Saturday, November 2, 2013

Closing Keynote: Rich Miner, Partner at Google Ventures, Co-Founder of Android

"Exciting industries: innovation around enterprise, especially mobile's impact on enterprise."

"Traditional enterprise communication models are not creative... Think about what you can do with a mobile device."

"There is also tremendous amount of innovation in connected devices: your car, your phone, your digital camera..."

"It's been easier to prototype hardware now with the makers' movement: 3-D printing, makers' network. You can get your design built and delivered back to you in a few weeks."

"The idea of bringing the world to you with a press of a button."

"There is raw data saying that teams that worked together before will be more likely to succeed than teams that haven't. Teams with co-founders do better than those who don't."

"It comes down to the right dynamics between the founders. But also know what's the product, what's the market."

"Diversity in teams is hugely important."

"Successful startups tend to have a balance and diversity of background in business, technical, commercial experiences, with the exception if the team has worked together before."

"A lot of it is being ready for the ups and downs, the successes and the failures."

"To future entrepreneurs: you should be driven, you want to take risks. If you hesitate to clip the bungee cord on... The best entrepreneurs have a problem they want to solve. You can't get there by matricing where you can get most money."

"Working for a big company like Google sometimes is good to get exposed to skills that may help you learn product development etc in the future. Or find a startup you like and join them. You don't have to dive in right at the beginning."






Enterprise Mobility: How Mobile is Transforming the Workplace

Live-Blog of Enterprise Mobility Panel.  *Please note that anything not "in quotes" are paraphrases of what was said and are not direct quotes of the panelists.*

Moderator: Michael Skok, North Bridge Venture Partners (http://mjskok.com/)

Panelists: 
Jay Wessland, Vice President of Technology, Boston Celtics (Apperian customer)
Cimarron Buser, Global Business Development, Apperian
Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA
Tim Gu, product Manager, Integrations, Okta

Tom: Enterprises don't have talent pool to build and support mobile applications.  In crisis mode.  Start with sales reps
Uneven distribution in how enterprise shops are going into mobile. Majority is being used as sales tools (catalogs, finding stores)

Michael:  this is a consumer-led evolution.  Moving forward, it will be "BYO Cloud," "BYO Device," and different security measures will be needed for corporate and private data.

Tim: this breaks traditional security model (company devices, company resources).  Now people are bringing their own devices to work.  How do we manage security?

Cimarron: Apperian is unique in that it allows companies to deploy an internal app store. People expect apps to be great, but traditionally enterprise apps have "sucked."  People come into workplace expecting great apps in a great app ecosystem.  Many of these apps have a social complement.  Becomes incumbent on the company to have a system to deploy apps and ensure adoption since ROI depends on it.

Michael: Jay, you're an Apperian customer. Comment on how you reacted to the "your apps suck" mentality.

Jay: moved videos and information onto general, publicly-accessible cloud offerings, but didn't want to go quite so public with enterprise apps.  Went to Apperian and tied apps to enterprise.  Separated information into security-required and not.  This separated user bases and data within company.  Corporate employees needed security and were willing to invest time in learning apps.  Players have less need for this.

Tom: quoted Jack Dorsey: "In the future enterprise apps have to be as easy to use as Twitter."  I laughed at first but every day since that comment I realized he's right.  Everything now is about seamless application to prevent fragmentation.  All of our customers, enterprise or consumer, are trying to make apps as simple to use as possible.  How are they doing this? Looking at design. Simplifying and paying attention to "where the button is."

Cimarron: Consumerization of IT:  Expectation that apps used in enterprise are as simple to use as consumer apps.  Example of app used in insurance: reporting accidents via app works for end users, but can be mirrored for insurance adjusters.

There are so many things where mobile is the only way: "people won't want some stuff displayed openly on computers."  True for Celtics too: laptops no longer fit space, so people moving work to phones and ipads.

Mobile is now about content creation as much as it is about consumption.


Moving on to questions from Pigeonhole:

Corporate communications: Jay addressed early use of Blackberry Messenger as quick connections.

Tim Gu: brought up own question to audience about move to video communication for work.  Would people be willing to use this if the are home and disheveled?

Q: How are stadiums using technology to avoid mobile service disruptions caused by extremely high levels of demand concentrated in small areas?

Jay: "Not very well."  Mobile is such a challenge:  you have to rely on connectivity.  Industry is still in infancy.  Infrastructure problems, etc.  This opens up a huge opportunity for us.

Q: Will non-cloud-based enterprise software disappear?

Tom: What drove the cloud? Cloud computing came from the requirement of mobile devices.  We will continue to run into problems but we will also innovate solutions.

Michael: Mobile access to searches has surpassed PCs.  This will continue to grow. All of this relies on mobile connectivity.

Jay: Dropbox offers a simple cloud solution to this: it is so easy to favorite documents to make them available offline.  Other apps can do this too.

Enterprise selling.  What is the best strategy? Consumer to enterprise (like Box)? or other way around?

Cimarron: Still start pretty high up.  Another example (other than Box) of going consumer to enterprise is Evernote.  Everyone who uses it becomes addicted, so enterprises end up having to offer it.

Technique of "if you want to see this you need to join" works really well to entice consumer use of apps.

Michael: Pay attention to how long initial adoption takes.  "Overnight success" is actually "five-year overnight success."

Cimarron: Example is Blackberry. Tipping point occurred on hardware side when people started to move to iPhone, but it took a long time.  Now look where we are.

Michael: Questioned assumption of question that enterprise selling is painful.  It doesn't have to be.

Jay: barrier to me is ease of use on the admin side. Ease/speed of implementation is key to sell in enterprise apps.  Price is low on list (within reasonable constraints).

What do you think about the future of enterprise social media? (Yammer, etc)

Tom: Two barriers: adoption, and marketing organization not understanding. This could be a way for companies to understand their employees' experiences.  Similar to how airlines are responding to customer complaints on Twitter.

Michael: other side of this using this to engage with developers.  Enable communities to self-serve.

Tim: when i think about internal use of social media, I think of this as a replacement for email.  Facilitates communication of knowledge in a faster and easier way.  When you think about designing a product, anytime it involves communication between people, think about how this can help their interaction.

Jay: As we see more employees not congregating in an office space, and workforce is more geographically dispersed, these tools will become more and more useful in the workplace.  Twitter is about business and consumer, not within the business itself.

Question:  Have you seen interesting use cases of enterprise employee wellness apps?

Cimarron: this has been slow to develop.  Seen as an HR app and is not top priority right now. I've seen the gamification of employee programs and this has started to show up on the wellness side too.

Jay: We're growing this part of the business for players.  Have been using gamification to mark player's progress using mobile tools.  Adding an employee on the basketball staff who is a medical technology person.

Tom:  There's actually an HR company in boston that is now getting into the gaming business.  Giving games to employees during breaks because they noticed that employees were using other people's games and this keeps them on their portal during their off-time.

Question: Dropbox vs. Box? Consumer vs. Enterprise? Who will win?

Cimarron: Google is jumping in too and so is Microsoft.  What makes Box so successful is the ecosystem they have built, offering up their platform for people to build on.

In an enterprise setting, how can companies like Evernote compete with Microsoft, which rolls out products to millions of users instantly?

Cimarron: by solving problems that remain in the software.  Evernote has been doing work to address privacy.  People want to share some but not all of their data within their org (work vs. private data).

Tom: Battle needs to be mitigated between consumer desire for open source and enterprise desire for control.
Jay: Will need to compromise on both ends.

Cimarron: Is it about controlling behavior or protecting data?  Lines are becoming blurred between corporate and private life.  In the past, IT controls were about controlling behavior, not about utilizing ad optimizing technology.

Michael:  I am looking forward to the next generation controlling IT.

Tom:  I'm really excited about the disruption that is taking place now.  Mobility is not about "mobile" anymore.  It is so much more than that.  This is a GREAT time to start a company. If there was ever a time, it is now.

Jay:  I think we're ending on a good note.  It is difficult and challenging to find the balance between open and private, but this will be the big challenge and opportunity moving forward.

Cimarron:  We tend to be very American and Euro-centric when we think about these devices, but a huge market opportunity exists outside of these regions. Huge opportunities exist in this area.  We don't know what technologies will win.  This is going to be an exciting couple of decades.

New Funding Model Panel

-- We have moved from monarchy of innovation to crowd-funding where everyone can follow their dreams- Hugo Van Vuren
--  Crowd funding is not just for entrepreneurs but for everyone! - Paul Gu, Upstart
-- Upstart thinks of a person as a start-up-- Paul Gu
-- Crowd-funding investors are concentrated in US and UK
-- JOBS act will not stop the project based crowd-funding
-- Start using Upstart as soon as you can get into a binding contract!!- Paul Gu
-- Most common activity people invest money raised from Upstart in their education and starting a company

-- who are the ideal customers of a crowd-funding platform-
1. Idea campaign owner: People who can identify audience which cares about them and idea, with strong perseverance, ready to accept feedback and who can integrate this feedback-- Bre, Indiegogo
2. Companies which are really successful on FundersClub: Companies which can get funding easily, companies which have been around for a while but for some reason are not really successful, companies for some reason (like present in middle of no where, ideas which do not sell easily)-- Alex, FundersClub
3. Businesses who have maxed out their credit cards

-- How to make businesses sustainable after the first round crowd-funding?
1. People do not understand manufacturing at scale- there are companies which actually fill this gap!!
2. More curation of the project
3. It's worth trying!!

-- What will crowd sourcing for large projects?
1. Indiegogo helped raise a project 12.6 million. So some of these existing funds can sustain it.

--Where will crowdfunding be in 6 years?
1. Completely grown present across the world
2. Crowdfunding will be a natural state and norm

Future Trends in Mobile Technology


Future Trends in Mobile Technology

Panelists Answer questions submitted through Pigeonhole

Moderator: Steve Papa, Founder of Endecca & Investor

Panelists:
Purnima Kochikar, Director of Apps & Games, Google Play
Bob Davis, General Partner, Highland Capital Partners
Susie Kim Riley, Founder & CEO, Aquto
Rajesh Mishra, Founder & CEO, Parallel Wireless

Led by moderator, Steve Papa, panelists gave a survey of the key trends in mobile technology and addressed the following questions:
  1. What is the opportunity with Payments?
    1. Payments are not the problem, credit cards are easy enough - Purnima Kochikar 
    2. NFC payment systems require vendors to install new hardware, making it very unapproachable - Susie Kim Riley
  2. Changing the Risk Profile of Entrepreneurship?
    1. There is a huge supply of creativity, but, entrepreneurs in different parts of the world fear failure. In Japan, entrepreneurs lose credit profile if their businesses fail. - Purnima Kochikar
  3. What are the challenges and opportunities of reaching the next billion users? 
    1. Users in emerging markets see mobile engagements in "bit" sizes, need to package business models to - Susie Kim Riley
    2. US-style pricing models will not work in other parts of the world.  Compounding the expenses of traditional carrier plans are additional costs like electricity, making the technology  - Bob Davis
  4. How will the internet of things change the mobile landscape?
    1. The internet of things is the most interesting trend in mobile technology.  Estimates of 20 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 - Bob Davis
    2. Carriers will have to change their product offering in order to meet spectrum requirements - Rajesh Mishra
  5. Will Infrastructure be able to support demands required by next billion users and internet of things?
    1. Phones are only used 10% of the time, yet they are consuming data 100% of the time. We need to figure out how to more effectively allocate spectrum  - Rajesh Mishra
    2. The numbers tell us that there will be a crisis in internet availability, but, confident that smart entrepreneurs will find the solution - Bob Davis
  6. How to balance agility + sustainability in the mobile world, where businesses have such a short half-life?
    1. Entrepreneurs need to have a larger vision (i.e. Uber is not a transportation company, but, a comprehensive logistics platform) so that can roll-out new services and features - Purnima Kochikar & Susie Kim Riley
    2. Content is fickle and it always has been, mobile just makes it more obvious - Bob Davis
  7. How to Handle Privacy Concerns
    1. First task is to prove to users that metadata can be anonymous - Rajesh Mishra
    2. Users will opt-in to share data if they get something in return - Susie Kim Riley
  8. Android vs. iOS
    1. Closed systems do a great job educating the market, but open systems always win in the long run - Bob Davis
    2. User experience is key, whoever masters this will win - Rajesh Mishra
    3. Poor user experience on low cost Android phones ruins the user experience - Rajesh Mishra
    4. This debate will continue forever - Purnima Kochikar

Mid-Day Keynote: Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber

--Everyone's private driver.

"San Francisco and Paris are sister cities, in that it's equally impossible to get a cab on the street."

"How do we make it so that there is always a car 5 min away from you - through math... Heat map, anti-heat, what you left is under served market."

"Surge pricing is your friend. Higher demand drives higher price, so more cars will join and stay longer, and thus drives supply so no one is stranded."

"If you can deliver a car in 5 minutes, you can deliver anything. Recently we had Uber ice cream, Uber kitties..."

"We give riders high fives and give drivers hugs."

Growing the Startup

Growing the Startup


Moderator: Dave Balter, Global Head of Investments, dunhumby & CEO, Smarterer

Phil Beauregard, Founder & CEO, Objective Logistics
Florian Meissner, Founder & CEO, EyeEm
Jason Jacobs, Founder & CEO, Runkeeper 
Alex White, Founder & CEO, Next Big Sound
Pat Kinsel, Founder & CEO, Spindle

Dave: What are the key metrics, internal and external, to gauge growth?

Depending on the company you are in, these could be a million downloads a month, the no. of searchable photos created daily, registered vs. active users, tracking activity, etc. The internal metrics are more revenue and growth focused, and the external are more broad base and measured in terms of activity, users, etc.

Key metrics are very different depending on which company you're in (B2B, B2C..). The dashboard changes with each iteration of the product and measurement of ROI, revenue per client, etc. For search companies like Spindle, what is most important is the search query volume as this brings in search syndication deals. 

The most important thing to do is to always keep goals and measurement metrics in mind. Key metrics change over time. Growth becomes more important over time but is not crucial at the beginning.

"Do you have enough cash in the bank to achieve your goals?" - Flo

Metamorphosis: Moving to Managers
How do you become a CEO over time and move out of functional areas and more into holistic strategy. The key is the hand-off as you hire more people, decision making, and how do you balance friendships with being the boss. 

"All the world's a stage" - Phil. It's constant evolution; your language changes, you wear a suit for meetings.

"Anything is better than insolvency" - Pat

There is pressure, some hard alternatives to face and you can't be too idealistic any more. There are employees and their families to consider.

"There is no such thing as product market fit; the market is always changing and you are constantly chasing a moving target" - Phil

Internal transition - what do you do? With too much delegation, you might find yourselves out of things to do. You reshape yourself to find things only you can do and then you create a culture where there is transparency and your employees are honest with you.

What keeps you up at night? 
The cash out date (how many days till we run out of money), are the metrics moving in the right direction, are you building the product, and are your employees upset, and if yes, what can you do to remove obstacles so they can do their job. And excitement!

"Work life balance as a father and a workaholic!" - Jason

Key Takeaway

"It's a roller coaster!" - Alex White
"You have to take a lot of punches and refuse to go down" - Phil

Mobile Monetization


Mobile Monetization panelists discuss why companies are suceeding in the $12B mobile ad market! #cyberposium



Panelists (from left to right)
Marco Iansiti, HBS Professor (moderator)
Eric Futoran, Scopely
Paul Alferi, Turn
Cheryl Morris, Nanigans
Raj Aggarwal, Localytics
Herman Yang, MoPub

Mobile ads have moved from easily dismissed banner ads to highly engaging fullscreen ads.  

Models going forward are going to focus on the ability to target customers across devices (desktops, tablets, smartphone) and to learn about their location-specific behaviors in order to increase engagement.

Brands want to reach as many eyeballs as possible.  Apps allow brands to reach 3-4M people in 2 days and is only expanding.  However, most campaigns are still initially developed for desktop and then forced onto mobile.  Brands need to think mobile first, then figure out other channels.   

Education Technology Panel



The EdTech panel kicked off this morning featuring our speakers:

Rosa Birch, Head of Policy Programmes EMEA at Facebook
John Richards, Founder and President of Consulting Services for Education
Steven Syverud, Business Development at Coursera
Lynda Weinman, Cofounder and Executive Chair at lynda.com

The panel was moderated by Deborah Quazzo, Founder and Managing Partner at GSV Advisors.

Over a billion dollars have been invested in the education technology market in each of the past 3 years. We're seeing massive network effects with high water market 40 million users.

Deborah (moderator): Why now? Why do we suddenly have all this innovation in the education space?

Lynda: The Internet is disrupting everything, but education is one of the slowest industries to be transformed. Just a sign of the Internet age.

Steven: It's now more expensive to get a traditional college degree, while it's easier to have new channels to get alternatives.

John: We're seeing spending increases in technology by educational institutions who are making these decisions to invest in innovation. The biggest growth area is in testing and assessment.

Rosa: There's also an advancement of learning through doing. Facebook partners with Apps for Good, which is democratizing how young people now engage with technology.

Deborah (moderator): We still have massive issues like achievement gaps, skills gaps, inequity, cost, etc. Technology is controversial in the classroom... so is technology disruptive or destructive?

Steven: The quality and specific environment of a university can never be replicated online. But not everyone is able to go to an institution like an Ivy League. We want to bring elements of acclaimed universities to people who can't attend them. We're not disrupting universities in a negative way. In fact, the MOOCs are more collaborative with universities than they're given credit for.

Lynda: Teachers found it was complementary and liberating to offer Lynda to students. We need to better evaluate what's better done in person and what's better done online. A lecture is better delivered online than in person, but you can't do a Q&A, project based learning, or discussion groups online. This is the changing role of the educator. There are threats to the status quo, but there are improvements in efficiency and efficacy.

Rosa: Important to separate the behavior from the tools that we're using. This summer, we worked with two different schools to get them to use Facebook in the classroom. Students were using facebook Timeline to fill out histories and asking each other questions instead of asking the teacher. The teachers thinks it enhances the work they're actually doing. It's easy to blame the tools initially, but it's also the behavior. For education, there's not a lot of scale because it takes time. That's a big challenge.

John: Technology allows us to get in and do the kind of changes we want to make in education anyway (like a "Trojan mouse").

Deborah (moderator): in K-12 system, technology is empowering, not threatening. We can personalize delivery, as students operate on very different levels. Now we're worried about how to get to the 99% instead of the 1% early adopters. How did you arrive at your business model and what does the future look like?

Lynda: We didn't consider any other model because we were so early-stage that the freemium model wasn't even in the vernacular. Have not changed subscription price since 2001. First rule is to offer something of extraordinary value for very low price (the scale of the Internet allows this since we now have 3 million users). Paid model allows us to pay our contributors and employees. Some contributors live off the royalties. We have pride in creating a business model that is a win for every person, from students to contributors to employees. We recently took money for the first time (bootstrapped for 18 years) in the largest funding round in history of education companies.

Steven: The mission of our organization is that we make a high quality education available to everyone, so the courses will always be free. Here are the challenges: 1) Putting high quality content online right now - only a small segment of users end up using it. 80% of users already have a college degree. Believe it's not enough to make the users available, but also putting in it a place and framework where people can engage with it. 2) There are going to be parts of the site that you pay for. You can currently pay $60 to get a verified certificate, making us compete with a free product that we're offering ourselves. There are tons of opportunities though; other organizations may want to license the content to teach to their students or employees. but we have to articulate how we want to license the content without fundamentally changing it.

Rosa: Facebook is free to use and we pay for it through advertising. This means we need to do really cool stuff to make money, so our interest is about finding stories of people who use the platform in interesting ways.

John: It's important to think about the double bottom line of education companies: doing good and making money. Free is a branding/marketing position that you take on but still need to be sustainable and generate cash. There is a responsibility that comes with free and need to be careful there.

Deborah (moderator): what do you think about monetizing through advertising?

Lynda: We're against it. It's hard to provide quality content when there's a sponsor. Even with our scale of 3 million users, we're not able to get the kind of revenue that we have to rely on advertising.

John: We were able to make enough money on licensing. When you have something that is completely free and ad free, you have to deal with how you were going to fund it. There's a distinction between who you're advertising to - is it students, teachers, or administrators? What kind of service does it provide and who is it addressing?

Deborah (moderator): What's the role of outside capital? Education is a unique ecosystem. What do you think about for-profit versus non-profit?

Lynda: It's our moral and civic obligation to offer free education to K-12, but not everyone believes this. Many want to take education private. Education reform can be seen as a conservative or progressive movement. There's also been a private side to public education (for profit textbook companies, multi-trillion market). But we need to figure out how to lower costs and how to get it work better. Private enterprise has to have a role in that because that's not the government's expertise or purview.

Steven: This is a big existential question. EdX is our main competitor, and they use the fact that they're a nonprofit to draw universities. This is a great marketing opportunity. There's an implication that for-profit companies are focused on extracting the last dollar or intersect with the way a university is run. The best way to address is look at how it actually intersect with what companies are doing, looking at how we are being good partners and delivery things to our students.

Audience question: how do contributors benefit as a sales channel? Do people start using your system because of your contributor is promoting it?

Lynda: We have a partnership program with authors (what we call our contributors), in that if they put a link on their website, then they get a kickback if someone subscribes through their link. Enterprise membership is sold through a sales team and sales channel. We need to spend very little on marketing compared to other companies.

Where are we in the research on which individuals learn well through these networks and who don't?

John: there's a lot of work now on big data and taking a look on how students proceed through a course, but that's very hard statistical analysis. We talk about adaptability and personalization, but we're not quite there yet. That is the promise to be able to look at what you're doing, understand what a good teacher knows intuitively, and adapt to it. If people tell you they're doing it right now, don't believe them!

Lynda: One of the problems with mining data and quantifiable data is that it works well if you have a right answer. But skills like collaboration and presentation are hard to measure.

Audience question: How has working with teachers unions impacted you?

Deborah: We don't really deal with teachers unions in the US. There's been a real aggressive move to make sure unions are aligned with the district when they apply for Race to the Top grants around technology. Unions appreciate that the technology is there to give them leverage.

Audience question (Dave Balter of Smarterer): Where do you see the role of helping people get jobs?

Lynda: We haven't taken a formal stand on that. We offer a certification that you watched the video, but we don't have tests but like what they can do for placement. I'm a big believer in flexibility of what we offer. Is completion really the goal? Some have the goal of trying something new, so completing a course is not the right measure of success.

Steven: In an ideal situation, you would take a Coursera class and have a job opportunity. A lot of people take 4 years of college but want to learn something else. What you learn is more detached from the place that you learned it from.

Audience question: What about partnering with the private sector to offer skill sets that employers need?

Steven: That oversimplifies the problem. People pay money to take these courses to get a job after and sometimes don't end up with a job. MOOCs have the opportunity to have a tighter feedback loop to make sure the content is relevant to new career fields, not careers 80 years ago.

Lynda: Yahoo is using Coursera, Lynda, and other competitors for employee benefits. They also use us for onboarding by assigning courses from different vendors for new employees as part of their onboarding process. We've also seen them use it for recruiting; for example if they're looking for Android developers, they'll recommend taking these courses before you apply.

Rosa: Technology helps move things faster. We partner with Apps For Good to train teachers to teach kids how to code in the classroom. The UK government made it possible to teach outside courses in curriculum time, but agree that we need to understand learning gaps in terms of employment.

Thank you to all the panelists! For those of you who are students at Harvard, you can get a free subscription to Lynda.com via http://lynda.harvard.edu!

Sharing Economy Panel

Great panelists discussing the emerging sharing economy and peer to peer marketplaces. Great discussion!   #cyberposium



Panelists (left to right)
Jing Yang - Moderator
Matthew Shampine - WeWork
Nick Grossman - Union Square Ventures
Karin Brandt - coUrbanize
James Slezak - Peers.org
Alex Lofton - Peers.org
Prof. Arun Sundararajan - NYU Stern School of Business

What is the Sharing Economy?

"What the Sharing economy needs is a shared definition."
   - Prof. Arun Sundararajan

"The average car spends 80% of its life sit. That has amazing utilization implications."
   - James Slezak

"Transaction costs for doing anything drive to zero with digital infrastructure. That opens up all kinds of new and exciting opportunities. It starts to blur the lines between professional and private activity."
   - Nick Grossman

How much does your community depend on trust?

"You have to have an inherent willingness to share . People need to be open and trusting. Trust and understanding of who you're surrounded by are key."
   - Matthew Shampine

"An area of trust that is emergent is trust with the platform. What are they doing with the data? How trustworthy are they with data about you?"
   - Nick Grossman

"Peer marketplaces enable new creation. People who are creating new things, offering themselves up as freelancers, the trust infrastructure is really central so they can realize their economic potential."
   - Prof. Arun Sundararajan

"Community members are fearful about what developers' true intentions are. We are changing that dynamic of trust by increasing transparency and collaboration."
   - Karin Brandt

How did we rediscover the sharing economy?

"There's an important element of humanity we are discovering that can really excite a consumer base. We just did a series of dinner parties around the sharing economy. We thought we'd get 25 people to host around the world. We got hundreds. Lots of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you take a second to connect with people as people, they'll take it from there."
   - Alex Lofton

Healthcare Technology


Healthcare tech panelists discuss why NOW is the best time to be in healthcare! #cyberposium


Panelists (from left to right)
Zen Chu, Accelerated Medical Ventures (moderator)
Ryan Graue, Operating Analytics
Yohanes Frezgi, HealthTap
Grant Ho, Carecloud
Mandira Singh, Athena Health
Heath Umbach, Activate Networks

Hospitals are open more than ever to streamlining their business. Simple waste and inefficiency improvements can mean the difference between a hospital being profitable and going bankrupt.

Healthcare reform (specifically the shift from fee-for-service to fee-for-value) is forcing hospitals to make use of big data for the first time

The fax machine is an anachronism that remains in healthcare and is a detriment to patient safety…