As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there’s been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare – Reimbursement. I explain more below regarding why Google Health was doomed to fail in light of the legacy reimbursement model.
First, let’s recap some of the explanations offered up so far. These are all valid but miss the biggest point.
Adam Bosworth, who originally ran Google Health gave one reason - It’s Not Social. That’s true if one wants to create a weight management program or is simply interested in fitness-minded folks. Clearly that is important given the obesity epidemic, however there’s vast swaths of healthcare where being “social” isn’t appropriate or applicable in a doctor-patient relationship. In other words, being social is necessary but not sufficient to transform healthcare. → Read More
I almost miss the bad old days. When I first started wandering around some of the more obscure nooks and crannies of this planet, lo these many years ago, Internet connections were rare and wonderful discoveries; now I just get annoyed when I can’t get online. The last decade-and-a-half of innovation has completely transformed the experience of travel. Right now I’m in the middle of a four-continents-in-six-weeks jaunt, from Canada to East Africa to Europe to India, and thanks to all my tech gear, life on the road is almost unrecognizably different from that of fifteen years ago.
The biggest change this trip has been my ebook reader. I have a Kobo. There is much about my Kobo that I really don’t like: its interface is clumsy and confusing; anything other than straight front-to-back reading is intensely frustrating; it can only use completely open wireless connections, so any wi-fi network with a login or click-to-agree-terms button is completely useless to me; and when I do connect, attempts to download new books fail approximately 50% of the time. But they do succeed the other 50%, meaning I’ve read nine books in the last month, and was able to buy and download books via ambient wi-fi in Kenya and Djibouti, which did feel like living in the future.
There are also subtler and more negative repercussions. → Read More
Skype is being criticized for terminating employees immediately prior to the closing of the Microsoft acquisition, and people are assuming they’re doing this to keep the value of those employees stock options. Skype’s response boils down to saying that the employees were fired because they weren’t good employees, and that the value of the stock is negligible and didn’t affect the decision making process.
Ok. But it gets worse.
Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades. → Read More
Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. Check out the video as well (embedded below).
LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers. → Read More
Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. John Biggs and I reviewed it on Fly or Die back in March, when CEO Bill Nguyen joined us to defend the app ( you can watch that episode below, we both gave it a “die”). The company continues to struggle, so we decided to revisit our assessment in the new episode above.
Things don’t seem to be getting much better for the company. Nobody is using the app. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board. It might scrap its photo app altogether in favor of, well, something big and vague. → Read More
“I’m CEO, Bitch.”
While the story of this title appearing on Mark Zuckerberg’s early Facebook business cards has been around outside the company since at least 2009, when Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires was released, it really exploded into legendary status last year. That’s when the Acadmey Award-winning film, The Social Network (based on Mezrich’s book), launched the phrase into pop culture by having Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker utter it as the exclamation point at the end of a key speech meant to inspire Jesse Einsenberg’s Zuckerberg.
“This time you’re gonna hand them a business card that says, ‘I’m CEO, bitch!’ — that’s what I want for you,” Parker says. Later in the film, Zuckerberg opens a box of business cards that have the title on them. → Read More
Over the last few days the TechCrunch tips box has seen a surge in complaints from Facebook developers who have had their applications disabled without warning. Facebook’s developer forum is filled with threads as developers cry foul, saying that Facebook is killing their businesses without warning or just cause. And developers in a thread on Hacker News are reporting similar problems. So what’s going on?
The sudden bans are the result of an automated Facebook bot, which automatically shuts down applications that it deems to be spammy. Obviously neither users nor Facebook want spammy applications on the platform, but there’s one problem: Facebook recently tweaked this bot to be much more aggressive, and it didn’t give developers any warning before it set it loose. → Read More
Good news, everybody! My head, scanned at Makerbot Industries by artist Jon Monaghan with a high-resolution laser scanner, is now a Thing, available for everyone to own, covet, and place into terrible places.
That’s right: I’m now 3D-printable. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Phil Windley, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — celebrated the news that apps are moving past web sites as the default architecture of the planet. I say celebrate because I think the trend is one that will continue, and even accelerate, as iOS notifications make interoperation between apps more useful. In the process, as @windley notes, notifications and the processes that are triggered, become the focal point of what used to be known as the operating system.
What that means for Windows is cloudy at the moment, pun intended. Though many analysts suggest Windows Phone 7 will gain significant penetration alongside iOS and Android, it will only be possible should important apps drive that adoption. @scobleizer is dubious, and @kevinmarks suggests the locus of power in notification has moved away from OS to Facebook and Twitter. @stevegillmor has his money on @mentions, where social and Web meet in a native wrapper too tasty to ignore. → Read More
What’s more impressive than a car that can do over a thousand miles per gallon? One that was designed by school kids.
In the UK, students from regional schools and universities took part in the annual Mileage Marathon Challenge near Leicester, England, each team vying to set new gas mileage efficiency records in a race around a track. Cars were allowed to coast, but had to maintain a minimum speed of 15 miles per hour. Students worked on the vehicle prototypes, many in partnership with design and engineering firms. → Read More
There’s a lot of hate out there these days from the press when it comes to the daily deals industry. I’m looking at you, TechCrunch. Sure, Groupon has become the whale in this industry, but that doesn’t mean Groupon constitutes the entire industry. Sure, while Groupon may sometimes structure lousy deals for merchants, it doesn’t mean the entire daily deal business model isn’t sustainable or beneficial for small businesses. When done right, the daily deal can actually be very lucrative for everyone involved: Merchants, customers and the daily deal sites themselves.
So why should you take my word for it? It’s true, I’ve got my biases. But so many people have quickly elevated themselves to “experts” on this space that it’s hard to filter truth from the noise. My company, KASA Capital, started Crowd Cut in May 2010. We are now a top player in our markets, generating eight figures of profitable revenues. So, when I talk about the daily deal space, I do so with direct experience. I talk to merchants and customers every day. I have numbers to back my claims. I’m a player in this game, not a self-proclaimed expert who sits on the sidelines. → Read More
Dear Gene,
I was just reading your most recent Washington Post column: an open letter to a j-school student who wrote to you, at her professor’s behest, asking how you built your “personal brand” in journalism. You sure showed her!
Of course, you’re absolutely right that the desire to build a “personal brand” has encouraged some journalists to eschew good reporting in favor of self-aggrandizing positioning statements calculated to increase their own popularity. Similarly, I share your frustration at how user generated content is taking over from real journalism. No-one hates “users” more than me, Gene.
Still, a couple of points you might have considered before filing your column… → Read More
Well actually it was an Instagram of a Foursquare check-in, posted to Twitter …
So I actually haven’t been following news at all today, and when I say news I mean actual news, not tech news which I keep up with like an addiction. And I so had no idea that a bill to legalize gay marriage was passing through the New York State Senate at the very moment I was writing this post about the Quora redesign.
I was actually pretty surprised when TechCrunch Managing Editor Erick Schonfeld Skyped me with “Look at your Twitter feed.” In a quick game of Internet catch up, I scrolled through my feed. → Read More
Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.
Now instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic. → Read More
Update: It’s over! Congrats to all the winners – emails have been sent. Thanks for entering, everyone, your bookcases are all very interesting. If you’re curious about the new generation of touchable e-readers, now’s your chance to pick one up just for being a CrunchGear reader. Kobo has been generous enough to donate one of their new eReader Touch Editions for us to give away, and a few gift cards as well. I like the device: it’s a simple, responsive e-reader that would tempt me if I weren’t a scurrilous, paper-loving Luddite. So how do you win? → Read More
Here’s a fun little project, a little too advanced for me but worth looking into if you’re okay with a little soldering and such. Basically you’re just replacing the innards of a book with a frame (or you could cut out the pages, which would look cooler) and putting an LED strip and some opaque acrylic in there. Makes a nice diffuse light that turns off when you shut the book. Instructions and video here. [via Red Ferret and BoingBoing] → Read More
As part of a $500 million package aimed at funding homegrown innovation and high-tech jobs, the National Robotics Initiative is $70 million intended for “the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people.” Sounds good to me! We’ve already got enough hunter-killers and such. → Read More
Marathon was the Mac answer to Doom, and when I was younger I preferred it infinitely (in my innocence), lauding its creative level design, intense multiplayer, and insanely well thought-out story. When it gave way to Halo I pretty much stopped caring about Bungie, but now they’ve gotten my attention again. Marathon is comin’ to the iPad. → Read More
So you’re walking along the beach, daydreaming, and you think to yourself “How much more fun would it be if I could get up on some weird contraption and fly around at 17 miles an hour just below the surface of the water while children, families, and the elderly scatter in front of me like vanquished enemies?”
Well you’re in luck because this wild-looking vehicle will offer you that privilege for a mere $500. As you see from the video below, the vehicle offers a graceful and tactful way to skip across a pond like a huge freak, bouncing around on a flimsy-looking hydrofoil thinger that will inevitably cause you to flip over and spill your beer. → Read More
It looks like a 9.7-inch WiFi-only TouchPad and a 3G/Wi-Fi TouchPad aren’t quite enough for HP, as rumors suggest that the company may be building a 7-inch model of the TouchPad to be released in August.
This should come as pretty good news to those of you who, like myself, prefer a smaller, more portable tablet. → Read More
