Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

May 21, 2009

Trusera shutsdown

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Raja @ 9:30 am

Community is a very important resource for health realted information and peer support. It is sad to read that trusera, a health community site, where people share their health realted experiences with each other is shutting its doors.

Trusera, a health 2.0 community where users can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions, is officially closing its doors on May 27, according to a blog post on the site. We originally reported on Trusera’s possible shutdown in March, when the startup was nearly out of money.

Founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, Trusera launched almost a year ago. Trusera sought to bring users together who were suffering from similar health conditions. The site also took other personal information into account when connecting people, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Trusera would then match people up according to all of these factors and allowed users to receive email updates whenever a new match submitted a story or tip, which meant that users didn’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information.

In the blog post, Trusera’s site manager wrote that the startup had run out of funds and could not sustain operations. Although the site was innovative and had steadily attracted a growing and dedicated set of users over the past year, it was still a small community. The health 2.0 space is a competitive landscape to survive in—there are a number of websites, including Medpedia and PatientsLikeMe, devoted to online forums for people to share their health-related stories.

May 19, 2009

Doctor’s new best friend: iphone

Filed under: Mobile, Technology, Trends — Tags: — Raja @ 9:01 am

Dcotors and medical students are embracing mobile technologies such as iphone apps. This is only the tip of the iceberg as mobile technologies will truly transform the healthcare as we know it.

"We saw that a lot of the physicians were using [iPhones] in the clinic," said Georgetown student Joseph Murray.

To his frustration, Steven Schwartz often encounters patients who have no idea what each of the pills they’ve been popping is called.

“But usually they can tell you what it looks like,” the Georgetown University Medical Center family practitioner said. “They might say it’s a blue, triangular pill for hypertension.”

Armed with an iPhone, Schwartz is able to play detective.

He uses an application called Epocrates to input pill characteristics, such as color, shape and clarity. The software replies with a list of medications and images that match those criteria, allowing him to deduce what the patient is taking.

Schwartz says his iPhone has become indispensable: He uses it to pull up instructional diagrams and videos for patients, write electronic prescriptions and check basic information, with the patient beside him.

” ‘This is how often you need a colonoscopy,’ I’ll say to a patient,” Schwartz said. “I’m just double-checking on my phone to make sure I don’t make a mistake.”

Doctors are also using smartphones to look up drug-to-drug interactions, to view X-rays and MRI scans, and even to stream music from the Internet during surgery.

The power and versatility of smartphones, Schwartz said, is leading more doctors to abandon their pagers and PDAs. Of the various smartphones on the market, such as the ones made by BlackBerry and T-Mobile, the iPhone’s graphic, audio, video and memory capabilities are helping it take the lead in the medical field.

Schwartz’s use of his iPhone speaks to a larger trend: Nationally, about 64 percent of doctors are now using smartphones, according to a recent report by the market research company Manhattan Research.

At George Washington University Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Health System, BlackBerrys are more popular than iPhones among physicians, according to officials at both institutions. Of the 700-plus smartphones in use by doctors, nurses and other hospital staff members at Johns Hopkins, only about 5 percent are iPhones, said Mike McCarty, the chief network officer at Hopkins; the rest are BlackBerrys. Although there are many applications being developed for the iPhone (the iTunes app store lists 674 applications related to medicine available), a lot of medical software used at Hopkins runs on the Windows operating system, which is what the BlackBerry uses, McCarty said.

McCarty believes that smartphones will soon assume a permanent place in medicine. “I think over time we will be replacing pagers with these devices,” he said. “Every clinician I meet says they want to be carrying one device, rather than two or three.”  

May 18, 2009

Scribd wants to be itunes for docs

Filed under: Internet, Media — Raja @ 8:48 am

It started out as YouTube for docs. Now it wants to be itunes for docs. I think it is a no brainer. Youtube is yet to make a penny while itunes is minting money.

Writers can sell their work via Scribd, encrypted against piracy.

SAN FRANCISCO — Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month.

Scribd hopes its more open and flexible system will give it a leg up on Amazon, which has become the largest player in the burgeoning market for e-books. Amazon sets the retail price for books in its Kindle store and keeps the majority of the revenue on some titles, which has publishers worried that Amazon is amassing too much control over the nascent market. Amazon also allows those books to be read only on its Kindle devices and in Kindle software on the iPhone.

“One reason publishers are excited to work with us is that they worry that publishing channels are contracting as Amazon and Google are gaining control over the e-book space,” said Jared Friedman, chief technology officer and a founder of Scribd.

But Scribd also has some hurdles to overcome itself. Though large publishing firms like Random House have experimented with the site, they also express frustration that copies of some works have been uploaded to Scribd without permission.

Trying to address the piracy problem, Scribd is building a database of copyrighted works and using it to filter its system. If a publisher participates in the Scribd store, its books will be added to that database, the company said.

So far, no major publishing houses have signed on to the store, though the company says it is talking to them. The independent publishers Lonely Planet, O’Reilly Media and Berrett-Koehler will add their entire catalogs.

Twitter cracks the local business puzzle?

Filed under: Business, Internet — Raja @ 8:42 am

AdAge thinks so.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — All those brands trying to figure the ROI of Twitter? They might do well to follow the lead of the local pizza joint.

NAKED PIZZA: Recent Twitter promotion brought in 150% of a recent day's business.
NAKED PIZZA: Recent Twitter promotion brought in 150% of a recent day’s business.

Naked Pizza, a New Orleans healthful-pizza shop that’s hoping to go national — Mark Cuban is a backer — has been marketing itself via the microblogging service. And recently it has started to track Twitter-spurred sales at the register. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day’s business.

“Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful,” said Jeff Leach, the restaurant’s co-founder. “Sure, there’s the brand marketing and getting-to-know-you stuff. … But we wanted to know: Can it make the cash register ring?”

Mr. Leach is one of many small businesses using Twitter as a marketing tool — and his group could turn out to be a lucrative market for the fast-growing site if other local entrepreneurs have similar experiences.

Twitter’s real-time messaging service is turning out to be a boon to local establishments, who are starting to get onboard — mostly because the message pops into users’ Twitter feeds and they’re close enough to act on it. For Mr. Leach, who is targeting people within a three-mile radius of his store, that’s key. He’s gone so far as to erect a billboard outside his store publicizing Naked Pizza’s Twitter handle (which got him written up in TechCrunch). After that, Twitter contacted him; he’s going to be working with the company to beta test some applications for small businesses.

Low barrier to entry
Twitter has a golden trait that appeals to small businesses: It’s easy.

“It’s simpler than a blog, than setting up a Facebook or MySpace page,” said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in the local-marketing sector. “It’s very much like e-mail. And e-mail, from small-business standpoint, has been one of the most effective marketing tools.” The social nature of it is also appealing: Consumers are already using Twitter as a question-and-answer recommendation service and to forward (”retweet”) messages they receive from brands.

Michael Farah, founder and CEO of Berry Chill, a yogurt shop with three Chicago locations, has been using Twitter to send out “Sweet Tweets” — promos that require users to show they’re Twitter followers of the store. In a month, he’s logged 700 followers and, he said, “sweet tweets” haven’t diminished his daily sales.

“Our last big promotion we gave away 1,100 yogurts — $5,500 worth of product — but sales were the same as the day before,” he said. “The people who were existing customers standing in line attracted people who hadn’t tried it.”

Potential
“The reality is Twitter’s got all sorts of business models available to it,” said Todd Chaffee, general partner at Institutional Venture Partners and a Twitter investor. “We’re putting together monetization framework, things like features for commercial accounts, which could be for global companies all the way down to local companies.” He said the business model will be largely driven by the creativity and needs of the businesses using it.

BillMyParents

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Raja @ 8:35 am

BillMyParents provides a solution for tweens to do online shopping without having access to their parents credit card. I think this is a greate business idea if it can convince online stores to place their billmyparents button next to the items.

There’s a cute new payment service just launching: BillMyParents. It’s a way that kids (”tweens,” according to the founder) can shop in online stores and easily spend their parents’ money–if their parents later agree to buy them the stuff they want.

The system puts little BillMyParents buttons next to items in online retail. To check out, kids write optional notes to their parents about the items they want. Parents get e-mail notifications and can approve and pay for individual items directly.

Kids never get access to their parents’ credit cards. And parents don’t have to visit the store sites their children found the items on.

Jim Collas, CEO of SocialWise, which makes BillMyParents, says it is “focused on the communication between tween and parent.” As inclined as I am to disparage systems that put the Web in the middle of the parent/child relationship, I actually think this idea works. It doesn’t reduce or remove communication in a family, in fact it could increase it. And it makes it easier to mark, track, and purchase online items.

BillMyParents is also focused on making money. Collas points to the $28 billion spent online by the “youth demographic,” and says he’s also eyeing the $40 billion spent offline on products researched on the Web. Much of this commerce, he says, goes offline because the child can’t buy the item. BillMyParents will make money from transaction feeds.

The challenge of BillMyParents is that is has to be integrated into online retail sites. At launch, the company has no customers to announce. The company will have an Amazon affiliate store, though, which will let any item on that service get routed through BillMyParents for approval, and then back to Amazon for purchase.

But Collas said he believes his solution will increase commerce on the sites it ends up on. He says the BillMyParents buttons can be placed on item pages, not in an online store’s shopping cart, which makes the kids’ “check-out” that much easier. Also, he points to the opportunities to integrate with sites and online worlds that sell virtual goods.

Online Homework and Exam Guides

Filed under: Internet, Trends — Raja @ 8:28 am

One of the ways to gain an unifair advantages in an exam is to get your hands on copies of previous examps in the hopes that some of the questions may show up on the question paper. Now thanks to the web everyone has access to such material. There are many sites that not only has question banks but also provide answers and ways to solve the questions. Take home exams take a new meaing with these sites. Are these sites good or bad? NYT looks at this question.

 

William Kinney, an assistant professor of physics at the State University at Buffalo, believes students who use the sites ethically can benefit.

In the old days, college students might turn to classmates for help during all-night cram sessions before final exams. Now their study buddies are just as likely to be commercial Web sites with step-by-step solutions to textbook problems, copies of previous exams, reams of lecture notes, summaries of literary classics, and real-time help with physics, math and computer science problems.

“It’s a backup,” said Chris O’Connor, a pre-med sophomore at Columbia University who relies on a popular site, Cramster, to unravel the mysteries of complex math and science problems. “Many professors who return homework won’t tell you how you got it wrong — just that it’s wrong. This way you can complete the feedback process, which is essential to learning.”

But as companies with playful names like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and SparkNotes are transforming the way undergraduates like Mr. O’Connor study, some professors and ethicists are questioning whether such Web sites encourage cheating and undermine the mental sweat equity of day-to-day learning by seducing students with ready-made solutions and essays.

On Course Hero, for example, students can type in a college name and course number to unearth the previous semester’s particle physics final exam. They can find examples of research papers on, say, the causes of World War I. For homework, Cramster supplies step-by-step solutions to problems in more than 200 college-level math and science textbooks.

“There are professors who don’t change their questions from semester to semester, and one of the things that this raises is how problematic that is,” said Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity, which is part of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. “Part of what’s valuable about homework is that it gives you a safe space to practice and struggle.”

But defenders of the Web sites — including some professors — say that teachers should not be recycling exams and that students who simply copy homework solutions hurt themselves at exam time. Many of the documents posted on the Web sites, like term papers and prior exams, have long been available to members of fraternities and sororities, which archive them (this has also been a source of complaints in the past).

David A. Sachs, an associate dean in the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Pace University who is joining an advisory panel for Cramster, said in an interview that colleges need to rethink practices in light of the Internet age.

“As faculty, we need to be better educated about what the possibilities are, and the truth is you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Dr. Sachs said. “If Cramster and all these companies disappeared tomorrow, you could still do a Google search and find what you’re looking for in five minutes.”

David J. Kim, president and chief executive officer of Course Hero, which started early last year, said the premise of the company was to “bring the concept of study groups” online. “A student may know one or two people in their class,” he said, “but we wanted to provide an online community where you could connect with students from different colleges studying the same subject.”

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

Cramster, which went online in 2003, has carved out a different niche, with many of its 500,000 registered users visiting the site specifically for solutions to math and science textbook problems. Solutions to odd-numbered problems are available free, but college students must pay $9.95 a month to see the even-numbered ones (solutions to even-numbered problems are not available for high school textbooks).

Students can also post queries to Cramster’s 3,000 “experts,” who are rated for quality (just like sellers on eBay) and earn “karma” points for rewards like laptops, iPods and gift cards. An expert, according to Aaron Hawkey, Cramster’s chief executive officer, could be a brilliant high school senior bound for M.I.T., a professor or a retired engineer. In addition, the company has in-house staff members who moderate the question-and-answer board.

Exploding Digital Universe

Filed under: Technology, Trends — Raja @ 8:08 am

the digital universe is expanding  just like the physical univrse. IDC says digital universe doubles every 18 months. The version of moore’s law provides great oppotunity for creating mega businesses.

warehouse_D_20090515173007.jpgGetty Images
It’s getting crowded in there

“Like the physical universe, the digital universe is expanding. In fact, exploding,” says John Gantz, a researcher for IDC.

For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.

This is good for EMC, but it’s probably not so good for the CIOs of the world. They’re the ones who have to find room in their shrunken budgets to buy the disk arrays to store all this stuff that’s being created by employees, customers and their devices. IDC says budgets for servers and storage are shrinking by 6% this year.

In one solution to the storage problem, AT&T is announcing Monday that it will start offering “Synaptic Storage” as a service that business customers can buy on demand. It said EMC, which already provides online storage to individuals and some companies through its Mozy service, will provide the technology that AT&T will use in two of its data centers. AT&T said it will start providing what it calls a “virtual private storage cloud” widely in the third quarter. It predicted companies with fluctuating storage needs would find it attractive.

In 2008 alone, IDC says the world created 487 billion gigabytes of information, up 73% from 2007. That was 3% more than it forecast at the beginning of the year.

IDC calculates the number by estimating the installed population of data-creating devices — CAT scanners, digital cameras, iPhones, RFID readers, supercomputers — and multiplying each by the amount of data each creates. Not everything has to be stored. Phone call routing information, digital TV signals and spam don’t need to be saved. But a lot of information does.

Even the economic crisis, which is shrinking economic activity, can accelerate digital information creation, IDC says. Demands for more financial accountability are likely to lead to requirements to store more information for forensic accountants to peruse. Stimulus spending in China and the U.S. will go for electronic health records, smart grids and more broadband that will also increase the amount of digital data.

Health care is another fast-growing source of digital information. IBM said this week that the average individual’s health-care record, including digital x-rays and scan information, contains as many bits of data as 12 million novels. IDC says that an individual’s “digital shadow” of information created about them such as surveillance photos, health records and credit reports is larger than the digital persona they create about themselves composed of things like blogs, YouTube videos and MySpace profiles.

IDC says that there are some software techniques that can reduce the unbridled growth. Storage virtualization can boost the percentage of each disk drive that is actually storing something. Data deduplication can avoid storing the same thing multiple times, as happens when one individual forwards a report to hundreds of people on an email list.

Eric Schmidt CMU Commencement Speech

Filed under: general — Raja @ 7:27 am

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, gave the commencement keynote at CMU. Here is the video:

May 17, 2009

Korean Financial Nostradamus

Filed under: general — Raja @ 3:02 pm

NYT writes about the troubles of a korean finance blogger that captured nation’s imagination to only end up in jail.

 

Park Dae-sung with his mother after his release from prison last month

SEOUL, South Korea

FOUR months ago, Park Dae-sung became South Korea’s most celebrated — and vilified — blogger, when he was arrested on charges of spreading false information on the Internet with malicious intent. Prosecutors accused Mr. Park, whose financial postings under the alias Minerva had attracted a cultlike following, of damaging the nation’s economy with his “extremely pessimistic forecasts.”

On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted in a court of law, but his troubles persist in the court of public opinion. In a society still negotiating the gulf between its traditionally hierarchical culture and the free-floating online world, he has been sharply criticized for, in effect, not being the authority figure most people had imagined him to be.

“I am disillusioned and disgusted,” Mr. Park said in an interview in his Seoul hide-out, where he was holed up to escape from most reporters, as well as online death threats. “I have seen the madness of Korean society. I can’t live here anymore. I want to emigrate.”

For months last year, Minerva riveted South Korea with his uncannily accurate analyses of the economy, his often scathing criticisms of government policy and his predictions of, among other things, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the Korean currency, the won.

When some of his prognostications proved on target, readers dug up his earlier postings and eagerly awaited more. A civic group gave an award to the anonymous “citizen journalist.” A national television anchor called on the government to heed Minerva’s advice. Bookstores gave special displays to economics books recommended by Minerva.

It was not until January, with Mr. Park’s arrest, that the mystery of Minerva was finally solved. Mr. Park, 31 and jobless, had attended a two-year vocational college and had never even invested in the stock market. He was charged with spreading false information on the Internet “with intent to damage the public interest,” punishable by five years in prison.

Among his crimes, prosecutors said, was to state that the South Korean government had barred banks and major companies from buying American dollars in a desperate attempt to check the fall of the won.

On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted on the grounds that, while not everything he wrote was correct, there was no evidence that he knew it was wrong or acted with malicious intent.

But his difficulties — at what seemed to be a moment of triumph — were far from over.

Mr. Park’s evolution from a former employee of a wireless communications company to a national sensation to an embittered outcast reads like a case study of what can happen to an unprepared blogger in this highly wired, and politically divisive, society.

Are we wired to acquire?

Filed under: general — Tags: — Raja @ 2:52 pm

Seed magazine reviews the book ‘Spent’ written by univ of new mexico psychologist geofferey miller.

 

Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t?

In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.

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