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Motorola Injunction Kicks 3 iPhones And An iPad Off Of Apple’s German Site

Administrator — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:26:46 +0000

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a website called Apple.de. And on this website, in historical Deutschland, there lived three iPhones and an iPad. They were a happy bunch: some wise but slow with old age, others quick and lean, but they all had one tragic flaw in common. According to a court in Germany, all four of them are infringing on Motorola patents related to embedded 3G/UMTS wireless technology, FRAND standards essential patents to be specific. This means that the technology within the patents is now a standard across the industry, and the company that owns said technology is required to license it to competitors under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. That said, the Mannheim Regional Court has enforced a permanent injunction on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G and the iPad 2 3G. Luckily for German fanbois, the ban only affects Apple’s online presence. Customers can still purchase all four products in various retail locations, including Apple brick-and-mortar stores. This all comes back to a ruling in December , where the Mannheim court issued a preliminary injunction against Apple’s infringing products. German: “Derzeit nicht verfügbar” English: “Not currently available.” You may notice one wireless Apple device — the one that speaks — missing from the list. That’s likely because the iPhone 4S uses a Qualcomm chip as opposed to an Infineon/Intel chip. FOSS Patents suggests that Moto and Qualcomm have a licensing deal already in place, which would mean that Apple is covered by extension with regards to the 4S. In other Apple/Motorola/Germany-related news, Moto also won a permanent injunction today against Apple’s iCloud push email feature. This means Apple customers in Germany will likely be forced to revert back to the old method of push email, rather than using iCloud.

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Motorola Injunction Kicks 3 iPhones And An iPad Off Of Apple’s German Site

Lean-but-mean StylistPick Guns For The Competition With New War Chest

Administrator — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:31:52 +0000

Bringing US business models to Europe might seem an obvious move for some – but it’s frequently far harder than it might appear. US incumbents can indeed try to expand, but some fall at the first hurdle. Exactly this happened on January 20 when Shoedazzle announced its closure in the UK. UK head Nigel Whiteoak has since admitted to me that the company was looking to make more of the continued opportunity in the US, versus trying to expand in the UK. Shades of the Romans over-reaching their borders? Maybe. Whatever the case, the news has been a boon to Stylistpick , the local UK player which is making hay in the UK and now heading to other markets with a war chest. StylistPick has now raised an $11million B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. The subscription-based fast fashion brand, kept existing investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures on board, who invested $8 million in a Series A in April 2011. The board of directors is now Davor Hebel (Fidelity), Sonali de Rycker (Accel), Robin Klein (Index) and Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital).

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Lean-but-mean StylistPick Guns For The Competition With New War Chest

Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup

A D M I N — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:32:29 +0000

This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream , check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, winner of “Biggest Social Impact”. His poise and dedication helped keep the microblogging service online so it could aid revolutions. And a big congrats to Dropbox on its win for “Best Overall Startup”. The company’s young founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (seen below) demonstrated the power of the freemium model, and had the guts to turn down a 9 figure acquisition bid. Here are the nominees and winners: Best Technology Achievement Lytro (Runner Up) NFC OnLive Siri (Winner) Tesla Flat Pack Battery Best Social Application Facebook Timeline Instagram (Runner Up) Google+ (Winner) The New New Twitter Path 2.0 Best Shopping Application Birchbox Fab (Winner) Gilt Groupe Lot18 Warby Parker (Runner Up) Best Mobile Application Evernote (Winner) Flipboard (Runner Up) Pandora Spotify Square TaskRabbit Best Location Application Airbnb Foursquare Grindr (Winner) RunKeeper (Runner Up) Uber Best Tablet Application djay Eventbrite At the Door Fotopedia (Winner) GarageBand Netflix (Runner Up) StumbleUpon Best Design Gojee Orchestra Path 2.0 (Winner) Pinterest (Runner Up) Quora Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired) Github (Runner Up) Imgur (Winner) Instapaper Onesheet Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) Best Cloud Service Asana Box (Runner Up) CloudFlare Dropbox (Winner) Okta Twilio Best International Startup Badoo Klarna (Runner Up) Peixe Urbano (Winner) Rovio SoundCloud Wonga Best Clean Tech Startup Alta Energy Array Power (Runner Up) EcoATM (Winner) EcoMotors Hara Best New Device Galaxy Nexus iPad 2 iPhone 4S Kindle Fire (Runner Up) Nest (Winner) Best Time Sink Modern Warfare 3 Quora Skyrim (Runner Up) Turntable.fm Words With Friends (Winner) Biggest Social Impact Charity: Water (Runner Up) Khan Academy Kickstarter Practice Fusion Twitter (Winner) Angel of the Year Ron Conway Paul Graham Reid Hoffman (Winner) Keith Rabois Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (Runner Up) Kevin Rose VC of the Year Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (Winner) Matt Cohler (Runner Up) Vinod Khosla Aileen Lee Yuri Milner David Sze Founder of the Year Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) Brian Chesky (Airbnb) Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) (Winner) Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) Drew Houston (Dropbox) (Runner Up) CEO of the Year Dick Costolo (Twitter) Daniel Ek (Spotify) (Runner Up) Phil Libin (Evernote) Mark Pincus (Zynga) Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) (Winner) Best New Startup of 2011 Codecademy (Runner Up) Fab Nest Pinterest (Winner) Turntable.fm Best Overall Startup of 2011 Dropbox (Winner) Instagram Gilt Groupe Spotify Square (Runner Up) Tumblr Thanks to everyone who watched, voted, or attended the Crunchies. This award show is about the tech community, and we’re honored to have you as our readers.

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Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup

SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

blogger — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:05:30 +0000

Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics. The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. For example, as outlined over email by SoftKinetic’s vice president of marketing and communications Virgile Delporte, a young woman might walk up to SoftKinetic-equipped display at an airport, and she could browse information about nearby malls and fashion-related shops. If the viewer was an older man, they might see an ad for a nearby cigar shop. The description reminds me of one of the most famous scenes in Minority Report , when Tom Cruise’s character runs through the mall and all of the advertisements start delivering personalized messages. (The movie is also famous for featuring gesture-controlled computers, so clearly the SoftKinetic team was watching very closely) Of course, not everyone thinks the Minority Report future is positive, but for people worried about privacy, Delporte assures me that SoftKinetic’s data will be anonymized. “Only statistical information will be stored, and this anonymous data will be shared in the cloud to provide real-time data to the advertisers, who can easily test different advertising scenarios,” he says. “Think about the way web advertising is managed today. Combined with 3D imaging analysis, the data will get even more accurate.” SoftKinetic doesn’t have any customers to announce yet, but it’s demonstrating the technology at the Integrated Systems Europe conference in Europe starting January 31. I’ve included a video of SoftKinetic’s technology in action at Yahoo, as well as the Minority Report scene, below.

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SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

iNdustrial Revolutions

admin2 — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:11:34 +0000

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck , “iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It’s an ugly story . Over a hundred employees “injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis” because its use “meant workers could clean more screens each minute.” Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its 44.7% gross margins. Isn’t that awful? Yes, of course — but let’s try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it’s hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest Egyptian cotton and Cote d’Ivoire cocoa . Plus ça change; a decade ago it was Indonesian sweatshops and Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan , used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I’ll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers. Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable symptom of the former; and again, let’s please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads–but at the same time, coal mining kills more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody’s suddenly outraged about them . We in the West don’t really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers — unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don’t want people to suffer, but in fact we just don’t want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn’t that more than a little hypocritical? So what? you might say. It’s all horrible! Stop them all, or any of it that we can stop, right now! Right? No. Not necessarily. This is a really complex and difficult issue, and there’s no obvious right answer. Over the last thirty years, trade and export-driven growth have been insanely great for China, and made life enormously better for the overwhelming majority of its billion-plus people. (My personal experience bears out all the data, for what it’s worth: in 1997 I spent a month roaming solo through central China, then came back nine years later. China 1997 and China 2006 were like two entirely different nations, and the latter was vastly better off.) If Apple and other Western manufacturers were to pull production from China to other, better-paid, union-friendlier jurisdictions with stronger protections for worker rights, that would be disastrous for Apple’s profit margins and innovation speed — but it would also be disastrous for China’s people. On the whole, overall, despite the gruesome and heartrending disasters in the spotlight right now, both sides benefit greatly. That’s how and why free trade works. At the same time, we can all agree that no businesses anywhere should be poisoning their workers and/or generally treating human lives like disposable Kleenex. This is especially true in a nation whose government only accepts trade unions which are powerless government puppets . But I would argue that it’s China’s steadily growing wealth — which comes from trade, and especially, manufacturing — that will ultimately transform it into a nation where real unions and real worker rights can and do exist. It’s worth noting that Foxconn’s problems are China’s national problems writ small. Hexane pollution and aluminum dust are scale-model versions of the nationwide poisoned milk scandal, or the ongoing catastrophe of Beijing’s hyper-polluted air , or the major lakes entirely conquered by toxic cyanobacteria. Again, employee exploitation is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is ubiquitous grinding poverty – something that trade, investment, and economic growth slowly, over decades, alleviates, albeit at a terrifying cost to the environment. Think of the West’s Industrial Revolution. That’s more or less the same revolution transforming China right now. Is it possible to have such a revolution without some concomitant Dickensian horrors? The available evidence sadly indicates “probably not.” In the interim, what Apple (and the countless less-sexy enterprises whose products are manufactured in China under similar conditions) can do to improve the lot of those who craft its wares is this: increase their leverage over their suppliers, by making the threat of moving production elsewhere credible. Foxconn wants to keep Apple happy, obviously – but they’d be a lot more proactive about doing so if they genuinely thought they might lose massive amounts of Apple’s business to someone else. A concrete example: Apple shouldn’t get Foxconn to manufacture iPads in Brazil : they should have another company entirely build iPads in Brazil. Right now Apple needs Foxconn almost as much as Foxconn needs Apple. Real competition among suppliers would mean that each of them will jump a lot higher and faster when Apple says “worker rights.” But let’s not get myopic about Apple and iPads, when the landscape of globalization and its excesses is so much vaster and more diverse. Let’s not pretend that the dynamic is purely “rich Western tech companies exploiting poor nations.” And let’s remember that technology, and China’s growing wealth, will probably ultimately solve this problem. Remember that decade-old outrage about child labor in India’s fireworks industry? Well, it’s much diminished these days, thanks to automation and India’s much wealthier society . Similarly, China’s burgeoning online population has pressured its government to pay attention to air pollution … and Foxconn is already roboticizing its assembly lines . Most of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the technology pioneered in large part by the very same cohort of Western companies who outsource production to China is, slowly but steadily , lifting China, India and sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That, not where your iPad came from, is the most important story in the world today. Image : Smog over Tiananmen Square in 2006, by yours truly. By all accounts it’s gotten much worse since.

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iNdustrial Revolutions

To Pivot or Not to Pivot

user — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:32:31 +0000

Editor’s note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo . Follow him @ashkan . “ To pivot, or not to pivot, that is the question: Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles. ” Hamlet, were it set in Silicon Valley, circa 2011. Ah, the internet – how you hijack our vocabulary. A few years ago, “embedded” had connotations of journalists following soldiers. Today, it’s most associated with YouTube clips. Similarly, a pivot was something that I vaguely recall my basketball coach talking about. Today, it’s the repositioning of a company and without a doubt, 2011 was the year of the pivot. Talk is Cheap Let’s face it, despite the bravado and brashness, oftentimes Silicon Valley gets scared and zigs when it should zag. Lean Startup author Eric Ries popularized the term “pivot” but the concept has existed for years. Nokia used to produce rubber boots; today, well… that’s another story. But the point is, while the concept of pivoting has become commonplace in startup lore, it’s good to separate the fad from the core concept to answer the question: “to pivot or not to pivot”? Deconstructing Success You may be driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame. Whatever the case, success is i) subjective, ii) relative and iii) fluid. In other words, i) we define success based on what drives us, ii) but we tend to measure it relative to other people’s success and over time, iii) we convince ourselves to change its definition, revising upwards or downwards, depending on the conditions on the ground. Don’t Believe the Hype While Silicon Valley is entirely free and encouraged to have its own set of values, culture and objectives, the 24/7 media coverage startups and entrepreneurs are exposed to gives all entrepreneurs a sense that unless your idea and company blast off, you should pivot. In that context, the mindset of “fail fast” is understandable given the herd mentality and impatient nature of VCs, but wrong when you consider that 1% of projects fit venture capital’s profile and 1% of those become moderately successful. In other words, while money may accelerate a company’s ramp-up and growth, the reality is that teams needs to gel, products take time to develop and businesses have a natural life-cycle that can’t really be circumvented . Exacerbating this, of course, is that technology companies tend to compete in a zero-sum environment where the #1 and #2 players create value for shareholders but all others are left standing when the game of musical chairs stops. Meanwhile, content companies tend to be long term bets anyway: Machinima is one of the larger content providers on the leading video platform YouTube, but it launched in 2000 (12 years ago!). Vice is now featured in the pages on Forbes but it’s been around since 1994 (it launched as a magazine). Despite these realities, boards rush entrepreneurs to adapt or die without letting the child crawl, let alone walk or run. Yes, Pivots May Work, Sometimes To be clear, the extreme cases of Groupon and Fab are prime examples for why pivoting is sometimes the only solution to a stagnating or declining project, but those tend to be the exceptions and not the rule. But Usually, You’ll Simply Just Kill a Good Idea Before Moving to a Fad As such, before throwing out the baby with the bathwater, understand the following. Rule #1 : Pivoting is a Function of Your Employees When you recruit engineers and programmers, you can point them in any direction and challenge them to solve a given problem. If you are a content company, you hire writers or videographers and are, as such, limited to remaining in the content business unless you really choose to blow up the building and start from anew. However, you can’t assume that a team that has built a search engine can build a better social network. So don’t let the tech vs. content variable underestimate the inherent challenges with any pivot. As much as I dread quoting Donald Rumsfeld, “you go to war with the military you have, not the one you might want or wish to have at a later time”. Time is crucial in any company and hiring a challenge. If you have good people, it might be better to improve something than assume you need to nuke the joint. Rule #2 : Focus on A Different Target While the concept of the pivot refers to a radical and transformative change in company direction, strategy, focus and product line, it’s important to note that to become successful sometimes what you need is to pivot what industry or clients you are going after, and not the whole company. You may be developing a product and aiming for a B2B application, but perhaps by making it go free and targeting a B2C audience it might prevail. Rule #3 : Timing and Externalities Matter More Than You Think After 9/11, a lot of companies repositioned themselves to serve the national security and defense industries. They hit the jackpot. This isn’t so much chasing a fad but realizing that the broader macro environment and trends will affect your industry and company more so than you think. Rule #4 : Success Comes From Incremental Gains, Not Hail Marries Apple is the ultimate pivot. Most of its revenues come from iPhone and iPad – products that didn’t exist five years ago! But it was all born from the iPod. So the best pivots are not overnight 180-degree turns but progressive shifts and extensions. They are now charging into the post-PC era, but it was all an extension of their core. Hulu, too, is pivoting before our eyes (as are YouTube and Netflix ), moving from pure-play aggregators to creators of content. After all, at that velocity even a seemingly small shift in strategy leads to a large change in overall trajectory. While it’s difficult to define “pivot” and impossible to predict its outcome, you can drown out the noise and clearly ask yourself: “what do I define as success”. Once you do that, the rest falls in place. Photo credit: purplemattfish

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To Pivot or Not to Pivot

Android May Have Consumer Market Share, But iOS Is Tops In Enterprise

Achilles — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:10 +0000

According to a new report from managed enterprise mobility provider Good Technology , iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) hold the top three spots in the list of the top 10 enterprise activations by device type. The report includes data gathered by Good for Q4 2011 and includes half of the Fortune 100, providing insight into enterprise activation trends among some of the world’s biggest businesses. The company found that despite Android’s overall market share growth and steady absolute growth among Good’s customers, only 35% of all smartphone activations were on Android, compared with iPhone’s 65%. The mid-October release of the iPhone 4S helped that particular device quickly earn the number one position on the top 10 enterprise activations list, with the iPhone 4 moving into spot #2. The iPad 2, meanwhile, claimed the third position. Since there are far more Android devices than iPhone models, it’s not as fair to compare trends on a device-by-device basis. After all, there’s aren’t just a couple models of Android phones out there – there are dozens upon dozens of “top” (popular) devices. However, even when looked at as a whole, Android activations accounted for just 35% of the smartphone activations and only 6% of tablet activations. The Samsung Galaxy S II was the top Android device at spot #6 and was followed by the Motorola Droid Bionic, the Motorola Droid 3, Sprint EVO 4G (Q3′s most popular Android device) and the Motorola Droid X2. Motorola phones were popular over the course of the past year, too, and were represented in the top 10 each quarter. Good does note that iPhone activations had slowed in the previous quarter, in anticipation of the new iPhone, then jumped significantly after its launch, with 31% of smartphone activations from that device alone. But collectively, iOS devices accounted for over 70% of all activations in Q4, an indication that enterprise customers’ iOS preference wasn’t just being boosted by the iPhone 4S launch. iOS is the preferred choice in the enterprise, Good says. On the tablet front, iOS’s domination is even more apparent – the iPad and iPad 2 account for 94% of the total tablet activations in Q4, compared with 6% for Android tablets, where the Galaxy Tab leads the pack. iPads were most popular in three industries: financial services (accounting for 42% for the quarter), business/professional services and life sciences. Going into Q1 and Q2, Good says that it expects iPad and iPad 2 activations to slow heading into March, as customers prepare for the (rumored) launch of the iPad 3. It also expects Android activations to increase on a relative basis after the immediate impact of the iPhone 4S lessens and as BYOD (bring your own device) programs become more common. However, says John Herrema, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Good, the company expects the iOS/Android numbers to be roughly the same during the first half of 2012 as they are now. A change would require a major shift in tablet trends. “I don’t see that happening with the iPad 3 on the horizon,” says Herrema. “If Android and iOS split smartphone [market share] or even if Android takes the overall smartphone lead, it would still likely be no more than 40% of all Good activations overall, given the dominance of Apple on tablets and the large numbers of tablets we are activating. Meanwhile, I don’t see Android dropping substantially below where it is now because that would require major shift among BYOD smartphone users.” We should note that this report does not look at RIM devices or Windows Phone, as Good doesn’t have insight into these platforms. This is only a comparison between the iOS/Android adoption rates in the enterprise, which by itself, limits itself to enterprise environments where BlackBerry has already fallen from favor.

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Android May Have Consumer Market Share, But iOS Is Tops In Enterprise

Obama: America Should Support The Next Steve Jobs

A D M I N — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:49:08 +0000

In his compelling State of the Union address tonight, President Obama laid out a blueprint for economic recovery , with numerous references to the technology sector. “An economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country,” the President said, with Steve Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs (and Instagram’s Mike Krieger ) in audience, “That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.” "An economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country."— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 25, 2012 I, like commenter Dan Bowen below, find it ironic that the President is apotheosizing Jobs as the Apple founder and CEO is known for outsourcing a large majority of hardware manufacturing to China. It seems like Obama likes the idea of Steve Jobs more than some of the things Steve Jobs actually did. The President implied that the tech industry in general was a beacon of hope for our country’s blighted economy multiple times in the SOTU , and I have gathered the most relevant passages below. “Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.” “Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.” “No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. “ “If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here. Send me these tax reforms, and I’ll sign them right away.” “I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that – openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.” “Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job.” “Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else. let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.” “You see, an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.” “After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.” “Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.” “The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose: Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

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Obama: America Should Support The Next Steve Jobs

The Rise of Nimble Medicine

admin2 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:40:50 +0000

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase , the CEO of Avado.com , a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist . Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave . Images are courtesy of Jason Hwang, M.D., M.B.A. Executive Director, Healthcare of the Innosight Institute and co-author of The Innovator’s Prescription. In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small innovations ultimately led to the transformation of farming, so too is a rapidly building wave of innovative new care and payment models leading to similar breakthroughs in healthcare. I call this Nimble Medicine. Traditionally, attempting a new care or payment model meant long planning and development cycles. The cost and complexity of testing new models prevented many from being tried. Even today, the leading HealthIT vendor is known to charge $100 million and up for its software. Amazingly, they require three months of training before they even let people use the software. This is a vestige of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement particularly given that healthcare is a supply-driven market (e.g., MDs who own a stake in imaging equipment order scans at three times the rate of MDs who don’t). Spending nine figures doesn’t sound so bad when you have capital projects planned in excess of $1 Billion. Perhaps we should refer to the legacy model as the “build more, do more, bill more” model. Any health analyst will tell you that the cure for healthcare’s hyperinflation is NOT building more healthcare facilities. It’s as if a fire department argued that the way to solve a wave of structural fires was to buy more fire fighting equipment. Yes, that might help, however there’s a much more cost-effective approach such as having buildings inspected for fire prevention capabilities. In their book, The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen and Dr. Jason Hwang point out how applying technology into old business models has only raised costs. In contrast, disruptive innovators such as WhiteGlove Health and Qliance rethought the care delivery and payment models from the ground up. Their results have been impressive. For example, Qliance has Net Promoter Scores higher than Google or Apple, while reducing the direct costs of healthcare (i.e., their service coupled with a high deductible wrap-around policy) 20-40%. More impressively, they have reduced the most expensive downstream costs (surgical, specialist and emergency visits) 40-80%. Likewise, WhiteGlove Health already has 500,000 members and has more 5-star reviews on CitySearch than any other organization in the country. In WhiteGlove’s S-1 filing, they highlight the importance of proprietary software they have developed to give them a cost and consumer experience advantage. The next wave of disruptive innovators are taking advantage of second-mover advantage as the wave of healthtech startups provide them off-the-shelf software that is an order of magnitude less investment than the first wave of innovators. It’s a couple orders of magnitude less expensive than legacy HealthIT. More importantly for the innovators is the speed that they can not only stand up the new technology but also easily iterate based on real world experience. Rather than months or years, it’s hours or days. This is a key component of Nimble Medicine. Consider the following scenarios: [Disclosure, my company, provides some of the technology components underlying these models which is why I have visibility into their strategy.] arriveMD has taken the lean practice model to an extreme by closing a bricks and mortar clinic and replacing it with a clinic on wheels. Their founder, Dr. Craig Koniver, visits patients at their home or workplace. It only took a couple weeks to put the technology into practice while running his practice, closing his stationary clinic, and outfitting his clinic on wheels. MedLion (aka The Most Important Organization in Silicon Valley No One Has Heard About ) has created a fast-growing Direct Primary Care model with minimal capital investment. So far in 2012, they are opening clinics at the rate of one per week. They’ve done this with a mix of a creative business model and enabling technology that is well under 5% of the cost of what their competition has spent. A company that is providing emergency physicians to hospitals has found that many individuals are using the emergency department as their primary care facility. This is because these individuals aren’t able to access a regular primary care provider. Unfortunately, many of them are unable to pay the high fees common in an ER. Rather than simply sending them to collections, they are setting up an affordable alternative outside of the ER for non-emergent care. The technology setup takes less than a week to enable this new line of business. They’ve taken a lesson from wireless carriers who realize that more affordable packages can address a market need yet still be profitable. Sites such as 2nd.md have created virtual second opinion or e-consult marketplaces. Rather than flying from Alaska to San Francisco to get a critical second opinion or consultation, the individual and their family can save time and money through a virtual encounter. In response, some physicians are realizing that they can set something up directly without having to pay a 3 rd party intermediary. Their technology need is essentially a light-weight (and low cost) system that allows intake of patient information (medical history, lab results, etc.), a virtual visit (e.g., using software from a company like Revation) and then follow-up documentation. The entire technology implementation doesn’t take more than a couple of days. This has been applied in disciplines ranging from oncology to orthopedics to pediatrics and more. Even established organizations such as Catholic Health Partners are becoming more nimble. For example, a when drug gets taken off the market for safety issues, they can immediately identify the subgroup of patients currently on the drug for outreach, while simultaneously removing the drug from order preference lists and order sets, substituting with appropriate alternative medications. At one time this took days and now it takes just hours. For those of us in the technology industry, there’s striking parallels with what has happened in technology where centralization was followed by decentralization. For providers, lessons can be drawn regarding how some organizations were able to make the transition from one generation to the next while many others faded from the landscape. The graphic below depicts the transition from the slide rule to the mainframe and then back out to mobile devices. In an earlier piece ( Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center ), I highlighted an innovation group that is building the next “hospital” – a hospital without walls. Unlike a massive capital project necessary to build a traditional hospital, I expect that new “wings” of the virtual hospital will get built via a series of smaller projects. They have hired entrepreneurial people to bring the agility necessary in this new approach. This is a great example of Nimble Medicine. Related articles: Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes

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The Rise of Nimble Medicine

CEO Invests Another $500K In CrowdOptic’s “New Social Medium”

bestcbstore — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:02:30 +0000

Jon Fisher, co-founder and CEO of startup CrowdOptic , just told me that he has invested another $500,000 so that the company can build out what it’s calling a “new social medium.” The idea is to create automatic clusters of people based on their location and line of sight. I met with the CrowdOptic team this weekend — they demonstrated the technology by whipping out their phones and taking photos of the same spot off San Francisco’s Embarcadero. CrowdOptic can detect when people are all looking at the same thing, and it sends a notification asking whether they want to form a discussion group, where they can share photos and comments. The company actually launched in 2010 as a photo service for event organizers, and customers already include the Bank of the West Classic tennis tournament and the Infineon Raceway. Then it became more interested in augmented reality , delivering relevant content based on where your phone was pointing. Now it’s using that technology for more social purposes. This should still appeal to event organizers — it’s a way to help attendees interact with each other, and to deliver targeted messages and ads. (Other customers are using it as a way to coordinate their security, the company said.) COO Jim Kovach told me that sports seem like an obvious match (after all, he used to be a linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers ), but the vision is broader. For example, he said CrowdOptic is looking to partner with large Internet properties to provide instant crowdsourced content. Over email, Fisher was even more grandiose, saying that he wants CrowdOptic to be the underlying technology any time “crowds aim phones to memorialize happenings.” Even though CrowdOptic isn’t trying to market an app directly to consumers, the demo reminded me of the first incarnation of mobile startup Color, which also allowed users to share photos based on proximity. Color flopped and is now working on a new product . When I brought it up, CFO Tony Wu joked that CrowdOptic could almost be seen as the “anti-Color,” since it only raised $1.5 million in funding ($2 million with the new investment), compared to Color’s $41 million. He also argued that, unlike Color, CrowdOptic is connecting people who should have real reasons to interact — after all, they’re attending the same event, and they’re looking at the same thing. Fisher also noted that he had only raised $3 million when his startup Bharosa was acquired by Oracle .

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CEO Invests Another $500K In CrowdOptic’s “New Social Medium”