RockYou Cofounder Lance...

Lance Tokuda was one of the masterminds behind viral apps on Facebook back at the end of last decade. He cofounded and led RockYou as its chief executive through the evolution of the Facebook platform, all the while inundating users with hugs , horoscopes , birthday cards and other lightweight social app communications (which some may refer to as “spam”). RockYou ended up finding its business in social advertising and social gaming, and in late 2010 Tokuda stepped down from his CEO role. Now he’s back with a new company on Facebook today, called schoolFeed , that’s trying to connect older users with long-lost high school classmates. Designed as a Facebook canvas app and a standalone site that you use via logging in with your Facebook identity, schoolFeed basically creates a new layer that looks not dissimilar to myYearbook, Tagged and other entertainment-focused social networks that have survived Facebook’s world domination. But It’s going after Classmates.com, which charges a fee, by providing its service for free, and by mining Facebook data to discover missing connections. At this point you might be thinking, “hey wait, isn’t this what people already use Facebook for?” Tokuda’s response is that Facebook has not offered class-based high school search for years. There’s no way within Facebook, currently, to specifically search for class year. Instead, you just see everyone who ever went to the school (albeit you can piece together quite a bit of your old class by seeing who you have friends in common with). Tokuda also says that most older users have relatively few classmate connections on Facebook, based on the research he’s seen. Take a closer look at the app and you can see that there’s a lot more going on than anything Facebook is trying to do. First off, the app has its own news feed, that shows you activity from people that it already knows you went to high school with. And yes there’s a feature to help users plan real-life reunions. It also has a virtual currency system built in, that it uses to reward users for creating engagement — posting status updates, inviting friends and the usual types of incentives like that. The earnings can then be spent on games like Bingo, or on accessing real-life yearbooks. Via a recently introduced feature, one user from each high school can have their yearbook professionally scanned and uploaded in exchange for a bunch of virtual currency. Then, every other user who went to the same school pays using their currency to access each page in the book. From my understanding, one page is free each day but you pay if you want to flip through faster than that. The app does work fairly hard to strike a balance between virality and a quality user experience. For example, you can’t pile up the points by repeating the same actions over and over again. But if you become a serious user you’ll still find yourself blasting out a lot of messages. The site and app launched seven months ago, and so far it has been booming. It has more than 7 million registered users and nearly half a million daily active users, according to Tokuda; AppData meanwhile shows it hitting DAU numbers far higher than that on some days. When I asked Tokuda if he was interested in building a fuller-featured social network, he did say that he’d like to build out more features for young users as well, but that the focus is going to stay around classmates not anything else. The company has also convinced some RockYou investors to go in on it, too. It’s announcing what it calls a “seed” round of $1.75 million led by First Round Capital , with CrossLink Capital , Interwest Partners  and SK Telecom participating.

mHealth: Remote Patient...

Last month, we took a look at some of the ways mobile technology is transforming the health industry. While there are many factors affecting this transformation, like artificial intelligence, big data, 3-D printing, social health networks, and remote communications, to name a few (check out Josh’s post on this here ), unsurprisingly, change is coming at the hands of the growing ubiquity of cell phones, smartphones, and mobile devices. Early last year, PEW Research was already reporting that 17 percent of mobile phone users were using their devices to look up health and medical information, and Juniper recently estimated that 44 million health apps were downloaded in 2011. In turn, the amount and availability of health data is exploding in tandem with the growing adoption of health and medical apps and devices, thanks to the increasingly wearable and user-friendly devices that use smart sensors to capture and transmit a variety biometric data. Electronic medical records (EMRs) are being made available on mobile devices — e ven Kaiser Permanente is getting in on the digital revolution . The mHealth industry is growing fast. According to Research2guidance ‘s calculations, the size of the mHealth app market will nearly double in 2012 to $1.3 billion, up from $718 million in 2011. (I discussed the volatility of these statistics, the still-changing definitions of mHealth and mHealth technology, and conflicting reporting on these numbers here .) While these numbers can sometimes be misleading, the mHealth sector is not only going to continue to expand, its profitability is going to skyrocket. This is because, in juxtaposition with the $7 trillion global healthcare market, the mHealth market remains incipient. Healthcare companies, startups, and beyond are just beginning to tap into the potential of mobile technology, both in terms of quantified self devices, which bring healthcare in the clinic home, the mobility of data and communication channels. Companies are beginning to spend more and more on research and development, the big kahunas of the medical world are starting to release real, functional mobile apps, and consumer-facing medical devices are just starting to see real market penetration. On the other side of the table, doctors and health care professionals have begun to adopt mobile devices in droves, not only using these devices to manage their schedules (and workflow) as they move about the hospital or their practices, but to consult with patients, receive realtime alerts, and we’re already starting to see them being used for research and diagnostics. To this point, it’s no wonder that we’re also seeing a blossoming market for so-called “healthcare peripherals.” As smartphone processors become more powerful, a growing number of patients will be monitored by mobile networks. A recent report by Juniper on the mHealth sector estimated that 3 million patients will be monitored on those networks over the course of the next four years. In turn, Juniper expects that remote patient monitoring — by way of using the smartphone as a hub, — will significantly lower the cost of mHealth services, because it will create a reduced need for costly, tailored devices. In terms of which sectors are out in front, the Juniper report said that the monitoring of cardiac outpatients has become increasingly popular, “as insurance reimbursement in the U.S. market plays a key role.” Next, one can expect to see remote monitoring playing an increasingly central role in the management and ongoing treatment of chronic diseases, specifically of diabetes and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder. ( Omada Health recently raised a seed round from some notable angel investors to take on diabetes with behavior science and web and mobile technology. Gloocose is also doing some cool things here as well .) It’s these types of affordable patient monitoring services that can help intervene in unhealthy lifestyles, get (and keep) us in shape, as well as monitoring at risk and aging segments of the population. By doing so, they will help reduce the drain that legacy systems, over-medication, and more cause on the entire system, cutting costs across the board. Of course, the U.S. FDA plans to regulate mobile health products, which can be a good thing, as it could potentially open up the market and kickstart innovation. However, the FDA has not yet released its guidelines on what devices and services will require approval before being served up to the public. The FDA must ramp up its education and ensure that it avoids subjecting basic consumer-facing health apps to years of waiting for approval, regulations, and red tape. It will be a tricky balance to find, but the FDA could really open the floodgates. If they play it right, it could be a boon for the mHealth market. Furthermore, Juniper’s report also points out that developing markets are going to continue to benefit from SMS-based education programs and app-based healthcare services, like mobile ultrasound. And, as I mentioned before, electronic health records are still in the process of gaining traction, though there’s still a long way to go. Expect EMRs to become an increasingly important part of mHealth services. Go long on EMRs. For more, check out Juniper’s release here . Image excerpt from mHealthWatch

DMA: Email Brought in $...

According to the Direct Marketing Association’s recent “Power of Direct” study , email brought in an average of $40.56 for every dollar spent in 2011, with that number projected to decrease to roughly $39.40 in 2012 as many marketers are “missing out on opportunities to fully capitalize on email’s power.” “Too many programs fail to incorporate customer data effectively, to deliver more targeted and relevant emails,” says Matthew Kirsch, senior manager of online marketing at DirecTV. “The challenge with social and other new technologies is that an emailer can expend time and money chasing the newest thing and fall further behind on the nuts and bolts that will make meaningful and measurable improvements in his or her program,” he explains. Email’s decrease in ROI isn’t due to the medium losing its effectiveness, however, in fact email is big business and continually growing.  According to Forrester Research’s “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016,” email is expected to bring in $1.7 billion in revenue in 2012 and grow 10% annually through 2016, hitting $2.5 billion by 2016. At mobileStorm, we’ve long believed that email marketers need strong guidance in terms of making the most out of their email marketing strategy, which is why we give each and every client a dedicated account rep to provide such guidance and know-how every step of the way. More on the DMA’s recent study can be found here .

The Future of Peer Revi...

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other. Instant distribution Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago. Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Some of the strong platforms are Academia.edu , arXiv , Mendeley , ResearchGate and SSRN . What about peer review? One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research? Content discovery on the web Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web. The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are: Search engines (Google, Bing) Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc) Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively: Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website. Social Review : Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow. One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”: Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper. The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is: expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research. slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more.  of questionable quality : the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it.   unchanging : the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes  a lot of work for the reviewers : it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work. More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms: Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed Social platforms : Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter. As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process. But has the research been done to a high standard? People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not. The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally. Discovery and credit systems are powered by the same metrics Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question. The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system. One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process. Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit. Academic credit from social platforms In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include: numbers of followers you have the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed. These metrics show how much interest there is in your papers, and how widely they are read right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact. One drawback of citation counts as a metric of academic credit is that they are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper. This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit. The advantage of the kinds of metrics that social platforms like Academia.edu, Mendeley, and SSRN provide is that they are real time, and they fill this credit gap. Academics are increasingly including these real time metrics in their applications for jobs and for grants. The competition for jobs, and grants is intense, and having more data that speaks to the impact of your work helps. Funding bodies are also eager to see more data about the impact of research, as it helps them make better decisions. Instant Distribution and Peer Review The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation. The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by new peer review mechanisms, Crowd Review and Social Review, which are faster, cheaper, and more personalized. The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.

What’s the Fastest Grow...

Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s working wonders for the online ad business. According to eMarketer, video is showing the highest spending growth numbers of any category. Last year video went up 42.1% and it’s expected to keep in the double-digits for the next few years. More spending, means claiming a larger share of the online ad pie. For video, it’s currently at 7.9%, just barely sneaking past Classifieds and Directories. The share is expected to rise to 15% by 2016, keeping it solidly in third place. Add in search and banners and these three ads account for 80% of all ads sold. Search, accounting for almost half of all online ads by themselves. The rise in video ad spending is certainly being spurred on by the rise in video consumption. Recent numbers from comScore show that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 23.2 hours of video content per viewer in December . Video is the new TV but it’s cheaper and easier to put ads on a hit YouTube series than on a hit TV show. If you need more proof that online video ads are on the rise, answer this. When was the last time you watched a video that didn’t have either a banner or a pre-roll ad? I can’t think of one.