The Withings Wi-Fi would have been alien technology in the 1950s. “What do you mean, this scale posts your weight on the ‘internet’, and then graphs it on your ‘iPhone’”? And yet, folks, this is our world today.

The Price:

$160

The Verdict:

Expensive, but worth it.

How do we justify a $160 scale when normal scales are $20 at Target? Think about when the last time your parents replaced their bathroom scale. Was it before you were born? Was it never? $160 isn’t too much when you spread it out over a lifetime.

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But even if you you just look at the features, the Withings scale is worth it. On the “weighing you” side, it reports your weight in pounds, kilos or the weird British stone, plus calculates out your fat mass and BMI.

The top of the scale is made out of, in their words, “tempered glass slab, covered with a layer of metal”, which looks and feels classy. The whole thing feels modern—again, the complete opposite of a normal filthy bathroom scale.

After the Withings weighs you, it’ll send all three data points online, to their free website, where it charts and graphs it for you. You can even have different users in your family, each with their own separate data graphs. And (this is probably something you won’t use) it’ll post your weight updates to Twitter, if you want. It’s not mandatory.

And here, for example, is a kid being tracked as she gets older—not a person devolving into a serious eating disorder.

And if you have an iPhone/iTouch, you can access your chart via the free app as well, in case you want to show off to your friends how much weight you’re losing.

In essence, the Withings makes for the perfect holiday gift. It’s pricey enough to not make you look cheap, yet it still conveys the “I think you’re fat” message that’s inherent in giving someone a scale. [Withings]

Internet connectivity and functionality is impressive for a scale

Works great as a scale

Slightly expensive

As the iPhone is increasingly used by businesses, more large companies and startups are providing customized productivity apps to serve this community. Roambi, which launched a free app earlier this year, allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on the iPhone in customizable charts and graphs.

MeLLmo, which has develops Roambi, is making a play for the enterprise market today with the availability of Roambi Pro, a secure, hosted service that lets companies transform data from Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, or business systems like Salesforce.com into interactive visualizations that cab be viewed on the iPhone.

There plenty of ways to share files over the Internet (I like Drop.io or Skype). But when you want to share something with the world, or a larger group of friends, the place to do that increasingly is on Twitter or Facebook. Today a new file-sharing service called Sayabit launched which turns your files into short URLs which can be passed around more easily.

If the file is an image, then the Sayabit link (like http://sayabit.com/LV9llB) takes you to a Webpage where the image is hosted, just like TwitPic. But if it is another kind of file, it just starts downloading right away (this will soon be changed to also first take you to a landing page.)

Here’s a bizarre use for Microsoft’s “Flash-killer” Silverlight—a ballistics calculator. Yes, Silverlight is being used to build an application that lets shooting and hunting enthusiasts “customize shooting conditions” while comparing Winchester-made bullets.

Winchester’s Ballistics Calculator lets gun users choose their type of ammunition and then compare up to five different bullet types with charts and graphs. You can enter specific conditions like wind speed and outside temperature, maximum range, direction, speed and height. The application will then display charts and graphs that visually lay out the point of impact, drop and trajectory of each type of bullet.

TC50 DemoPit company AskYourTargetMarket is hoping to simplify market research for businesses and solutions by offering a comprehensive platform where businesses can both create and deploy surveys. Since the site is in closed beta, AskYourTargetMarket has offered 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Each invite comes with a free survey package for up to 50 respondents; enter the beta code “TC50-2009″ here.

The site lets you define your target market demographic, then write a survey to distribute to focus groups. Because you are able to target a particular group, you don’t have to waste space on your survey with demographic questions. Once your survey is finalized, AskYourTargetMarket will launch it to your desired demographic within their consumer panel for as little as $29.95 for 50 respondents. The site, which says it has thousands of U.S. consumers on their survey panel, draws its respondents from its sister site, InstantCashSweepstakes.com, which offers users a cash prize incentive for filling out surveys.