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May 07 2012
IBM - Healthcare costs
This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare. Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is providing billions of subsidies for the adoption of electronic health records. While this is logical given the available money, it is paying for health IT systems optimized for the "do more, bill more" model of reimbursement that is rapidly being replaced by a value and outcomes based - a 180 shift in focus. It’s hard to argue with modernizing the record-keeping in healthcare that isn’t far beyond how medicine was recorded in the time of Hippocrates. Thousands of lives are saved as a result of this modernization (e.g., avoiding frequent, deadly prescription errors). On the other hand, most companies benefiting from the stimulus have two massive gaps that will need to be addressed for health systems to thrive in the new environment they are facing.
May 06 2012
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Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicated things such as capitalization tables and common things, such as payroll. You’ve fought with competitors, coworkers, friends and even yourself without losing your way or your wits. You’ve inspired others to work beside you each day to make your dream a reality. I salute you. Now, everybody else calling himself or herself a CEO—listen up, this is for you: stop it. Just stop calling yourself a CEO.
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One of today's most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems plaguing our education system: including reconciling student debt, providing students with the skills required to land a job both before and after graduation, and offering the best course material online regardless of age, location and educational level. Millions of people are headed to the Internet to learn. And now everyone, from professors to entrepreneurs, are looking to launch a platform to solve the problem of a broken traditional educational system -- And many believe that Silicon Valley will have the answers.
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“Money alone isn't enough to bring happiness . . . happiness [is] when you're actually truly ok with losing everything you have.” - Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose Disclaimer: This article’s sole purpose is to address the core principles of advertising in a new and edgy way. This is not for the faint of heart or those highly sensitive to socially charged public issues. So suck it up and buckle up. You’re about to be taken to school (of hard knocks). Class is now in session.
May 05 2012
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For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: it’s a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two. Naturally, this is much easier said than done. The most important part of a hackathon, by far, are the demos. Why else -- it’s what makes the event worth attending in the first place. Sponsoring companies wouldn’t offer money to anything that didn’t provide exposure. Developers wouldn’t forsake sleep if they couldn’t show an eager audience the hacks they built overnight. Pulling off demos at Photo Hack Day and Photo Hack Day 2, for example, has proven to be a continuous learning process, with a much more public (and much less forgiving) learning curve. There’s no need to be a n00b, I’ve done a lot of the screwing up for you.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China back in December 2011 created a storm of speculation on whether Facebook was preparing for a full scale entry into the most populous country in the world. Photos of Zuckerberg visiting Sina’s headquarters in Beijing, leaked by a Sina employee and reports of him meeting with other major Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba have further fueled rumors that Facebook is looking for a local partner to facilitate its China entry. Putting aside the rumors and speculation, there is little doubt that Facebook is looking for a way to enter the China market and the real questions lie not in the “if,” but rather the “how,” “when” and whether Facebook will be able to make a success of their China market entry when countless other western Internet juggernauts have bruised and battered themselves against the Great firewall of China.
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Today, in 2012, there is a talent war like no other. The Valley is abuzz with a hiring frenzy. Startups can't compete with Yammer, Zynga, Twitter, Facebook and the rest for developers. Perhaps the answer is to look elsewhere? To countries where the old Soviet education system produced maths and science graduates by the truckload? To Kiev, Belgrade, Slovenia and others? And perhaps to Romania. For Romanians, perhaps for the first time in history, the world is now flat. Forty-five years of Stalin-esque communism meant sports and education were the only acceptable ways to compete in Romania. Soviet-era industrialisation ended up producing a country where almost half of the educated population were trained to become engineers. Today, in 2012, they are more likely to be coders. And now they can take their place with the rest of the world on the level playing field of technology.
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Jailbreak verb. 1 To get out of a restricted mode of operation. 2 To enable use of a product not intended by the manufacturer.
Currently, the degree is the only meaningful “unit” of education to which employers give any credence. Of this dependency, TIME magazine writes, “The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it… It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs.”
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With the influx of information flooding the web – 90% of the web having been created in the last two years alone – web businesses are looking for ways to understand and use big data to drive their business. Just as SaaS and the cloud completely revolutionized the way businesses operate, so will Big Data applications (BDAs). BDAs are web-based applications that interpret and use massive amounts of enterprise and web-scale data to deliver more intelligent results for their subscribers. BDAs leverage the best of the cloud; they’re web-hosted, multi-tenant and use Hadoop, noSQL and a range of recommendation and machine learning technologies. But the real question is – so what? So what if the underlying data structures use Hadoop or noSQL? No CEO of a major business gets excited about a value proposition around more scalable data structures. That’s where BDAs come in. BDAs don’t just repackage your data in a cool interface or offer productivity improvements in data scalability, they harness the world’s data to deliver you a better outcome – like more revenue.
April 13 2012
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There is only one logical reason that Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, would set it sights only a mobile app with 13 employees. The main driver for Monday’s...
March 17 2012
10 Features Missing From Pinterest
There’s one thing you should know before we open up this can of worms: I have 795 pins on Pinterest. Probably by the end of writing this article, I’ll have 895. As you can see, my wish list of Pinterest features hasn’t caused me to slam down my laptop screen in disgust.
That being said, I would change a few things. And based on Pinterest’s new profile, the company already has.
Most of these 10 suggestions have to do with Pinterest.com’s design and the social network’s user experience. For instance, I’d love to be able to move pins between boards with the greatest of ease. I’d also like to create a private board or two — not because I want to build a digital shrine to Ryan Reynolds, but because I’d like to plan a future wedding without my boyfriend having a commitment freak-out.
Here are 10 features I’d like to see on Pinterest in the future. I’m sure all you pinners have even more dreams for Pinterest, so sound off in the comments below.
1. View the Individual Boards I Follow
At this point, you can only view users you follow, not the individual boards you follow. I'd like to be able to know both. For instance, I'll browse a user's page to determine whether I want to follow that person. However, many times, I have no interest in particular boards, and therefore, don't "follow all" boards. But there's no way to go back and determine just which individual boards I've followed in the past. What if I want to view them for future inspiration?
Click here to view this gallery.
More About: design, Opinion, pinterest, predictions, Social Media, user experience
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March 13 2012
Why There Will Never Be One Social Network to Rule Them All
Jeff Tinsley is the founder and CEO of MyLife.com, the leading social service for connecting your social networks and email services all in one place.
Every other week, it seems a new stat pops up, released to prove that social network X is more popular than social network Y. Whether it’s Facebook dominating the market, Google+ adding users fast, or newcomer Pinterest grabbing 11 million visits in one month, the battle of the social networks shows no sign of letting up. Many ask, “Who will be the ultimate winner?” But perhaps this is the wrong question.
Mounting evidence suggests that the battle of the social networks isn’t a zero sum game. Both Facebook and Google+ are growing in popularity and activity. Tumblr continues to demonstrate it’s more than a fad for millennials. And let’s face it, Twitter is a mainstay.
The staying power of social networks — big and small — proves that there needn’t be a “best” social network, or even a “most popular.” Instead, there ought to be a bit more social networking diplomacy. While the public battle for “most liked” social network carries on, trends point to a far more satisfying outcome: diversity of choice.
The truth is, people aren’t using just one social networking site — they are embracing a dozen. ComScore’s latest digital usage study, 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus, found that social networking accounted for 16.6% of time spent online in 2011. In December alone, Twitter drew 37.5 million uniques, while LinkedIn and Google+ drew 33.5 million and 20.7 million, respectively. In that same month, the average user spent 151 minutes on Tumblr, 80 minutes on Pinterest, and 423 minutes on Facebook. Oh, and MySpace just gained one million users — in a month.
The true focus of social networking sites should be less about seeking popularity, and more about helping a user live his life.
People have proven that they will access multiple social network sites, if they have good uses for them. The top sites have already proven themselves worthy. Twitter broke the news of Whitney Houston’s death 27 minutes before the press. Pinterest users are showcasing and caching items collected across the web. Facebook users are posting family photos. Google+ users are learning to play guitar via video hangouts.
The fact is, no matter how great, no one network is able to deliver on every front. For instance, can any platform match Twitter when it comes to short, instant global communication? Or will any network ever equal Facebook when it comes to making and sustaining connections the world over? Users will embrace a variety of sites, each of which excels at its unique method of connecting, sharing and more.
For the future of social networking, that means tolerance is key, and integration and management tools will have essential roles to play. Those that succeed will offer users simple, comprehensive solutions to maintain their connections and make new ones.
Sure, users recognize that a definitive, end-all platform to communicate may be ideal. But it isn’t essential. People will share, friend, link, circle, pin, like, tweet and post — and they’ll do it happily. They know that when it comes to making quality connections, “more” is always better. Social networking, it turns out, isn’t a zero sum game after all.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL
More About: contributor, features, Opinion, Social Media, social networking
SXSW 2012: The Year of Infectious Optimism
The fearsome rain at this year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference couldn’t dampen our spirits; it just made downtown Austin all the more sweet when the clouds finally parted on Sunday. The unprecedented hour-long lines for badge pickup on Friday? Full of friendly faces and quality networking.
Everyone agreed the event was too full, spread across too many distant locations, oversubscribed, oversponsored and full of dumb stunts. Then everyone laughed and shook it off like they shook their hastily-acquired umbrellas.
Nor were we downhearted at the fact that no one app seemed to “win” the conference, the way Twitter or Foursquare did in years past. (Sorry, Highlight, Glancee, Banjo and the other location-based social apps that pinged our pockets a little too incessantly.)
Most of us got it: the whole question of an app “winning” SXSW has become a parlor game. It is as useful an introduction to the person next to you as “are we in a tech bubble?” or “will the Facebook IPO change everything?”
And what conversations resulted. Maybe it’s the fact that the economy is starting to turn a corner, or maybe Austin hit some sort of critical mass of startups per square foot. Sure, past years have provided plenty of food for thought, but I don’t think the optimism — the sense that we really can make this world a better place through tech and social media — has ever been this tangible.
This, of course, is just one humble scribe’s take. It is impossible for any of us (or any one publication) to see all the cool panels and parties; there are just too many, and they all seem to happen simultaneously. For every great speaker I mention, other attendees can offer two more. Everyone’s mileage at SXSW varies, which is part of the joy of this nerd spring break.
See the Best SXSW Panels, Illustrated
But it was impossible not to be enthused right from the first keynote, where The Onion-based comedian Baratunde Thurston told a capacity crowd of thousands that online comedy is making the world a better place right now. To make his point, he came armed with hilarious government-tweaking skits and satire from as far afield as Afghanistan, China, Iran and Venezuela.
Cult real-world game designer Jane McGonigal launched SuperBetter, a level-based app that she created to help her recover from a serious concussion (and one that is already slowly transforming hundreds of SXSW attendees into their healthiest possible selves). The CEO of Aetna launched his health appointment management app, iTriage, while admitting his company and industry needed to do a better job of regulating itself and serving customers.
And it wasn’t just micro-managing apps or online tweaks. If you were there to see X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis recount how he gathered teams of amateurs who figured out how to clean up oil spills four times as fast as the industry best, or how Dean Kamen is about to mass-manufacture a machine that can turn any toxic soup into pure drinking water, you left feeling ready to take on the world’s worst problems.
Same goes for the talk from former game designer and astronaut Richard Garriott, who convinced us that the private space industry and NASA working together will take us to Mars inside three decades. Ditto for the designers of the Prius Bike who showed us how to steer their ultimate eco-friendly wheels using a brainwave-reading helmet.
Lest you think SXSW was all panels of Pollyannas, rest assured that audiences did their due diligence with tough questions. Indeed, it was hard to find a speaker who hadn’t subjected their own ideas to some stringent devil’s advocacy.
Take Brian David Johnson of Intel, who has one of the world’s coolest briefs: figure out what future the company is building chips for by commissioning science-fiction stories from leading authors.
While describing himself as a “declared optimist” about the future, Johnson still encourages his authors to write dystopian rather than utopian visions. “They can help define the world we don’t want,” Johnson said. “We should encourage the study of unintended consequences; it opens things up to further investigation.”
So here’s to all the unintended consequences of SXSW — every startup hatched over a beer, every bad app that bombed, every chance meeting that created a C-level executive. Bring on SXSW 2013, and let the rainclouds do their worst. We’ll still be smiling, networking and beta-testing better worlds.
Bonus: Scenes from SXSW
A look at the ISIS Mobile Wallet Booth
The mobile wallet software was a sponsor at SXSW.
Click here to view this gallery.
More About: apps, Opinion, sxsw, trending
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I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to...
March 11 2012
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As web watchers, entrepreneurs, and investors search for the next big thing, they’d be wise to focus on innovations that can be easily adopted by technology novices. A recent string of companies, including Groupon and Pinterest, have found success outside the early-adopter digerati by building products simple enough to be used by just about anyone. Designing with tech novices in mind can mean the difference between staying niche and going mainstream. Here are three principles for designing software for people Silicon Valley too often disparagingly calls “normals.”
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Every vote counted on Super Tuesday with the results coming down to Mitt Romney narrowly beating Rick Santorum by only 0.8% in the Ohio primary. While some may argue that the issues elevated Mitt above the rest, as a social marketer I can’t help to wonder if social savvy determined the winners and losers.
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The most recent commercial for the BMW i3 and i8 concept cars is a great example of something enlightened marketers have known for years: emotion is the key driver behind purchasing decisions. Yet, today, most businesspeople still follow the old adage, “Emotions and business don’t mix,” relying on rational data to drive decisions instead. Doesn’t the advertisement make you want to buy a BMW? Don’t you want to feel cool or look more successful, technology-forward and progressive? Well, that desire is emotion at work. Steve Jobs inherently knew the emotion of his consumers was critical currency in building the Apple phenomenon, and with over 1,700 CMOs admitting that building an enduring connection with consumers is a top priority in a recent IBM survey, leveraging emotion is fast becoming a top business imperative.
March 10 2012
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The first image that comes to my mind when I think about business computing is the dystopic scene from the 1984 Apple commercial: A swarm of employees wearing the same uniforms and marching in unison into their offices where they are forced to use certain devices and software. They sit down in front of their PCs, open a business application their company paid millions of dollars to implement and, in a disciplined manner, fill out forms to populate the company’s database so their managers will be happy. The Anya Major in this dystopic scene is the consumerization of enterprise software. The term "consumerization" was first used, in the context of enterprise software, by Kevin Efrusy from Accel Partners back in 2008. You probably heard about it before. Heck, there’s even a SXSW panel discussing this subject, which means it really went mainstream. What is missing from the conversation though is a good look at the root causes and more importantly, at the implications of this phenomenon.
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IPOs are hot again. Naturally, the press is focused on high-profile offerings like Facebook's. But, I think there is a more important group of companies going public: Smaller, less sexy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups. Think of it as the Sexy IPOs versus the SaaS-y IPOs. They aren't household names, but the most recent SaaS IPOs (Cornerstone, Jive, Brightcove and Bazaarvoice) are doing better in the public markets, on average, than the Sexy IPOs of LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga.
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I'm a complete sexist. I want women to look as good as possible. And I'm not the only one. Women want to look as sexy as possible. That's why they buy hundreds of millions worth of form-fitting Spanx every year. And now Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx is worth a billion according to Forbes. She took Justin Timberlake's advice. A million is not cool. A billion is cool. So what happened next? In the past 24 hours I've heard three different guys say something to the affect of, "She? She is worth a billion? Huh. I guess anyone can be worth a billion." As soon as someone says that they are scratched off my list of people I want to spend time with. I only like to be around positive people who celebrate success.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
