There have been a few walkie-talkie mobile apps that have come out on iOS and Android over the last year or two, but it wasn’t until last fall that one of them had a breakout moment. Voxer suddenly hit it big with the young black community in Cleveland and a few other big cities last November. Since then, it has spread to the rest of the world, topping the app store and gaining a wide range of users – including venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road here in Silicon Valley.

By which I mean, lots of VCs are both using it, and looking at investing in it. Voxer has spent the last couple months working on closing an angel round that it had left open, according to industry sources, while also working on its first venture funding. It’s raising $15-20 million at a pre-money valuation of $150 million, says one person. Another counters, saying that the valuation is going to be at least double that.

Among the attractions, beyond the usage numbers, are the company’s patents and tech about its live-streaming voice service. Many of its competitors are essentially using existing voice mail technology, which results in delays between the person recording and the person getting the message. Voxer is able to make everything live, to the point that you can talk to each other at the same time. It is the most similar to the Nextel walkie talkie phones that have been out for years, except it lets you listen to messages whenever you want and talk one-to-one with other users.

Beyond the product and tech, one of the other main attractions is that the company is looking at doing what Nextel did, and distribute across larger organizations. Indeed, founder Tom Katis told me in November that the idea for the company resulted from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, trying to coordinate reinforcements and medical teams during a firefight. He’s also the founder of one of the top security contractors in the world, Triple Canopy, so you can imagine him using his connections to that industry to help drive enterprise sales.

The big question now is how high investors are going to be willing to go. An additional source says that some top firms have been very interested, but are unsure of the company’s long-term trajectory. It has 2.5 million daily active users, one person says, but most of this growth has been in the last two to three months. The uncertainty here is what the future holds for Voxer’s style of communication – short-form voice message recordings, that users can listen to sequentially in a text-message style flow. The fact that VCs are finding the format valuable is no doubt helping the company raise.

I haven’t pinned down which venture investors are going to lead or participate, but names mentioned have included a good portion of the most prominent firms in the Valley.

We’re on post-PC watch here lately, tracking the many warning signs that we’ve crossed the imaginary line separating PC’s heyday from that of a new landscape scattered with multiple mobile devices; it’s a place where the traditional desktop and laptop computer is seeing decreasing importance. That’s why this new Forrester report on mobile devices in the workplace caught my eye, as it highlights the disruption those devices have caused in the business world, seemingly right under the noses of I.T.

Before diving into the data, the report notes that today’s I.T. departments think they have only a handful of devices out in the field: a PC and smartphone for most users, and maybe a tablet for a handful of execs. But in reality, one-half of info workers report using multiple devices, often behind I.T.’s back. Post-PC era? Sounds like it… whether I.T. is ready or not.

To determine its findings, the analysts surveyed nearly 10,000 information workers and 2,300 I.T. decision makers around the world. The two groups’ responses indicated a big disconnect in terms of what those in charge of device connectivity think is happening, versus what’s actually happening.

Info workers reported using 60 percent of all their PCs and mobile devices for both personal and business use, with only 14 percent used just for work, and 26 percent for personal purposes. The numbers indicate a further blurring of the boundaries between personal time, and time spent working.

When I.T. departments were asked how many devices were used in their companies, however, only about a third reported that they issued three or more to execs. A quarter reported issuing three or more to I.T. workers, and fewer to other types of workers.

But when workers themselves were asked, over half (52 percent) said they used three or more devices for work purposes. Uh-oh! Some of those are flying under the radar, it seems.

So what kinds of devices are these? Well, one-third (33 percent) of all those reported to be in use were non-Microsoft, and one-quarter of them were mobile. (Forrester counts tablets as “mobile,” for what it’s worth).

Explains (exclaims!) Forrester’s Frank Gillett, “Microsoft’s share of OS on shipping PCs is still much more than 90 percent and declining only incrementally in the face of growing Apple Mac share. Microsoft’s share of PCs in companies is even higher. But seen through the eyes of the workers, not I.T., Microsoft is down to about two-thirds of the devices they use to get work done.”

What’s more, Microsoft’s OS share in the I.T. environment will erode over time, as multi-device use becomes more common.

I.T. is slow to respond to changes here, even though they’re already underway. In fact, you could say the same thing about employees’ use of consumer-friendly cloud services, like Dropbox, iCloud, Google Apps, Box.net, and others – services which mobile makes even more accessible.

In addition, although we’re hearing a lot about BYOD (“bring your own device”) programs in businesses, it’s still a trend in its very early stages from I.T.’s perspective.

Employees today are bringing their own devices largely outside of BYOD programs, Gillett says. While 73 percent of workers pick their own phone, 53 percent their own laptop, 22 percent their own desktop, and 66 percent their own tablet, significant numbers of workers report paying for the devices themselves. In the case of smartphones, for example, 57 percent report paying the full price for the device themselves, and 48 percent report paying full price for their own tablet.

BYOD programs, meanwhile, are still low. Only 6 percent of companies have BYOPC programs in place. 58 percent expect growth in employees bringing smartphones to work in the next 12 months, whether BYOD-supported or not.

I.T.’s slowness in shifting policies to accommodate employee behavior is due to the processes which have been in place for years, including how I.T. budgets are handled, the need to streamline operations, the way device approvals have been handled, security requirements put in place for legal reasons, compliance issues and more. Employees dictating to I.T. what they’ll be using now (thank you very much), is also such a new concept that’s it still downright laughable in some circles. Imagine! The users think they’re in control! Ha ha ha ha!

Well, surprise: they are. And I.T. is in denial about it.

This is only one of many examples of what the post-PC Era looks like, or at the very least, how a transition into such an era begins. And to be clear, “post-PC” doesn’t have to mean “no PC.” Maybe it’s not the best turn of phrase to describe it (R.I.P. Steve Jobs). “Post-PC”  is about having more devices, and the PC is not the only one that matters.

Geoloqi, a name you may know because of the mobile app that once provided automatic Foursquare check-ins and geofenced reminders, is today launching its next-generation location platform as an SDK. Although previously available in API format for developers’ use, the new iOS and Android SDK makes it even easier for developers to drop in location services into their apps, whether those are consumer-facing apps, apps for government, carriers, or the enterprise.

The company was founded by Amber Case and Aaron Parecki in 2010 and (awesomely) bootstrapped with hackathon winnings until last June when it received $350,000 in angel backing. But even when one of the co-founders is known as a “cyborg anthropologist,” what makes Geoloqi really interesting is the way it handles location services. That is to say, it handles location intelligently.

One of the primary problems with location-tracking apps today is that they have a tendency to drain smartphones’ batteries by always running the GPS in the background, or constantly pinging cell towers. With the Geloqi SDK, however, Case explains that algorithms know when to turn the GPS on and off. For example, if an app is using geofences, it knows that the GPS doesn’t have to constantly be running unless you’re near those geofences, she says. (For the uninitiated, geofences are a new-ish, but still somewhat under-utilized technology that allows events to trigger as you’re passing by a given location. One example of a geofence could be a location-based reminder, like an alert that reminds you to buy milk when you arrive at the grocery store.)

After building a sample app (the consumer-facing Geoloqi), Case says that their phone just started ringing. Enterprise, government and even carriers were interested in the technology and were inquiring about a white label version. Although the company wasn’t ready for customers, they eventually let interested parties start using a beta version of Geoloqi early last year. One such customer is TATE, Inc., a company that helps U.S. government personnel overseas, including DoD staff, contractors, and those from other agencies. With Geloqi’s carrier agnostic tech, they’re able to keep their people safe when they’re outside the U.S. using other operator networks.

In addition to real-time tracking, Geoloqi’s new SDK also provides access to location-based push messages, geofences, location-based analytics (soon), hosted spatial intelligence, plus support for iOS, Android, Windows and embedded systems.

Although the potential for Geloqi’s revenue possibilites lie with its carrier, government and enterprise relationships, such a technology will also help heat up the consumer app space, too, especially when plans start at $19/month (and testing is free).

Geoloqi is not alone in hoping to heat up this location services market, however. Other companies, like Urban Airship for example, which acquired SimpleGeo in 2011, will also help bring location-based push messaging to mobile apps.

As a potential user of such apps, watching the technology advance is exciting. To date, most of us have been hesitant to use too many GPS-enabled apps, primarily because of the battery drain issues. But if the technology can be pushed forward in a way to reduce the impact on battery life, it could become common for apps to not just remind us and alert us to things, but do so smartly.

Imagine coupon and deals apps that could tell you if you’re passing by a place that has a special available, grocery shopping apps that send you your list as you walk in the store, friend-tracking apps whose reminders can be configured by proximity, news apps hyper-targeted to your neighborhood or block, and so on.

More details on Geoloqi’s SDK, its pricing and support options are available on the company’s developer site here.

Correction: The consumer-facing mobile application no longer does automatic Foursquare check-ins, but the iTunes App Store description claimed it did, up until this article’s posting this morning. The company just sent in an update to Apple which will correct the description in the App Store.

If you’re an iPhone user, you may not be as familiar with Astrid, which has turned into one of the most popular “to-do,” list-making apps for Android. We first wrote about Astrid when it joined thirteen other startups that composed AngelPad’s second batch. Astrid’s value proposition was simple: Offer users a clean, easy-to-use interface to enable sharing and collaboration around tasks. Other services have now come along to make this a familiar service, but the goal was for groups (businesses) to be able to assign tasks to each other, and broadcast to the group when those tasks are completed.

In the big picture, Astrid was conceived to be a social way to encourage friends and colleagues to help tackle your to-do list, from sending memos to buying your mom a Mother’s Day present. A year removed from AngelPad, Astrid has moved across platforms, as the startup now offers a mobile site, Android, and iOS apps, with a Windows Phone app on the way. But, what some may not know is that Astrid was started as a side-project by co-founder Tim Su, then a software engineer at Palantir Technologies. Su was joined by co-founder Jon Paris, and the two launched Astrid on the Android Market when it was still young, back in the fall of 2008.

Collectively, the team were early adopters and proponents of Android, says Paris, but like so many others, they moved on to focus on building for iOS and other platforms. But, today, Astrid is officially returning to the platform on which it got its start, launching a new version of its service for Android tablets, accompanying a complete redesign for Android phones that features streamlined design and a new set of integrations aimed at helping users be more productive.

More specifically, Astrid’s new app for Android tablets can be used independently, or synced with Android phones, iOS, and Astrid.com. The app is available now for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom, and will be made available in the next week for Kindle Fire through the Amazon App Store. The goal here, Paris says, is to make the UX easy for new users to adopt and learn without disrupting the experience of those using older versions.

And, to that point, the CEO tells us that Astrid has helped people complete over 30 million tasks and has racked up 3 million downloads across platforms. Yet, while Astrid is one of the most downloaded paid to-do apps in the Android Marketplace, the startup is today launching a new revenue stream via integration with TaskRabbit. Astrid has long offered users the ability to share tasks with family and friends, but, as part of its new look, users can now outsource individual to-dos to TaskRabbit, the fast-growing personal assistant that lets users list errands or tasks that needed to be completed in its marketplace. For those unfamiliar, it’s basically an on-demand delivery network for outsourced tasks.

Astrid is also now offering users the ability to view suggestions/ideas through integrated search with Amazon and Google, for the simple reason that many of us start their tasks with a Google search before popping over to Amazon to make a purchase. Again, in case it’s unclear, what Astrid is trying to do here is match to-dos and tasks with products and services that help get them done, a la TaskRabbit and Amazon. Paris says that he thinks this can be a win-win for both eCommerce retailers (and startups like TaskRabbit), as Astrid’s users are inherently people with full plates, looking to manage their tasks and lighten the loads. And eCommerce sites now get the benefit of getting traffic from people that are more likely to buy.

In the case of TaskRabbit, for every user that ends up purchasing help on the site, for every transaction, Astrid takes a cut. Paris — and he’s not alone — believes that the to-do list space is understandably a potential goldmine for purchase intent, something that has been supported by the interest around Pinterest and its related monetization path.

Clearly Gmail set the stage for crawling what is considered personal and sensitive information (your inbox) and matching it to related ads. Astrid is basically doing the same, serving up related ads when you search within the app for products/services that help you check off your tasks, but the CEO says that he understands the personal nature of to-dos, so users can turn off this new feature. Although not totally analogous, given what happened to Path, transparency in these situations is definitely advisable.

As to what’s next, Paris mentioned that they are working with TaskRabbit to provide additional features around outsourcing your task list. A lot of people don’t know which of their tasks to outsource to other people, so the team is expecting to offer the ability for its users to post their task lists on TaskRabbit and let other users flag all the items that they can help with. Beyond that, the startup is also considering adding a premium version of the service, and is embarking on its mission to raise its Series A. (It raised a seed round back in July of last year from Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and a few angel investors.)

As the collaborative economy heats up, and startups like TaskRabbit gain traction, it behooves services like Astrid to take group collaboration and task assigning outside its own walls, to the marketplaces that specialize in that kind of commerce. That can potentially be a lucrative relationship for both parties, though that remains to be seen. Along with a refreshed look for Android, adding subtasks to its service is another bonus. And, hey, now the 10 people that have Android tabs get to use Astrid 4.0, too. (Just kidding.)

For more on Astrid, check it out at home here.

We’re all becoming increasingly reliant on consumer cloud services, as cloud storage providers like Dropbox make it easy to share and store files, folders, images, sync between platforms, and more. They make our lives easier, but because they store an enormous amount of potentially sensitive data, there are some inherent risks. While Dropbox is for personal use, it and services like it are increasingly being used by businesses — another example of the ongoing consumerization of enterprise and IT.

It’s also true that most people want their data in their cloud service to be synced across all platforms on which they have the app installed, mobile, desktop, etc. So, with individuals and companies storing sensitive data in the cloud, cross-sync can make for some potential security problems, and it’s not really something you want to do at work.

That’s why virtualization provider AppSense has created DataLocker, a set of mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Windows and Mac that enable users to encrypt sensitive information in their Dropbox accounts for free — without giving up the convenience of cross-platform syncing.

DataLocker is the first product from “AppSense Labs,” the company’s new research arm, which is dedicated to building consumer-friendly solutions around cloud, mobile, and data that work within traditional IT infrastructure. As the boundaries between personal and professional computing are blurring, AppSense Labs will look to ride that wave with new products that capitalize on this transition, making it easier on consumers and enterprise, piece by piece.

And to that point, DataLocker is a great first step in alleviating some of the worry over the security of our personal information as it moves about the cloud. With the advent of Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, businesses will have to decide whether these proprietary clouds are something they want to adopt. In iCloud’s case, user accounts are tied to Apple not to businesses, which may lead to some businesses balking at using the service to share sensitive company information.

This is where DataLocker could really come in handy. For now, it’s focused on Dropbox, but there’s potential for it to move beyond Dropbox, even if iCloud/SkyDrive integration isn’t in the cards. Businesses want to use friendly cloud services, and encryption of sensitive data is key to encouraging further adoption.

As to how the app works? It’s fairly straightforward, users simply install the app and link it to their Dropbox accounts, at which point they can upload new files, protect them instantly, while browsing and viewing existing and protected Dropbox files.

AppSense raised $70 million from Goldman Sachs a year ago today.

For more, check out the iOS app here.

ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, ToutApp customers will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what the recipient clicked on, and how long they read the email.

Creepy? OK, maybe. But for serious CRM users, it’s kind of great, too.

If you haven’t heard of ToutApp before, a little background: the startup is attempting to address one of the most woefully overlooked pain points nearly everyone deals with today: email overload. To help speed up the process of creating and responding to email, the company launched its service last year which helps users create personalized email templates (aka “canned responses”). After installation, the app digs into your email to identify the types of mass emails you send to help you build these templates.

After your templated emails are sent, you can track nearly everything that takes place with them in the recipient’s inbox: it’s the who, what, when, where and how long of email viewing. It then presents this in a live-updating feed within your preferred email client. While privacy advocates my find this a shocking invasion, I disagree. Privacy, shmivacy. There are real-world benefits to this sort of tracking across multiple industries.

In my (fantasy) world, here’s how ToutApp could improve my life dramatically: a PR person sends a pitch. I open it. Read it. Click the link. Close the link. Then return to reading more email. When the PR person doesn’t hear back, instead of sending out one of those “just circling back” emails to determine interest, they already know I read the email and followed through by viewing the URL it included. If they still had to follow up, the response wouldn’t be a time-wasting “hey, did you read my email?” email, but a more productive follow-on pitch containing different angles or information the first one had neglected to include.

Of course, that’s just one example. As a entrepreneur, you could template different pitches to journalists and investors, and then see if they were read. Salesforce users could craft templates for client emails that help them close deals. And so on.

ToutApp is designed to integrate with Gmail, CRM systems like Highrise, Batchbook, and Capsule, and has been working to support Salesforce. However, until this latest update, the Salesforce integration was limited. The startup was doing some sporadic testing, but nothing was available to the public.

But now, Salesforce users will be able to see real-time updates on when and where emails were read, what was clicked and other analytics data related to email tracking directly from within Salesforce. Templating, automatic file attachments, and performance reports are also included.

In addition, for Gmail and iOS ToutApp users, there are a few other changes rolling out today, too, including a new Email Activity Feed for real-time tracking of emails, an improved interface for ToutApp’s Gmail integration and an updated iOS app that allows you to edit templates, send messages while on the go, and view email analytics on mobile.

ToutApp was founded in 2010 by Tawheed Kader, and closed a seed round of $350,000 last summer from 500 Startups, Esther Dyson, Eric Ries, Daniel Eskapa, NYC Seed Fund, Joshua Baer, and others.

Pricing for the service is based on the size of your team, ranging from a $12/month pack allowing you to send 25 emails a day, make three Tout groups and use 10 email templates, all the way to $199/month, offering support for unlimited groups and shared templates, team-wide analytics tracking, and support for up to 25 team members. More info is available on the ToutApp website here.

If you run a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.

Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system.

Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks. The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his co-founder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space.

Other website guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter), Armorize, StopTheHacker (also recently funded) and CodeGuard. They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments).

More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone websites. This can include anything from Facebook pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites.

While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management systems are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying.

The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures, following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.

“Wait, you want us to be your lab rats?” “Pioneers”

If you need more proof that Microsoft and Google hate each other, just watch the video above. It’s a direct message from Microsoft to businesses everywhere. And it raises some very valid points.

Change is hard for everyone. Switching from Office to Google Docs isn’t an easy switch. Many features are still missing from Google’s productivity suite. It’s not a direct replacement. Typing in the cloud is fantastic but so is a reliable auto-spell check and fool-proof offline editing. Microsoft Office might be disappearing from some shops but others rely on it as much as the office’s coffeepot.

Google will no doubt fire back with its own quirky advert. You can always count on Microsoft and Google’s marketing department for a good show.

Another cloud startup is making enhancements to improve the performance and functionality of its services. This one is squarely for enterprises and comes from Huddle, which today is announcing Huddle Sync, a service that promises “intelligent” synchronization of enterprise work files to serve users what they need, when they need it.

Huddle is banking on the idea that services like Dropbox will have limited appeal to enterprise users who have to access masses of data; and that IT managers and CIOs will want to exert control on how users access files, and that users will find managing everything themselves a headache. And that companies like Microsoft or IBM will not beat it to the punch in offering this functionality directly.

“Everyone does cloud synchronization today,” says Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP of Strategy. “That’s fine with 50 gigabytes of personal content, but when you have 50 terabytes, there is no way to know what is relevant. Dropbox is a terrific tool for small teams, but it’s not suitable for the enterprise.”

That is an issue that will only grow in the years ahead. In figures provided by Huddle, IDC in 2011 estimated that the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zetabytes this year, with enterprises accounting for 80 percent of information “in the digital universe” at some point in its digital life.

The service — available today for Windows desktop and as an iPhone app, with further platforms like Mac coming soon — works like this: enterprise users have access to sections of files that their IT managers enable them to use. Then over time, Huddle says that its algorithms learn what a user is accessing, and starts to offer relevant files to them, which they can use online or offline. IT folks get full audit reports of what gets accessed and when.

London and SF-based Huddle says that from today 100 of its customers will be going live on the platform, with it becoming available to its full user base soon. That base, currently, numbers 100,000 businesses, including 70 percent of UK’s central government and 80 percent of companies in the Fortune 500, such as HTC, Kia Motors and Procter & Gamble, says McLoughlin.

While we have heard many stories of remotely-controlled cloud services going down and causing problems for both enterprises and consumers, Huddle is fairly bullish on its ability to remain robust as it serves its current customers and continues to grow. McLoughlin says the company, so far, has not had to pay back on a single service-level agreement in its years of operation.

Hopefully McLoughlin hasn’t spoken too soon. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO and other co-founder, Alastair Mitchell, says that Huddle expects for its business to triple in size in the next two years — with options to potentially sell services like Sync on to third parties to offer on to other businesses or even consumers: after all, recommendation and personalization services are a hot area today.

The company, he notes, is already profitable and has not raised any more money since raising nearly $15 million several years ago, but he said it expects to announce another funding round soon “to help it grow even faster.”

Though it may not always seem like it, big wireless carriers are still stuck on the concept of push-to-talk communication. It’s easy to see why — instantaneous communication between multiple people can be a huge benefit in certain lines of work, and and catering to those groups often leads to some hefty service contracts. To that end, AT&T has announced that they have launched a new charter program geared toward getting push-to-talk smartphones in front of business customers.

Now the idea of implementing push-to-talk on smartphones isn’t exactly new — there are a whole host of apps available for the major mobile platforms that allow users to send voice notes, messages and media over their data connections. The immensely popular Voxer app comes to mind — it boasts a pretty robust feature set, not to mention about 200,000 average daily downloads. So what’s different about AT&T’s approach?

Their ace in the hole here seems to be their use of partner Kodiak Networks’ InstaPoC technology. While the name may conjure images of a real stinker, InstaPoC reportedly allows for sub-second voice connections between compatible devices, as well as better voice quality than a standard phone call.

InstaPoC was created in compliance with the imaginatively-named PoC (Push to Talk over Cellular) 2.0 standard, which lays out in excruciating detail the criteria necessary for a reliable, business-grade push-to-talk system. Throw in the ability for developers to fold PTT support into other applications via an API, and all of a sudden we’re looking at a potential ecosystem centered around instant communication.

AT&T promises that entrants into their charter program will be able to test the PTT service on “powerful, state of the art smartphones,” though they don’t offer any specifics. Considering the types of phones that tend to get saddled with PTT functionality, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see users testing the service given something like the forthcoming Rugby Smart to mess around with.

Software and SaaS security company Cenzic is today launching a new security product for mobile application developers which will allow for the testing of mobile apps on any platform – iOS, Android, J2ME, and more. The product will be the first that can test products without requiring developers to submit the source code, as all the testing is done through the cloud, while the app is up-and-running.

The service will then be able to tell what sorts of security vulnerabilities an app has, what sensitive data it could leak, what other sorts of security threats it may be vulnerable to, and what to do about it.

The security risk inherent in using mobile applications was recently in the spotlight, when it was discovered that many of users’ favorite apps were uploading their address books to developers’ servers. But that kind of risk, while important, is not the sort of thing that Cenzic’s solution is interested in addressing.

Explains John Weinschenk, CEO of Cenzic, “there’s been a lot hype and a lot of focus on the device itself, but the device itself is not the risk. If I hack into your mobile device, I get your information. That’s not that interesting. But as a hacker, if I hack into the server itself, I can get millions of accounts, and millions of pieces of information,” he explains.

The problem Cenzic wants to help fix has to do with the fact that many companies’ backend systems were designed to be accessed by web applications, but are now being accessed by mobile apps.

With the new solution, the company looks at a mobile app’s backend and use of web services, and analyzes those for vulnerabilities. This is especially important for enterprise app makers, who need to ensure that their apps’ are protected against all the latest threats to protect sensitive customer data.

But how prevalent are these sorts of vulnerabilities? Weinschenk says that prior to today’s launch, the company tested over 30 applications for four (unnamed) beta customers, which included companies that have over a billion dollars in sales operating in the financial services space, in e-commerce and in manufacturing. During the testing period, Cenzic found that 60% of the vulnerabilities were input validation issues, while 40% were authentication issues. “What this means,” explains Weinschenk, “is that programmers writing mobile applications don’t really understand how to manage the authentication of that device communicating up to the server.”

In Cenzic’s solution, the platform will provide info on how to fix the vulnerability and how to make code changes, but, as it doesn’t have access to the source code itself, will not make the changes, only point to the affected part of the code. In addition, the library of vulnerabilities is updated every week, similar to anti-virus systems, so developers can continually test for new threats to their mobile apps’ backends.

The new mobile solution will also be wrapped into Cenzic’s other products, in the form of software, managed services and cloud offerings. Pricing starts at $7,000 per app per year.

The company today secures more than 500,000 online applications for Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, universities, security companies, SMB’s and others. More information about the mobile product is now available on the Cenzic homepage here.

Attachments.me, the startup that promises to take the pain out of searching through email attachments, is gradually ramping up the services it’s offering to users: from today, it is launching an option to automatically file your attachments to specific folders in the cloud; and it has also expanded support to include Box, which now joins Dropbox in its list of supported cloud storage partners.

The news caps off some significant developments we’ve seen at attachments.me since announcing a seed round of $500,000 from Foundry Group last year: others have included Dropbox support and Gmail extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

The addition of an automatic filtering feature underscores the growth of time-saving services that we’re seeing around cloud storage — in other words, it’s not just yet another set of dumb folders for filing things away. In this case, attachments.me will let users set up rules to decide how attachments get stored, and then when the attachments come in, they’ll automatically go to specified folders.

The service sounds promising, if somewhat limited in this first iteration: for starters, attachments can be filtered by sender and file type — but not subject or other keywords. Also, a user can only set up the rules in attachments.me’s Chrome extension.

However, it’s worth nothing that in a blog post announcing the new service, co-founder Jesse Miller says that this is just 1.0 of this service: “We have a ton more options we are going to add to automatic filing,” he writes.

One of these, apparently, will be letting users set up automating rules via the tools’ iPhone app as well. Another area that has room for expansion: the platforms that attachments.me supports overall. It has yet to add other email providers, apart from Google’s Gmail.

Meanwhile, the new support for Box is a logical next step for attachments.me as it looks to grow its customer base, which currently accounts for some 40 million Gmail attachments.

Specifically, it could see attachments.me make bigger inroads into the enterprise segment: Box.net last year signed a strategic deal with HP to offer its cloud services on selected HP desktops, and, on the back of an $81 million Series D round of funding in October 2011, Box could have other, more aggressive expansion plans on the cards, too.

Mobilisafe, the stealthy Seattle-based mobile security startup with $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partnership, is opening up access to its private beta program today (invite link below) for a handful of TechCrunch readers.

In addition, the company is revealing new insights it gained during its private beta period related to the penetration of mobile devices in the SMB market – the area which happens to be the startup’s current area of focus.

Much of the current analysis on the consumerization of I.T. and the accompanying BYOD (“bring your own device”) trends are focused on the enterprise market, but Mobilisafe’s data comes from its own hands-on experience with SMB’s.

Founded by by former T-Mobile software architects Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, Mobilisafe is focused on building a security solution that helps companies deal with the influx of personal devices on the corporate network. But the startup doesn’t just provide businesses with tools to manage the increased number of mobile devices, it’s also performing data-mining on the aggregate data it collects, enabling its solution to learn over time, and become more predictive about its analysis and recommendations.

Mobilisafe’s big advantage is that it will be able to use the aggregate data to analyze whether an organization is more or less secure than its peers in the same industry or vertical. Right now, the focus is on providing this analysis and understanding to smaller businesses (between 15-2,500 employees), especially because they’re more at risk due to lower I.T. budgets and/or lack of in-house I.T. expertise. But such an ability could easily be useful in larger organizations in the future, if Mobilisafe wanted to go that route.

Over the past three months, Mobilisafe mapped out more than 38 million employee device connections (now up to 44M), which allowed it to uncover some interesting trends within the SMB market.

For example, the majority of SMB’s are highly mobilized, and are driven by BYOD programs, with over 80% of SMB employees already using smartphones and tablets. A new device model was introduced to a company for every 6.6 employees, but over half (56%) were running out-of-date firmware. SMB I.T. departments, meanwhile, are often at a loss when it comes to determining this sort of information for themselves.

In addition, around 39% of authenticated devices were inactive for over 30 days, something that could indicate devices which were lost, stolen, replaced or sold. In some cases, these devices may have had employee credentials and sensitive corporate data on them before disappearing off the network.

The data gathered here through Mobilisafe’s initial beta run is more of a confirmation of the market value for its mobile security solution, meant to simplify the challenges involved with assessing security risk and then knowing the next steps to take after being presented with specific issues.

Mobilisafe has been quietly running a private beta since late last year. Companies use its SaaS solution to tell Mobilisafe what kind of risk threshold they have, and then the startup does the heavy lifting to determine whether they’re falling above or below that threshold. The whole thing can be deployed in 15 minutes, without hardware or network changes, on-device software, or changes to employee behavior, the startup says.

In conjunction with the release of this new SMB data, Mobilisafe is also opening up access to its private beta to 50 TechCrunch readers who head to  mobilisafe.com/signup and enter in the code TECHCRUNCH.

How would you like to crunch your way through big data on your iPad? That’s one of the many promises of Lucky Sort, the stealthy new Portland, Oregon-based startup building a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch meant for discovering patterns in live data streams.

The company just raised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, and, oh, geek out on this one: chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who is also now the Chief Science Officer at the firm.

According to Lucky Sort CEO and founder Noah Pepper, “everyone complains about information overload, but until now, there have been few technologies or solutions that can really help a user control and even take advantage of the data deluge in flexible and creative ways.”

That where TopicWatch comes in. With the new service, Lucky Sort’s first product, the company wants to enable users to sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time, in order to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. To be clear, TopicWatch is not yet another “sentiment analysis” or “social listening” platform – those are just subsets of what can be done on top of its platform.

In addition, TopicWatch isn’t just for public data, like Twitter updates or RSS feeds. While those are supported, users are also able to import their own text content into the platform, and then analyze that alongside other data from Lucky Sort and its (yet to be announced) partners.

The big idea here is that the startup is trying to build the next generation interface for discovering information from huge, unstructured data sets. The system uses NLP (natural language processing) that favors statistics and user input over ontologies.

“Moving away from ontologies and dictionaries is pretty radical,” explains Pepper. “NLP relies on using known properties about language data. If you don’t have a database of nouns, verbs, etc., it’s hard to know what the linguistic structure is and therefore how to do more traditional NLP that leverages knowledge from the field of linguistics.”

For the company, Lucky Sort represents a philosophical shift away from trying derive structure from unstructured data, and a move towards embracing unstructured data mining through statistics. OK, that is pretty radical.

And if that’s all too complex an explanation, perhaps this will help. The end result are visualizations that look like this:

This visual interface for data manipulation just happens to work via touch, too. Yes, on the iPad. Of course, if you’re old school, you can do it all on the desktop, and there’s an API available for other developers to use. But that iPad app looks pretty hot, if you ask me.

The product has the potential to turn anyone into a data journalist and/or analyst, as it’s focused on ease of use, despite the complexities on the backend. With TopicView, users can embed and share restricted web views that provide interactive explorations of events or topics directly onto their website.

Forget infographics, these are living, breathing graphics.

Before Lucky Sort, Pepper was the Director of R&D for Qmedtrix, where he oversaw machine learning and visualization platforms to detect fraud and abuse in medical reimbursements. He also serves as a Collaborative Researcher for the Advanced Computation Group at Apple. However, Pepper says the concept for the new startup grew from his earlier work at Reed College’s Artificial Life Lab in the Center for Advanced Computation. He’s joined by CTO and co-founder Homer Strong and Chief Information Architect Devin Chalmers, who both have extensive development backgrounds as well.

The TopicWatch applications for iOS and the Web will launch in May 2012, as will the API. An enterprise private cloud solution will also be available in the future.

Editor’s note: Tien Tzuo is the CEO of Zuora, as well as the former chief strategy officer/chief marketing officer at salesforce.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @tientzuo.

Everyone is applauding Oracle and SAP’s cloud acquisitions — RightNow, SuccessFactors, and now Taleo. But the biggest cheers are coming from SAP and Oracle’s cloud competitors, salesforce.com and Workday. Because with these acquisitions, Oracle and SAP have effectively validated the cloud and sounded the death knell for ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Why? Because SAP and Oracle are acquiescing to the cloud, yet they have no strategy to get their customers there. If SAP and Oracle were serious about the cloud, where are their big cloud solutions or visions for migrating customers?

Consider SAP, the leader in ERP. SAP had supposedly bought into the cloud five years ago with SAP BusinessbyDesign. But there are only 1,000 BusinessbyDesign customers to date; that’s less than half of a percent of SAP’s entire install base. Salesforce has over 100,000 customers last time I looked. So where’s SAP’s NetSuite killer? How are they going to fend off Workday?

Similarly, Oracle is the leader in the enterprise stack, but, when it comes to the cloud, it has acted like a follower. Oracle’s initial response to the popularity of cloud computing was to revert to the mainframe mindset with Oracle private clouds. Oracle should be reinventing its entire stack and look to provide the next generation platform for the enterprise. That position is open and available. Instead, it bought Taleo, an HR solution, and RightNow, yet another CRM solution. Why isn’t Oracle offering a relationship database in the cloud? Or an app server in the cloud? Why isn’t Exadata a true competitor to Amazon? That would be a true sign of Oracle really trying to be a leader.

SAP and Oracle should be pushing innovative cloud solutions that cannibalize their bases. Instead, they’re attempting to acquire themselves into innovation. That’s not a strategy. That’s a shift into survival mode.

These kinds of deals have a history of backfiring on the deal makers. We’ve seen this story before: an industry giant makes a “strategic” acquisition that causes a critical shift in perception of a nascent space. It happened when Siebel acquired Upshot and in turn validated salesforce.com. It happened when Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com and validated YouTube. It happened when Cisco acquired Pure Digital, propelling video as a standard feature on smart phones. I would argue that it happened when Time Warner acquired AOL and in turn validated the entire Internet economy.

In each case, an industry leader first denies the relevance of a technology, then frets over losing marketshare to it, then finally spends big money to acquire it under the pretense that it’s the key to “expanding innovation”. Overnight, that technology is now worth far more in the eyes of customers and investors. But more importantly, the acquisition strategy failed in each case. Instead of leading the way, the deal makers never committed to the technology, and their actions usually helped open the door to a whole new class of companies to take over.

The bottom line is this: A series of cloud acquisitions won’t help lumbering old ERP one bit. Acquiring cloud companies doesn’t make you a cloud company any more than buying a Giants jersey makes you Eli Manning. It’s not a strategy for an on-premise solutions company. It’s an attempt to distract customers and hope they will forget about the ERP boat anchor they’re stuck with.

The big ERP players had their day, but now it’s coming to an end. This is the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. For too long SAP and Oracle have watched the enterprise market innovate around them, stuck to their knitting and failed to adapt. The cloud technology wave has passed them by, and now it’s too late.

It’s time for SAP and Oracle to either accept that they need to adapt and go all cloud, or accept that they are going to go the way of the mainframe stuffed in the back closet. They won’t die completely. They’ll just become irrelevant.

But today’s news is about a cloud software accelerator funded by Runa Capital and Parallels. Both companies have been founded by Serguei Beloussov, the Russian entrepreneur turned investor. Parallels, a virtualization and hosting software company, is a rare global success story in Russia.  Runa Capital, which originates in Russia, funds growth-stage companies globally.

Marketing cloud-based software to small and medium size businesses (SMEs) is expensive. What Parallels and Runa Capital plan to do is to select APS-certified cloud based product and services companies, and upsell their products through Parallels’ distribution network, which consists of 5,000 service providers serving 12 million SMEs.

The approach may just work, provided that the Parallels’ organization is agile enough to implement it. When corporate acquisitions fail to extract synergies, it often happens because of bureaucracy and poor execution. So let’s see how the Parallels’ organization which has grown to 800 people worldwide, will be able to add value to its accelerator companies.

The accelerator does not specify exact financial terms. For those looking to apply, contact Runa Capital by writing to aps@runacap.com prior to obtaining APS certification.

Search engines like Google scour the web to figure out how to rank content. Measurement firms like comScore sample users to estimate traffic to web sites. But what if you want to know which of some 2000 technologies a web site is using? And, what if you want to know what the tech trends are across the 130 million largest sites on the web today?

You could just dig through the source code for each site you’re interested in to answer these questions piecemeal, or you could repurpose other web site profilers designed for search engine optimization or other jobs.

Or, you could use BuiltWith.

The five year-old bootstrapped startup, built by one-man team Gary Brewer in Australia, looks at the publicly available code for each site, and figures out each piece of technology that it’s using. It shows that TechCrunch, for example, is using the WordPress VIP content management system, ad targeting from Quigo and AdSonar, traffic measurement from comScore, ChartBeat, Optimizely, Google Analytics, and many others. It also shows all the Javascript  libraries and widgets that we’re using, including Facebook for Websites, JQuery, and the Twitter Platform. You can take a look at the full results here.

Organized, easily accessible data about the profile of any one web site can be valuable for, say, someone trying to sell cloud hosting or ad network products to new clients — especially for figuring things out like which clients are already using competitors’ technology.

But even more interesting are the big-picture trends that BuiltWith reveals. By aggregating the data about usage across all of the sites that it tracks, BuiltWith can show which web technologies are gaining or losing in usage across the web. Some examples:

Adobe’s Shockwave Flash embed technology has been seeing steady declines over the past couple years. Among the 10,000 largest sites on the web, its market share has declined from 13.71% in January of 2011 to 9.88% last month.

JQuery, a Javascript library, has been blowing up. From 21.88% of the top million web sites in January of 2011, it has reached 33.92% last month.

What about Facebook’s efforts to introduce its widgets and other platform services around the web? BuiltWith shows that the Facebook SDK is now being used by 747,588 sites around the web, and grew by 0.29% between February 5 and 12. Facebook for Websites, which includes social plugins, along with its Facebook Connect authentication service and other platform features, now has 1.35 million sites on board; it grew by 0.14% over the same period. The Like button itself is used by 1.12 million sites. Check out the full list on the BuiltWith Trends site.

How is BuiltWith monetizing all this publicly available but painful-to-aggregate data? Through a professional version called Trends Pro that lets people buy access to run custom reports across its database. Each report comes with further details on each included site, such as available contact information, and includes options to export to spreadsheets or into your company’s customer relationship manager software.

At this point, Brewer is focused on fine-tuning Trends Pro, and building out a team who can help him sell the product. He says he hasn’t ruled out taking funding but for the time being wants to see how far he can get by bootstrapping. Considering how much he’s managed to build over the last five years, I’d bet he’ll make it pretty far.

On Tuesday, we covered the launch of Nimble 2.0, a simple, affordable social relationship manager designed to give SMBs the same mileage out of social that enterprise has been able to create with its CRM strategies. For most companies, managing customer relations on social media is difficult, time-consuming, and less-than-precise, and they outsource different parts of the social media management, marketing, and sales to disparate solutions.

Thus, B2B startups are increasingly looking to throw a wrench into the gears of legacy CRM models, providing SMBs with lightweight solutions that make it easier for them to interact with customers on social networks, track those conversations and manage relationships across platforms.

Today, the space greets another unified management player, as New York City-based Tracx is officially launching its social media management platform into the wild after several years of building, tweaking their infrastructure and beta testing. Simply put, the startup is offering a modular and scalable platform that enables professional users to build, manage, and monetize their social presence. Using its proprietary tech, the startup allows brands and agencies to define their “ultimate audience profile,” manage, and to monetize that profile to drive engagement, conversion, and good old ROI.

To support its launch, tracx is also announcing that it has closed a $4.4 million round in series B funding. The round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Revel Partners. As part of the round, Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge and Charlie Kemper of Revel will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team says that it will be using its new capital to push its service in international markets, ramp up hiring, and continue touching up its UI.

With a growing number of options out there for social CRM, tracx’s SaaS solution looks to go beyond simply managing Twitter and Facebook feeds to providing brands with a more granular view into the entire lifecycle of social media campaigns. From planning, testing, and strategizing how to most effectively distribute content to better understanding and communication with your brand’s social media influencers, tracx wants to offer an end-to-end service that allows brands to get more bang for their increasing spend on social campaigns.

But the real key to the startup’s value proposition is its data engine. Tracx says that it is currently collecting and analyzing “over a terabyte of social data every second” — which is mind boggling if you think about those big data implications — to give its customers a more accurate, realtime view of audience segmentation across marketing, sales, and customer relations.

Like Nimble, tracx wants to go beyond “listening and monitoring” platforms by offering big picture analysis of the competitive landscape and giving them more realtime data than the next service to enable them to quickly strategize, research, and measure conversations that matter most to their business. And access detailed reporting.

Bringing big data to social CRM can have a big effect on how deep marketers are able to go in planning the best ways to reach and engage their customers. Companies don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight, and building a SaaS solution on top of a massive data silo — as long as that realtime engine doesn’t encumber the user experience — allows brands to arm themselves with more effective ammo in an increasingly data-driven world.

Tracx launches with 180 brands and agencies in tow, including Coca Cola, Interpublic Group, and Porter Novelli, to name a few.

For more, check out tracx at home here.

Startup Podio says it just addressed one of the top feature requests from the 40,000 companies that use its collaboration tools — it now integrates with Google Docs.

When TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis wrote about Podio a year ago, she called it “Yammer with its own app store and app builder.” Judging from the demo I saw earlier this week, many aspects of the basic interface will indeed feel natural to Yammer users (or really anyone who can handle a threaded conversation), but as Alexia’s description suggests, Podio’s real selling point is extensibility — if Podio doesn’t have a feature you want, you can build a simple app for it, and the company also integrates with other online services through its APIs.

One of the company’s goals, says VP of Apps Ryan Nichols, is getting as much information into Podio as possible. He argues that existing chat and project management tools can create an unnatural divide — you do your work, and then you go to a website where you talk about doing your work.

Podio, on the other hand, should be the place “where you actually get work done.” So everything on the site is associated with a file. You can create a conversation and assign tasks around a document or a spreadsheet, replacing the tedious and confusing back-and-forth that can happen over email.

Until now, however, you couldn’t do that with Google Docs — or rather, if you wanted to include Docs, you had to use a clumsy workaround like pasting the links into Podio and hoping the invites and permissions worked properly. With the new integration, Google Docs work like any other file in Podio.

This builds on a feature released last December, Podio for Google Apps, which allows you to turn Gmail messages into actionable tasks. With these integrations, Podio is hoping to both appease existing customers and reach new ones. However, in Europe (which makes up 40 percent of Podio’s customer base, and a higher percentage of premium customers), Nichols says penetration of Google Apps is relatively low, so there’s also an opportunity to introduce Apps to Podio customers.

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.

“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor.”

- Dr. Josh Umbehr

The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as they have produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective communication will separate the winners from the losers.

The quantum improvement in the depth and breadth of communication seen in the consumer Internet and in the consumerization of the enterprise (iPhones, Yammer, etc.) has yet to fully impact healthcare. With healthcare representing nearly 20% of the economy, the stakes are so high that it is inevitable that communications will be a key driver separating the winners from the losers as the tectonic shifts in the landscape shake out. This will usher in an array of new technology entrants similar to consumer and enterprise arenas disrupting ineffective and expensive communication methods of the past. The stars are aligning to make this happen.

“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of communication in clinical care. Even with devices, robotics, genomics and personalized care, it all rests, and depends on, clear communication.”

- Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE, FAAP

The Individual (aka the Patient) is the Most Important Member of the Care Team

It’s long been said that the most important member of the care team is the individual (or their family member).

Quite simply, in a world where one is compensated on value and outcome, it’s nearly impossible to have success without recognizing the importance of the patient. Consider the diagram in this article. It is clear and appropriate that the “system” — i.e., the collection of healthcare providers — is in control of decisions that drive outcomes in high acuity cases such as when one is unconscious in the hospital. In contrast, in low acuity situations such as managing a chronic condition, the individual and/or their family are clearly in control of actions that will drive the ultimate outcome. Whether adhering to an exercise, diet or prescription plan, the patient/family plays the central role in determining the outcome.

The importance of this can’t be overemphasized given that 75% of healthcare spend results from chronic conditions. Decisions made while a condition is in low acuity can rapidly lead to high acuity flare ups that drive large medical bills. As Dr. Swanson states, “the steering wheel should be attended by the patient.” After all, 99+% of an individual’s life is spent away from healthcare providers and no one else besides them is in the driver’s seat.

It is a good thing that there has been great focus put on improving communication between healthcare professionals through standards and incentives related to the new models being driven by private and federal insurance programs. The Patient Centered Medical Home and the Accountable Care Organizations are the two most high profile of these. However, the communication focus has been about the patient not with the patient. Having worked in and seen literally hundreds of healthIT systems, the fact is the fundamental purpose of the patient as envisioned by these systems is that the “patient” is merely a vessel to attach billing codes to — not a core part of the care team. This legacy approach will prove to be a fatal flaw in the new reimbursement models. Throwing bodies (e.g., care coordinators) at the problem can help, but will be at a disadvantage versus approaches that combine the best of human and technology driven communication methods.

There are efforts being made to tweak legacy software to address these requirements. Unfortunately, they are as likely to meet the new imperatives as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have been at becoming market leaders in social networking. The reality is Facebook built social networking into their core design from the ground up and bolting a dramatically different approach onto an old system rarely works whether it is social networking or patient-provider communications.

Good News for Forward Looking Healthcare Organizations

I get knowing nods from my physician friends when I exclaim that I hear more frequently from my dog’s vet than my doctor or my kids’ doctor. We realize why the historical reimbursement models have contributed to this dynamic. Considering that people retain less than 20% of what a doctor tells them, this lack of communication and patient retention is a brutal combination driving sub-optimal outcomes. The good news is there is a tremendous competitive advantage that a healthcare provider can realize if they choose to focus on improved communications for the 99+% of the time when a patient isn’t staring them in the face.

Not only can this opportunity provide a competitive advantage, it is imperative in the new models. Simplistic patient portals, however, won’t get the job done. I’ve yet to meet the physician or individual who thinks that just making lab results available to patients or allowing for secure messaging is changing the care paradigm.

Whether out of desire or necessity, consumers are ready for improved communication so they can save on their healthcare costs. It’s expected that roughly one-third of the workforce will be permanent freelancers, contractors, consultants, etc. with zero expectation of employer-provided insurance. Even those with employer-provided insurance, are picking up an ever-growing percentage of the premium. The current average is 30% of the costs are picked up by an employee (up from 10% in the recent past). This coincides with the rise of consumer empowerment that has happened in virtually every other sector. Dr. Patricia Salber wrote about DIY Healthcare  to explain how far things have already come and to assert her opinion that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thought-leading Physicians Are Ready

Fortunately the economics and simplicity of the consumer Internet and SaaS have finally come to healthcare. Once upon a time, sophisticated new software was first deployed in large enterprises. Today, greatly improved communication technologies begin with small organizations. Consider a physician like Dr. Craig Koniver who uses various free (e.g., Evernote) and low-cost off-the-shelf software to manage his communications without employing any administrative staff. Dr. Kent Bottles wrote about reverse innovation in healthcare talking about offshore innovation making its way to the U.S., but it’s not just offshore healthcare that can be a source of innovation. Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon, is another example of an innovative individual physician that is more sophisticated than most large healthcare providers by simply using free and low cost software to communicate with current and prospective patients.

As was highlighted in The Rise of Nimble Medicine, there is an explosion of disruptive innovators as well as innovation groups inside established healthcare organizations. In many respects, healthcare has been measured on production with an almost factory floor-like model of producing as many “widgets” (i.e., procedures, appointments, tests, prescriptions, etc.) as possible. However with a shift to a service model where success will be driven by factors such as satisfaction and health outcomes, smart healthcare providers recognize that systems optimized for production are ill-equipped to optimize for outcome. With that in mind, recognition grows that communication becomes the most important medical instrument of the future.