Heritage launched the $3 million Heritage Health Prize with one goal in mind: to develop a breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. Heritage believes that incentivized competition – one that includes the involvement of those with passionate minds that don’t know what can’t be done – is the best way to achieve the radical breakthroughs and innovations necessary to reform our health care system. Sponsoring this prize is simply one way that Heritage believes it can help solve a societal problem. Heritage is not an insurer and doesn’t stand to benefit directly by solving this problem – but Heritage is in the business of looking after the health of Americans and believes that corporations have a role in enabling change for the better.

This has the potential of catalyzing big breakthroughs in healthcare analytics. At too many healthcare clients have I seen Informatics departments stuck in operational reporting instead of the higher-value analytics work that they were probably originally recruited for. Sure, every client is different, but a common experience in healthcare consulting is that data is 1) hard to get, 2) hard to interpret, 3) hard to put to use. Health insurers have hard enough time managing their databases and data warehouses given limited IT budgets and qualified resources, let alone do significant value-add or R&D work in effectively mining their membership health and claims data. Other industries are having problem managing and drawing insights from “big data,” but it is especially difficult for healthcare due to HIPAA privacy and other government regulations.

So, the fact that the Heritage provider network has partnered with Kaggle to create an analytics competition is great news, indeed! Finally medical data is available for data scientists and other analytics wizards to comb through, innovate, and perhaps come up with true out-of-the-box thinking on this problem: patient identification and member-level targeting to truly reduce cost (and not just lipservice/buzzwords to put on vendors’ latest care management platform marketing collateral). IT and Informatics/Business Intelligence departments within healthcare companies are too busy doing “business as usual” and “maintenance” projects… so crowdsourcing “anonymous” health data to scientists and data experts just makes sense. I hope to see more of these types of competitions within the healthcare space in the near future.

I have signed up for the competition; looking forward to getting knee-deep in the member data, and getting a real-world handle on the types of challenges that Informatics departments must deal with on a daily basis.

For more info check out

Just wanted to let everyone know I launched a new photo website! It’s simple, showcasing only 20 photos. The rest can be seen on my flickr stream. Thanks for viewing!

Here’s an idea my friends and I have been kicking around for a while… turns out another bunch of (well-funded, well-connected) people have been secretly working on this in the meantime….

So what is Aro? Currently, it’s a piece of software that runs on top of Google’s mobile Android OS. But it’s not just another layer like some of those awful skins that OEMs design for Android. Instead, it weaves itself into the OS and uses AI and machine intelligence to make sense of what you’re doing with your phone. It natively ties into your email, phone, calendar, address book, and browser to make them potentially much more useful to you when you’re on the go.

Maybe someone sent you an email mentioning an address, the Aro system can recognize that and with the click of a button give you all kinds of actions you can do with it. The same is true with names — of both people and companies. And dozens of other things.

Read more at Techcrunch

Like it or not, Android is huge. Creating an open source mobile platform was one of the smarter things Google has done. It's too bad that they haven't done that great of a job doing it. Android has succeeded despite Google. In fact it's safe to say that Android is successful for one primary reason. The iPhone is only available on AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon a year ago. Android would be no where near as popular. But since this has yet to happen, Android has become a huge market that isn't going away.

via David Beach’s Blog: Developing for Android.

Android will be huge, especially in international markets such as China.  Time to start cranking out some Android apps!

interesting article on freemium model for mobile app development

He and his company decided that an app was a trade with customers — customers would pay money to have the company fill out their free time. And that’s how the company attached itself to the concept of DAUs.

DAUs, explained Young, are “daily active uniques” — all of the people who log into an app to play with it daily, the number of unique users per given day. The company is also interested in dollars (actually cents) per DAU, or the average number of cents earned per daily user. 250,000 users may play your free app every day, but only 2% may actually pay for it using in-app purchases. If that money total equals $5000, Young said that's like 2,000 users (the average number of downloads for the top list of paid apps at the time) buying your app for $2.50. In short, you don’t need to have a paid app at all — you just need to monetize usage for that 2%.

via GDC 2010: Ngmoco’s Neil Young on how freemium will change the App Store world.

Prepare for Takeoff – New York 2010 :: Red Bull Air Race Videos.

Great article on techcrunch about a Beijing tech conference; was in town a month ago, too bad I missed it, would have been great to attend:

After exploring the mobile and Internet landscapes in Shanghai and Beijing, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) group (30+ techies mostly from the Silicon Valley) continued their Asian field trip to Korea today. In Beijing, the GOAP attended two of China’s largest tech conferences: CHINICT, “the largest conference on China tech innovation” (which was livestreamed on TechCrunch), and the “Global Mobile Internet Conference” (GMIC), both of which are held in the city every year.

The GOAP got in touch with and gained unfiltered insight from dozens and dozens of local entrepreneurs, VCs and industry observers during the conferences and the events that took place around them. What follows are just a few learnings and impressions the GOAP group picked up during their China web crash course in Beijing (the size of the tech landscape is summarized in my previous post).

GeeksOnAPlane at the GMIC And CHINICT Tech Conferences In Beijing: Learnings From China.

Thought this was a great quote describing “bootstrapping” (quite literally too) at Zappos…

Nick talked about the progress that the website had made over the past few weeks. They were already getting $2,000 worth of orders a week, and the numbers were growing. They weren’t making any money, because anytime an order was placed, Nick would run to the local shoe store, buy the item, and then ship it out to the customer. Nick wanted to put up the website just to prove that people would actually be willing to buy shoes online

via How Zappos was Born: Place Bets on Passionate People – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

I traveled to Beijing to meet truckers and brokers first-hand while performing market research with Xin Tian You (XTY). Xin Tian You (XTY) was founded by industry veterans with the vision to transform the Chinese transportation industry. China has 26M truckers, approximately 12M trucks (85% individually owned/operated), and hundreds of thousands of information brokers. Shipping and truck information market is highly fragmented, inefficient, and lacks transparency; return-trip logistics is problematic and costly. XTY created a mobile app that puts shipment info at truckers’ fingertips, helping them reduce costs and wait time for finding return-trip cargo.