Not every entrepreneur we coach is a geek. Here’s a cool video about one of our participants who had to pivot several times before getting his aquarium store open. I hope he does really well; he’s passionate about kids, fish, and local shopping.
Ordinary people and small businesses using Facebook are going to come to grips with two new terms after the big announcements Mark Zuckerberg made today at f8, the Facebook Developer conference. The first is “self-expression,” which means your friends will know a lot more about what you read, what music you listen to, and even what you cook. The second is “serendipity,” which means if you see a friend of yours has watched a movie on Netflix, you can click on that app in your timeline and begin watching it immediately from within the app.
This could lead to a great deal of inadvertent oversharing. Facebook’s new idea is to make its platform a 21st century form of scrapbooking, and to help you “scrapbook” your entire life “frictionlessly.”
But you might want a little friction as you try to interact with all these changes. Let me see if I can give some tips on how to make the most of the new features and not fall into their traps.
As CTO Brett Taylor says, “when you change from the current profile view to the Timeline, you forget how much stuff is there.” That can work for or against you. We’re used to burying much of the past on Facebook and hoping it went away. Now it’s all going to be very retrievable, by anyone you friend.
In the next few weeks, you are going to get an entire new interface that will convert your life into a timeline. That timeline will have photos, updates, and a new set of “OpenGraph” apps. While in the past, you could authorize apps and nothing might happen that you didn’t expect, that’s no longer going to be true,
Much more “passive sharing” will now be possible. Be careful what apps you authorize, because by default, much of what you do on Facebook with apps, or even outside Facebook with Netflix and Spotify, and Facebook’s other integrated partners, will be shared automagically. Once you add an app to your timeline, you don’t have to give it permission to add stuff to your feed: “Adding an app to your timeline is like wiring a real-time connection between your app and Facebook…There is no step two,” says Facebook CTO Brett Taylor.
Third, you will be encouraged by the new interface to make Facebook your permanent home on the internet, which means the “walled garden” is pulling more partners in, rather than helping you get out to the wider world. So if you are a business, and you have a Facebook presence, you are going to need a much broader Facebook marketing strategy in order to find your new customers solely within the Facebook platform.
Well, the good news is that 800,000,000 from all over the world are now on Facebook. The bad news is that creates a lot of noise, and doesn’t necessarily help you reach the “right” people, especially since Facebook search is notoriously inferior.
The good news is that Facebook’s new design is based on better data visualization. The bad news is that all that data is probably better for Facebook’s advertisers than for you. Remember that as long as you do not pay for Facebook, you are the product, not the customer. That’s why when you complain, Mark Zuckerberg
So Step !) Be careful who you friend. Step 2) Carefully explore your privacy settings and make sure you understand and Step 3) Think twice about adding apps.
Timeline Beta starts today, and with it, the common news apps that you might want to see. Watch out — it’s all coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Image via CrunchBase
The best startups begin because the founders see a big problem for which they want to find a disruptive solution. They don’t begin because the founder wants to make money; they are a response to a founder’s desire to change the world. If they make money, so be it. Starbucks began as an effort to create a “third place” that wasn’t home or the office. Facebook began as a way to make meeting women easier for nerdy men. Southwest Airlines began as a way to make it cost-effective for Americans to fly short distances.
Part of changing the world should involve finding others who share your convictions, and getting them on your team so the change can happen swiftly. But what often happens is that individual startups work in their little corners of the world, without knowing that they share the same vision, or in the words of my long-time and revered business partner, they have different pieces of the same puzzle.
And so it went with ChowLocally, one of the startups in our summer Gangplank Roadmap to Launch program. ChowLocally’s founders want people to buy food from local farmers and ranchers so we can 1)eat food that doesn’t cost scarce resources to transport 2)build a more vibrant economy 3) develop a closer relationship to the people who grow our food. ChowLocally launched about five weeks into the program, and was an immediate local “success.”
In Lean Startup terms, that means it acquired customers who came to its web site, ordered food, and picked it up. In slightly increasing numbers week-over-week. And, in those terms, it is taking the learning from those customers and iterating (adding more pickup locations, and starting delivery). It is addressing scalability issues as well; the company leased a refrigerated truck recently, and found some warehouse space.
And then, while watching the TechCrunch Disrupt Live stream last week, I encountered Farmigo. It sounded like the founders had a similar vision to ChowLocally’s, and I wondered if they were a potential competitor. Since one of the issues ChowLocally is addressing is how to scale, I suggested Derek Slife, one of the co-founders, do some research. He immediately called the Farmigo founders, and what did he find?
Sure enough. different pieces of the same puzzle. And a shared vision.
Farmigo has spent the last two years developing tools to connect farmers to buyers. ChowLocally has developed a platform that could simplify the process, or perhaps Farmigo can help ChowLocally scale. I haven’t examined Farmigo in detail, but it sure seems that if they partnered strategically, they could achieve their vision–to grow the local food culture–more quickly. At this writing, they’re still talking to each other. I hope they find a way to partner.
Changing the world is not simple. If you don’t have others in your marketplace trying to accomplish the same larger purpose, it’s much more difficult to make that change come about. That’s why both competitors and partners are good, not bad.
If you are interested in the local food movement, check out ChowLocally and Farmigo. If they’re available where you live, try them, and give feedback. They can’t do it without you, the customers.
Image via CrunchBase
“We are making this so simple even my mother can use it.” That charming phrase was uttered at TCDisrupt yesterday by the co-founder of Bitcasa.com, a storage service company. Thankfully, Paul Carr reminded the audience that this is probably the last generation that will ever be able to use their mothers as fall guys.
As one of those perennial fall guys, let me now react to the Google+ API story this morning.
I don’t want or need the Google+ API as I now understand it.
What do I want or need? A way to sent my tweets to Google+. (There’s already a Chrome extension that’s better than this). A way to interact with Google+ completely on my iPad.
What I am probably going to get is a way to see Google+ posts on other services. Or worse, a whole host of new applications built on that API that I don’t know. I presume that’s what “read only” means. A developer can take data out of Google+. Oh, goody. More “client” type applications? But what use are they without both-way access?
At least that’s what I take away from Dave Winer‘s comment about Google not getting it. I trust Dave. He has a depth of knowledge, a historical view, and a native curiosity about software that makes him worthwhile, in much the same way that Steve Gillmor. There’s still a space in the universe for those cranky early geeks who existed before the barriers to entry got so low that everybody and his brother-in-law became an application developer, taking data from everywhere and porting it to everywhere else so that people like me can no longer remember where a post originated and where I meant it to be seen. In the case of some of my posts, it seems to be “write once read everywhere.”
I just hope I didn’t misunderstand.
Here’s why I’m not anxious to have my Google+ posts connected all over the place. There’s something to be said about keeping your communications separate. I try very hard not to post inappropriate things to LinkedIn, for example. but the occasional post about my dog makes it over there because some application I tried out and forgot about connected all my Facebook stuff to LinkedIn. (Oops. It was that same Chrome extension.)
I’m only being somewhat facetious. One of the reasons people feel so burned out by social media is the constant challenge of seeing all these new applications hit the scene with such a burst that they are difficult to resist.
But at the end of the day, very few of them stick. There was very little “disruption” at TCDisrupt. And most of the other startups I see don’t excite me either. It’s all apps, it’s all software, except maybe in healthcare or biotech.
I have the feeling that American innovation is incremental, rather than earth-shattering. This may be counter-intuitive, but I think it’s more disruptive to build a high speed rail system than another software company. Because in the case of true disruptive technology, you can answer the question “whose business will you disrupt?” In the case of applications built on APIs like that released by Google+, the answer is nobody’s. The apps will go in app stores and be lost among the hundreds of thousands of apps already there.
Image via Wikipedia
Health care, long ignored by VCs who didn’t understand it, is now so obviously broken that it can’t be ignored, Rock Health, the crusading seed incubator in San Francisco where I’m a mentor , has done a study of VC-funded healthcare startups. According to Rock Health’s survey, which is admittedly incomplete, 35 companies have received $2 million or more in funding in 2011 alone. But that’s only 2% of the startups. The rest, we can assume, are bootstrapping in one way or another. And although 2011 shapes up to be a record year in venture funding for the segment, surpassing the previous record year 2010, much remains to be done.
Of the interviewees, 51% are in the business-to-business area (business to consumer health sites such as Wellsphere and WebMD having sprung up ten years ago and already consolidated that space). This year, I see a great emphasis on personal health monitoring, on remote patient monitoring, and on connections between doctors for clinical decision making. There’s also a push to be mobile.
And yet the bulk of the work in transforming the industry has yet to be done. In the early days of electronic health records, a few major players — Cerner, GE, and McKesson — became entrenched in hospitals, providing ERP systems that did things like bar codes and inventory management, critical care bedside monitoring systems and claims processing. Those players, already in the hospitals, also developed the early EHRs.
Those few players, with their expensive, proprietary systems, are still in place in most hospitals. As a result, patient data is siloed inside the hospital. When I had my hip replaced in 2006, I had to check into the hospital in advance. I filled out a series of paper forms at one end of the hospital. I was then required to take some preliminary blood tests, and I had to walk to the other end of the hospital, where the labs were located, and fill out the same forms. I filled them out again in the surgeon’s office, and again at the physical therapist.
My surgeon had to use the same costly EHR software the hospital uses in her office to make it possible for her to communicate with the hospital, and then another piece of software to read my outpatient X-rays, and still another software product to get the lab results.
When I returned to the care of my family doctor, who didn’t have any of the same software, so the information transfer reverted to fax machines and hand carried X-rays.
Why? Because the Amazon and the Google of health IT don’t exist yet. Google tried and failed to get into the health care market, and Amazon is smart enough not to try.
As a general rule, hospitals buy separate pieces of software that don’t talk to each other. The problem is intensified by privacy regulations that few people fully understand. These regulations were designed to protect the patient, but the net effect is to make the transfer of information between health care providers almost impossible without paper files. In his day and age, that’s shameful. Even Kaiser Permanente, one of the pioneers in integration within its own hospitals, doctos, and patient population, has a system that can’t talk to the outside world.
Here’s what that means for you:
You go to your family doctor, and he will now have an electronic health record, because the government is incentivizing him to put one in.
His electronic health records software may or may not “talk to” the hospitals he practices at, or the labs he sends you to
If you are referred to a specialist, he may not even have an electronic health record, but if he does, odds are it’s not the same one your family doctor has, and—you guessed it — the data doesn’t transfer from one system to another.For you, it means your doctor will receive a copy of the specialist’s records by fax, or hand carried by you.
If you go to a hospital, when you leave, you will have paper discharge instructions, and your doctor may or may not get a report. Chances are, he will have to ask the hospital for one, and you will have to fill out forms to give him access to the reports. In fact, you will have to sign multiple forms just to get your OWN report, and when you do, it will probably be paper.
Lack of information sharing leads to redundant data entry, which takes up critical time.
Can you see the opportunity here? Health IT experts call it “Continuity of Care,” and are trying to set up regional “Health Information Exchanges,” so that if you happen to move from one city to another, change insurers, or change providers, your data can go with you.
But these are in the dark ages, because the acceptable standard, HL7 (or maybe by this time is is HL8) doesn’t do the job. The big entrenched players appear to have done everything they can to protect their market share my making it as difficult as possible to export or import information from their systems. Even at Rock Health, where awesome innovators are committed to changing the system, everyone is touching only a piece of the elephant.
So where’s the big opportunity in health care these days? I think it’s in data transfer and data sharing. If you think about how the internet has made it possible to share all kinds of other data, such as consumer sentiment, political opinions, even energy use through the common TCP/IP standard, you realize how far health care has fallen behind.I am anxiously awaiting the day when your own health data moves with the same fluidity as data about your car, or data about your spending habits.
