time.
"Zamzee is a social enterprise on a mission to make it easier for tweens and families to be more physically active."
Social enterprise on a mission? What? Are we talking Star Trek? What? I'm confused...
In other words, Zamzee is a cleverly designed, fun way to get your couch potato preteen off the X-Box, PS3, Wii or Nintendo, and out the door doing something a little more physical than moving their thumbs.
Zamzee is a Fitbit for tweens, without all the fancy graphs, calorie count, etc. that a preteen could care less about. Zamzee is what Fitbit used to be: simple to use, tracks physical activity, plain and simple, nothing fancy. And unlike Fitbit, Zamzee is FREE to use, after you've purchased a meter for only $29.95. Or you can get one (or up to 5) for free by participating in our Zamzee Giveaway.
Setting up Zamzee is easy. Plug it in to the USB port on your computer or laptop and while it's charging, you can customize your avatar.
Can you guess who is who?
Then you pop that little puppy on your body, you can clip it to your waistband, your shirt pocket, or leave it in your pocket. Zamzee likes skin on skin action best and tracks better when it's clipped on your waist.
You can download the information each night to track daily progress or just wait until the end of the week. Nightly downloads give younger kids more immediate gratification.
Badges are earned for different levels: Newbie badge just for joining, 1st Timer Badge for uploading your first activity, and the list goes on.
Badges aren't the only things your kids can earn, they can earn Zamz (Zamzee currency) which can be used to buy tangible items like iPod Nanos, Wii and X-box games (yeah that cracked me up too - here we have a system designed to get kids to stop playing video games and one of the rewards is video games, but you've gotta give the kids what they want), and $25 gift cards.
A drop down prepopulated list of activites are available for your child to select what they were doing, where they were, and how they earned pointz (yes, that's a "z" on the end of points to correlate with the spelling on Zamzee), all designed to capture your child's imagination and get them to become an active participant.
What they were doing choices (well over 50 possibilities) range from the realistic "kickball", the silly "blowing bubbles", to the outrageous "taming ogres".
Where they were choices (again, tons to choose from) include "at Hogwarts", "in disguise", and "in zero gravity."
How choices include "and using the force", "like a Zombie", and "with my BFFs."
Perfectly geared to tweens, Zamzee was easy to use and fun. For adults, Zamzee is too simplistic, by golly we want to know how many calories we burned. Not having an option to create a field for what you were doing was also an issue.
But again, Zamzee was designed for tweens and not obsessive, type A adults.
Speaking of obessive, since we had four Zamzee meters, we opted to do a family challenge to see who could rack up the most activity pointz.
The bad news: You'll have to stay tuned to find out the winner of the Schroeder Family Challenge.
The good news: You can win your own Zamzee.
Read the Schroeder Family Challenge Zamzee Giveaway post to enter and win.
Note: Other than receiving 4 Zamzees to review, I was not compensated in any way for this post. All views are my own.
