Startups

Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce announced today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20. Google suggests that merchants who do not have their own payment processing transition to Braintree, Shopify or Freshbooks, which are offering discounted rates for Google Checkout users. U.S. merchants who do have their own payment processing can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy. Developers selling through Google properties will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the next few weeks. News of Google Checkout’s demise comes a week after several major updates to Google Wallet, all designed to attack PayPal’s dominance from different angles by leveraging several of Google’s properties. These include storing payment credentials in Chrome to make it easier for consumers to checkout and reduce shopping cart abandonment; making Google Wallet available in the desktop version of Gmail; the Instant Buy API, which is designed to streamline transactions for merchants selling physical goods and services; and the Wallet Objects API for merchants offering loyalty programs.

SAN FRANCISCO — Aetna, one of the largest health insurance providers in the world, is changing the way it thinks about itself. Last year, chief executive Mark Bertolini said Aetna was no longer in the insurance business, it is in the information business. Now, the company is turning into a fitness app maker too. Next month, Aetna will launch an iPhone app and website for managing your fitness, encouraging you to eat and live in a more healthy way, and monitoring your personal health information. If you’re an Aetna customer, the app, called CarePass, will integrate your personal medical records with data from popular fitness-tracking devices like Withings Wi-Fi-enabled scales, Fitbit’s Flex wristband, and Jawbone’s Up wristband, as well as apps like MapMyFitness. If you’re an Aetna customer, it’ll be accessible through the same sign-on you use with Aetna’s web portal, Aetna Navigator. But you can use it to integrate data from various sources even if you aren’t an Aetna customer. “We want a consumer to be able to see the information they care about from a healthcare perspective,” said Aetna’s head of business development, Dan Conroy (pictured above), who gave a sneak peek of the upcoming app at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health technology conference here. It’s a consumer-friendly app with an approachable, simple design, based on Conroy’s short walk-through. When signing on to the app, people have a choice of looking at their data, picking a goal to work towards (like losing a pound or fitting into their favorite jeans), or getting medical care. The third option leads to another app, iTriage, which Aetna acquired in 2012, Conroy said. Once you’ve picked a goal, the app can help you get there by setting achievable daily goals, like running a certain number of miles or consuming a certain number of calories. It can also show you how much you’ve walked each day (assuming it has step data from one of the compatible devices) and other details. If you’ve given it access to your medical data, the app will also let you see vital stats like your body measurements, BMI, blood pressure, blood glucose level, and more details, all drawn from your last visit to the doctor’s office. It can also pull in data about your recent office visits and medications, and can even help remind you to take your meds. There’s also a web version of the app. Aetna’s challenge is going to be a steep one, given the large number of fitness apps out there. Many of them already integrate with a variety of different data sources — for instance, Runkeeper can also integrate data from Withings scales and Fitbit fitness-trackers; MapMyFitness helps you track your food consumption as well as your exercise; MyFitnessPal has an app library (as does Runkeeper); and all three are extensible through open APIs. And that’s just scratching the surface of the fitness-tracking universe. Aetna has a couple of huge advantages, however: For instance, it has 38 million customers and made almost $500 million in profits in the most recent fiscal quarter. The app won’t launch until June, but developers interested in integrating their apps can check out Aetna’s CarePass developer portal. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Cloud companies like Box and Salesforce have a new sector in mind: health care. It’s still not clear whether the industry is ready for them. “Anyone who has to write a check knows the value of cloud computing,” said Joshua Newman, an M.D., who is also the director of product and health strategy at Salesforce, a pioneering cloud technology company and the leader in defining the marketing term “software as a service.” Newman spoke this afternoon on a panel at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health-focused technology conference. Newman said a big part of his job is to communicate the value of the cloud to health providers, and to assuage fears about breaches of sensitive patient data. In the past, patient records were stored on film, tape and paper charts. As data gets digitized, everyone in the field has grappled with how to keep it secure, including hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms and affiliated health care organizations. The federal government recently released statistics that 21 million people had their sensitive health records hacked. This is just the cases that were reported — the actual number is thought to be far higher. As a result, security challenges have overpowered the benefits of the cloud. Cost-savings and easier software upgrades pale in comparison to leaked health care records. As a result, health providers are treading very carefully. Newman is convinced that we’ll see increased adoption of services like Salesforce in the coming years. “There are a lot of great examples of how it’s working, and you can see how quickly it’s grown,” he said. “There are emerging standards in health care,” David Chao, a product manager at MuleSoft, said in agreement. At HealthBeat, we also heard from Box CEO Aaron Levie how the company intends to be an “underlying layer for how content gets stored and shared” for physicians. Recently, Box received HIPAA compliance certification, meaning the product is now considered safe enough to hold on to data about your health — and safe enough for health care developers who use it. Box and Salesforce are both appealing to progressive CIOs at hospitals and other health providers. But Newman believes it really needs to start small. “Let’s get the ball rolling with small apps,” he said. The hope is that CIOs will then realize the value in these tools. “Getting into the cloud is not an all-or-nothing game,” said Newman. When it comes to healthcare, he stressed that we can take “baby steps.” Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Cloud, Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

SAN FRANCISCO — CD-ROMs may be out of date for transferring music and photos, but the health care industry still uses them to transfer radiology and lab information. David Yakimischak (who goes by “Yak”) opened a fireside chat at HealthBeat today by holding up a CD from radiology center that he has to physically deliver to his doctor. As the general manager of E-Prescribing at Surescripts, a leading health information network, Yak is an expert on using the cloud to exchange health information. He said that despite advancements in the transmission of health records and clinical information, data like X-rays MRIs, and lab results are primarily moved around offline. “Over half of prescriptions in the country now flow electronically,” he said. “500,000 doctors actively use Surescripts every month, 60,000 pharmacies are connected, and we work with 450 EMRs. We successfully achieved critical mass because the players in the ecosystem got together and created this company. E-prescribing is deeply embedded into every prescribing application as a neutral common network that plugs into existing workflows. That’s what we have to do with labs and radiology.” E-Prescribing digitalized the exchange of prescriptions which makes life easier for doctors, pharmacies, and patients. Physicians can quickly access their patients’ benefit and medication history, send presciptions to pharmacies online, and all of that information is kept within one secure network. Yak said that labs and images are currently moved electronically, but usually in a point-to-point manner. To do for radiology and lab results what Surescripts did for prescription requires a strong network on both sides. “We are where we are because people are trying to multiply both sides of the network, we need a single national plan or model that brings governance, a business model, and public and private institutions together to capture the market. This is not a technology problem, this is a system problem.” Surescripts has that system, and the network, experience, and technology to migrate imaging and labs to the cloud. Yak said the company signed a deal with Merge Healthcare in November to tackle this very problem. Surescripts “laid the rails” to 500,000 physicians and Merge will push its imaging results across its network. For the cloud-based transmission of imaging and labs to succeed, it needs to provide a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to the existing model. Yak and John Cooper, a partner at Archpoint Ventures who moderated the discussion, agreed that the real opportunity here exists in the sharing of meta-data. Doctors usually don’t need super high-resolution images to make diagnoses and prescriptions, but they do need contextual information about the patient. “You have to build some value around this data,” Yak said. “it’s not just a transaction or a message switch, there is an ecosystem play here. Consumers, labs, and doctor’s probably won’t pay, but a providers and server would if the efficiency and accuracy is heightened and pays off.” As with most services in health IT, the bottom line is increased efficiency at a decreased cost. In today’s day and age, driving across down with an envelope or CD-Rom with medical results is unnecessary and seems a little absurd, but no company has been able to create a superior, compelling alternative. Is Surescripts that company? “We may be,” Yak said. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell Filed under: Cloud, Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Pinterest is not just a place to collect and organize inspiring images. The powerhouse social site has improved its enviable good looks and upped the IQ of its pins so that everyone, including businesses, can get more out of pinning and Pinterest, in turn, can get money from businesses. The company that made it possible to organize and collect (aka “pin”) things from around the web has worked hard to make pins useful by adding relevant information to certain types of pins and making it possible to pin from mobile apps. If you’ve ever clicked on a pretty bootie or a mouth-watering boozy popsicle, only to land on a dead-end Flickr album or broken link, you will especially appreciate the backend improvements that Pinterest has just rolled out. Product pins now have more information so you can see where that boot is from (Nordstrom) and whether it’s in stock before you even leave the site (it is). Similarly, recipe pins from your favorite food bloggers now include cook time, ingredients, and servings. Movie pins now include content ratings and cast members. It will automatically update all your old pins that have contextual data. So far only product, recipe, and movie pins contain more information. But as software engineer Anna Majkowska says in a blog post announcing these changes, “This is just the beginning and we hope to make all pins more useful in the coming months.” To start off, Pinterest worked with some popular websites like Anthropologie, Etsy, Bon Apetit, Real Simple, and Netflix to add more information to pins. Companies that want to make their pins “richer” can join Pinterest as a business or convert their account.  They will have to prep their website with meta tags and apply to get on Pinterset. Is it a coincidence that Pinterest has coined these useful, business-oriented pins “rich pins?” And because everyone is getting more mobile these days, Pinterest is making the Pin It button available on apps such as Modcloth, The North Face, and Jetsetter so you can really pin wherever you are. It’s too early to tell how much effect these changes will have on people’s pinning habits, but it does seem like a way to both monetize and help users get more out of perusing pins. Filed under: Business

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Practice Fusion is best known for its free web-based electronic medical record, but the startup’s goals are far more ambitious. Speaking at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference, CEO Ryan Howard said the decision to offer the health record to doctors for free is “somewhat of a Trojan horse.” “We have all this patient information that doesn’t reside anywhere else,” said Howard. The product is currently used by more than 150,000 doctors and tracks 64 million patient records, he claimed. Aside from mining the data contained within its health record, Practice Fusion also helps doctors with calendaring, scheduling, and billing. The goal is to provide a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for physicians. On the consumer side, the company launched a service last month, dubbed Patient Fusion, now used by 27,000 doctors. Already, consumers can use it to book appointments and peruse 1.5 million doctor reviews. In the month of April alone, the company offered 3 million open appointments. That’s a lot of data to work with. But the sensitive patient information is stripped of personally identifiable factors, and will not be sold to pharmaceutical companies. “We don’t sell data sets to payers,” Howard stressed. Instead, the goal is to use the data to prevent miscommunication between doctors and patients. Howard observed in a recent interview that accessing and mining patient information can save lives. “We can recommend drug therapies based on their popularity [with previous patients],” he said, and claims there are 200,000 avoidable deaths a year because “data is simply not shared.” By being among the first to put data in the hands of patients, Practice Fusion hopes to add more doctors to its health record. By marketing products to patients, the company will augment its brand with hospital decision-makers. Howard revealed that the company is making “eight digit” revenues each year, and plans to go public in the future — but not in the coming year. Practice Fusion still has a long way to go; “we’re only at ten percent of our potential,” Howard revealed in an interview. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Big Data, Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

We sell our range of biltong via our website Target Audience: People who like Jerky or Biltong Website URL: http://chiptong.com No. of Feedback Providers Requested: 3 Feedback sought: 1) Look around the home page – what is your initial impression of what you see? 2) Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you were looking for? Was anything confusing? 3) Do you find it easy to order or find out how much the product is and the cost of shipping? 4) Go to search engine of your choice and find one other company that offers a similar service. Compare the two companies. Which on do you prefer? Why? 5) Please share any additional feedback/comments you may have.

Skype used to be what you would use to send secure, encrypted, and untraceable messages to friends, family, and business associates all over the world. Not any more. According to a test by Ars Technica, Microsoft is intercepting, decrypting, and reading at least some Skype messages — to the point where URLs embedded in Skype chat are being visited by machines at IP addresses belonging to Microsoft … most likely a bot, but potentially a human being. “And this can only happen,” Ars’ security expert Dan Goodin writes, “If Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.” Skype currently uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure communications between users, which is considered to be very secure. Secure, perhaps. But not very private — when Ars sent messages via Skype containing four web links created specifically for this experiment, two of them were accessed by a Microsoft-controlled machine. Skype’s privacy policy openly states that Skype may check instant messages and SMS texts for spam, fraud, or phishing attempts, and, in some cases, have a human being check them. Ergo, we can decrypt our own encryptions, and can know what you say and know what you send. Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links. In limited instances, Skype may capture and manually review instant messages or SMS in connection with Spam prevention efforts. Skype may, in its sole discretion, block or prevent delivery of suspected Spam, and remove suspicious links from messages. That’s not good if you have an expectation of and desire for privacy. And now that it’s obvious that Microsoft itself can read your private messages, the question is who else has that ability too? Almost a year ago, the FBI requested private backdoor access into multiple communication and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and yes, Skype. Wiretaps are increasingly useless, the FBI realized, and modern communications were defeating the bureau’s attempts at surveillance. Whether these were ever granted or not is unclear, but Microsoft has a patent on ways to make it happen. And Skype’s terms of use also say the company can route your communications to law enforcement agencies: Skype may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims, to protect Skype’s interests, fight against fraud and to enforce our policies or to protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety. However, if you want more security — and privacy — on Skype, you can have it. You simply have to pre-encrpt any messages (as a Polish professor discovered) and then decrypt them on the receiving end. I won’t do that, and most Skype users won’t do that, probably because we’re not discussion matters of national security or engaging in nefarious behavior. But it’s disappointing, if only the cold slap of reality in a dangerous and violent world, that private isn’t really private any more. And it would be nice to know the exact limits of Skype privacy and security. Filed under: Business, Cloud, Dev, Enterprise, Social

The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop is Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use. The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams. The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account. The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — offered included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: it let users who did upload pictures download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Their originals have always been stored by Flickr.) From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well. “It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,” our contact says, adding that while now-distant past CEO Terry Semel had made a big push on premium services, after his departure (and actually during his time) there was “virtually no investment made” in trying to develop or push the Pro tier. Nevertheless, there are now currently Pro users wondering how exactly Yahoo will be compensating them for the rest of their annual subscriptions. Yahoo notes that as part of the changes it will be removing “pro” badges beside people’s names and people can no longer gift pro subscriptions. Strangely, in a bit of an AOL subscription move, Yahoo says it will continue to offer renewable subscriptions to pro to “Recurring Pro users.” The Pro tier did have another role to play. Today, CEO Marissa Mayer recounted how the small-image download was what prompted her to rethink Flickr altogether. “When we looked across our services we asked, why are we doing that? That started a thought experiment,” she said. The decision was that Flickr no longer wanted to offer “degraded” images. “We keep your images and you have high resolution images everywhere which is a huge differentiator.” But in the age of Dropbox, Bittorrent, Mega and more, there are so many places to store pictures online today: will anyone really want to pay such a premium price for that place to be Flickr and Yahoo? In any case, as one person has pointed out already, why users wouldn’t just register for two accounts rather than pay for the extra space? In the meantime, Flickr users are taking a page from the Tumblr book of user reviews, and laying out their vitriol about the changes over here.

An ambitious startup, AirStrip has a plan to circumvent the tangle of incompatible systems currently clogging up the free flow of information in health care. Believe or not, it’s an iOS app. That’s simplifying quite a bit, but the app — and the mobile devices on which it runs — are a powerful tool for making health care data easy to share for doctors, nurses, and similar professionals. “Look at what the iPhone did for the music business, and retail, and banking,” said Bruce Brandes, executive vice president at AirStrip, onstage today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference. AirStrip aims to make the iPhone do the same thing, only in health care. “Health care is arguably the industry most in need of a ‘big bang’ disruption.” The crux of the problem, according to Brandes: It’s “humanly impossible” for doctors to get all the information they need from the many sources of data available to them. Electronic medical record systems (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) are often built on proprietary systems and lack transparent interfaces for making them interoperable. AirStrip started by focusing on a seemingly simple problem: Making it possible for doctors and nurses to share waveform data (heart rates and blood oxygenation levels, for instance) with one another without having to be in the same room — previously a difficult problem. The company initially focused on perinatal care. “The sad truth is babies are injured many times because of that communications breakdown,” Brandes said. Once AirStrip figured out how to coordinate that data exchange, it was able to expand the areas of medical data that it consolidates into its apps. It now incorporates vital signs, lab results, imaging, critical medical events, and more. Dignity Health, one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, is using AirStrip. “We need something that is going to allow us to communicate across system, that can layer on top of the other EMRs, otherwise we’ll never be able to exchange information like we need to,” said Richard Roth, a vice president at Dignity. Dignity tested AirStrip with a pilot deployment at a rural healthcare location first, then followed up with an urban pilot, then jumped right in to a large-scale deployment. An entrepreneur in the audience asked about AirStrip’s experiences working with EMR providers, particularly Epic, the market leader. “Some vendors are more open than others, and as we know with Epic, they’re a hard nut to crack,” Brandes said. However, Brandes noted that even Epic will integrate its data with other systems in response to customer demand, as Epic CEO Judy Faulkner noted in a recent Forbes interview. With Dignity Health and other large health care providers who number among AirStrip’s clients putting pressure on EMR vendors, Brandes said, the walls are coming down. “Even the closed ones are being forced to work with us,” Brandes said. Top photo: Bruce Brandes, Airstrip. Photo by Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }