And facebook, quora, blogs, talk radio, etc?
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
— Mark Twain
A phenomenally unsuccessful angel investor, Twain became a prolific and highly sought after public speaker to pay off his debts. So he probably would have been on all this stuff. And he is posthumously @MarkTwain!
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My family hosted a Chinese exchange student from a small (only 4.5 million pop) city west of Shanghai for a long weekend. Billups (his Americanized nickname) is a delightful young man and an NBA fanatic. The Celtics are his favorite team. We watched the NBA network and saw a replay of the ’87 All-Star game. He knew all the players. He knows US cities if they have an NBA franchise. I knew of the NBA’s popularity in China but his devotion to the game was astounding.
On Sunday, we took Billups to my son’s baseball practice. Billups had never even heard of baseball before.
David Stern is smiling. MLB’s commissioner not so much!
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At breakfast this morning, my seventh grade son commented on his sixth grade sister’s winter coat. He commented that the coat must be very old because an interior pocket was identified as the mobile phone pocket with a mobile phone icon that included an antenna.
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My marketing department has put me in the predictions business with this. Not bad for the plane before the door closed. On the year ahead theme, let’s go 1 level deeper.
The base:
1. In 2011, information proliferation will only accelerate. Entrepreneurs with vision for how to make sense of all that information for either consumers or businesses will prosper.
One level deeper:
1a. Entrepreneurs with technological vision will add to information overload by generating cool information that no one can really use. They will struggle.
1b. The overwhelming number of information related products and applications will focus on the time-rich/cash-poor instead of the cash-rich/time-poor because the former is larger, more easily marketed to and… if it goes viral, it could be huge.
1c. Entrepreneurs with clear customer vision for how information can be packaged and efficiently sold to users who can make immediate and impactful decisions with said information will be welcomed at Chrysalis Ventures. Even if other VC’s have told them the market isn’t big enough, their technology is not proprietary, or their business model is not disruptive enough. I want Santa to bring me niche-focused, information centric investment opportunities.
2. By this time next year, your channel guide at home will still stink despite Netflix, GoogleTV, etc but help is coming.
3. Next year, Christmas shopping with your credit or debit card will be safer and more secure.
4. In 2011, applying for financial aid for college will actually resemble the quick, digital experience you would expect it to be.
Happy Holidays!
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From the 11/24/2010 VentureWire:
Both Digitalsmiths Corp. and Gotuit Media Corp. have patented technologies that make it easier to find, index and manage large libraries of video content, a problem that’s been growing as more people use the Internet to watch video. Now they’re going to team up, as Digitalsmiths has acquired Gotuit.
Both companies are venture-backed. Digitalsmiths, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., raised $18 million in two rounds from Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures, .406 Ventures and Cisco Systems, according to VentureWire archives, while Gotuit, based in Woburn, Mass., is backed by Atlas Venture, Highland Capital Partners and the Topol Group, among others. Gotuit’s funding amount could not be confirmed.
Digitalsmiths Director Wright Steenrod, who’s a principal at Chrysalis Ventures, would not reveal the terms of the acquisition, but he said that Gotuit shareholders are now Digitalsmiths shareholders. The deal closed this week.
“We’re bringing together two leading companies around millisecond-by-millisecond indexing of video content…so you can search content we’ve indexed by actor, scene and language to produce a frame-by-frame index of that content and also index from what’s coming live off the broadcast,” Steenrod said. “If Google or Bing were confined to searching by blog title posts and magazine article titles, you would find their search a lot less fulfilling. We aim to bring that level of context to video.”
Digitalsmiths does have competitors, Steenrod said, but the combined companies have more than 35 patents and can create frame-by-frame video metadata. Both companies also have large media customers — Digitalsmiths’ include Paramount, Warner Brothers and ESPN.
Gotuit CEO Mark Pascarella, who joined Gotuit in 2001, will sit on Digitalsmiths’ advisory board, while Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger will head the combined company from Digitalsmiths’ North Carolina headquarters, Steenrod said.
In 2008, Digitalsmiths was named one of Dow Jones Top 45 Companies to Watch.
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This is from today’s PEHUBWire, which published David’s letter about healthcare innovation.
Today’s guest column was written by David Jones Jr., chairman and managing director of Chrysalis Ventures.
Disrupting Health Care
There’s been much discussion of late about health care, including the worsening state of Americans’ health on an individual level, and the effects of recent health care reform. I think these changes create great opportunities for entrepreneurs and their investors in two areas: working to make our medical institutions better, and working outside of them to improve health.
Improving the health care system is the first and most obvious investment opportunity. In our current system, third parties pay for disconnected piecework, creating a siloed and inefficient supply chain that leaves the patient powerless to pursue either value-for-dollar outcomes. Regulatory and proprietary constraints further clog information flow.
Clinicians with extraordinary, and expensive, expertise often meet their patients with less complete and contextualized information than possessed by the average online marketer selling mundane goods. This inability to share and synthesize data makes institutions incapable of responding to system failures that rival the recent home mortgage collapse, yet persist over decades. Witness the 90,000 Americans who die every year from hospital-acquired infections, or the nearly 20,000 reported deaths last year from medication errors, drug interactions or side effects.
Such fundamental disconnects in a $2.5 trillion industry should make entrepreneurs and venture capitalists stand up and take notice. That it has not is testimony to the bureaucratic purchasing rules that drive supplier behavior within the medical-industrial complex. Technologies that qualify for high reimbursement (proprietary drugs, incrementally better devices, highly specialized services) have received the lion’s share of venture investment. By contrast, technologies that help doctors and hospitals predict the value of their own activities, target those that have high impact, reduce defects, attract the right customer mix–technologies that have transformed manufacturing, media, transportation and other industries–have received far less attention so far.
Washington’s “reform” didn’t really address this stuff, but I believe change is coming. The technologies we’ve come to take for granted to help us reconnect with old friends, to carry our “boarding passes” on our phones and skip the check-in line, to book a table at a busy restaurant–these are poised to obliterate the gridlock that protects profit centers for poor quality incumbent health care institutions and makes the entire system so frustrating for consumers.
Three factors give me confidence that change is coming. First, information-rich networks with defined standards are ubiquitous and growing. Not all information relevant to patient care is contained in the patient chart, and progress can be made by integrating the rest while the institutions get organized. Second, health care costs are killing our economy, reform will accelerate this trend, and technology-driven productivity is the best way out of this trap. Finally, the government has allocated several tens of billions of dollars to subsidize health care IT purchases–money that may well be wasted, but will still draw attention to the issue.
This change is already coming from companies like MyHealthDirect, which aims to become an “Open Table” for health care. The company aligns patient needs for care with available resources across complex health systems of thousands of care providers, reducing costly inefficiencies by empowering the patient to get to the right place for care.
With the economy wheezing from carrying the health care cost load and insured individuals bearing the weight of higher deductibles and co-pays, avoiding the chronic illnesses that consume so much health care spending is also coming into focus as an economic imperative. And most of these costs have their roots in how we eat, whether we smoke, and how much we exercise.
People need to be encouraged, incented, and see direct economic impacts from good and bad choices. None of this occurs in the institutional health care system.
Happily, there’s an explosion of entrepreneurship around these issues. Companies like I Move You, an “Evite” for wellness, through which users can challenge their Facebook or Twitter social networks to engage in healthy activities (e.g., “if you quit smoking, I’ll run a 10k for you”), or HealthTeacher, which helps communities keep their kids healthy and fit through sponsored K-12 curricula reaching millions of school children, are great examples.
The good news for entrepreneurs and early-stage venture capitalists is that the past 15 years of innovation in technology, Internet and mobile applications and communications have created low-cost tools that we need today to disrupt the health care industry. The ubiquitous connectivity, “big data” opportunities enabled by common data standards and powerful personal connectivity platforms that have transformed other parts of our lives are now evolving to help us create health.
I look forward to the day when I visit my doctor’s office and rather than pulling out his prescription pad he tells me “there’s an app for that.”
David Jones Jr. is chairman and managing director of Chrysalis Ventures, one of mid-America’s largest funds for early-stage and growth investments in health care and technology with approximately $400 million under management.
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