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Microsoft Aims to Store Health Records Online -- Will Anyone Bite?
Microsoft today unveiled their new consumer health and search site Health Vault. Built around their fairly impressive health search engine, Microsoft hopes that the site will become a central repository for people to store and selectively share their health information and records, including patient records, test results, and prescription info.I have no doubt that eventually health records will be stored online. Easier access and sharing of health information between doctors and hospitals is something that can lead to better and quicker diagnoses, less headaches when changing doctors or moving to a new town, and less chance of a serious condition being missed by a doctor. Many large companies are betting on the future of online health information portals, Google, Intel, and Cisco all have initiatives underway in this area. But there are major hurdles toward gaining public trust and acceptance, not least of which is security concerns.Personal health records are something...

The New Rules Of Technology VC
Just a few years ago, large venture firms were incubating companies for months. During the incubation period,the founders wrote 70+ page business plans, which described the market opportunity, the execution plan, along withthe five year financial projections. The plan was a proof, a risk management tool, used to justify that the ideahas legs and will work.But this isn't true anymore. You can't afford to be in stealth mode for months. Your can no longer buildrealistic projections for five years. The only way to create a technology company in this market is to evolve it.If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well.What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look.How Old VC WorkedIn the good old days, startup funding was a well a understood process. The founders would write the business plan.Typically it would be a lengthy document including...

A Flood of Mashups Coming? oAuth 1.0 Released
The distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec oAuth have released what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The oAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.The spec got a burst of publicity earlier this week when the widely used feed reader Bloglines announced that they intend to support it in addition to OpenID and the Attention Data standard APML.In this post I offer a high-level overview of what oAuth does, in as much as I understand it, followed by some thoughts on the concepts from some helpful industry experts.Why a Standard?Standards are the railroad tracks to a potential explosion of innovation and oAuth aims to make mashups far easier to develop than ever before. The group of developers took what they believed to be the best...

Tjoon: Split Screen Web Videos
Tjoon is an interesting webcam app aimed at, I suppose, musicians. It let's users create a 30 second split-screen video with up to 4 participants. Tjoon can be used to jam with friends or create a 4 part harmony with yourself -- or maybe just to recreate the opening credits to the Brady Bunch (sorta).Unfortunately, there are a few limitations to Tjoon that effect its usefulness. First and foremost, there isn't any real-time collaboration going on with the application. Jam sessions must be done asynchronously by each participant recording their piece separately and passing the Tjoon along to the next guy. Second, 30 seconds really isn't enough time for a band to get their ideas on paper, er, video. Last, they only offer 4-way split screens -- a number of videos on the site just have empty third or fourth spots, which looks silly.Tjoon was created as a spare time project from a group of employees of Suite 75 and was built with Ruby on Rails and Flash. The site supports...

HP Announces Digital Download and DVD On-Demand Wholesale Marketplace
HP announced a slew of new licensing partnerships this morning as part of their on-demand wholesale DVD service called HP Video Merchant Services. The service allows business customers to order on-demand production and packaging or digital downloads of niche video content that would be unfeasible for retailers to sell otherwise. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.Today's announcement, first covered in the San Jose Business Journal (press release here), was that HP has made deals with 30 video content production companies for more than 4,000 titles. Classic TV, religion, independent film and geographically targeted content were among the examples of provided of available content.ContextAs points of consumption for video content proliferate and the cost of production falls, the market for video content is sure to expand substantially. Lingering brand fears around user generated content have kept demand high in distribution channels for professionally produced content....

How To Create a Web App
This is the second post in our series on how to run a startup and develop a product. In part one, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, we outlined the process of bootstrapping your company into existence. In this post, we show you how to go from idea to specified product. By the end of it, youll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and write the most important document youll write for the company: your functional specification. For a simple system the process outlined in this post should take you a month. For a complex build, there will be a lot more research and your mock-up and functional specification will be big - so budget 3 months of full-time work.A Word on Strategy Every good business begins with a solid understanding of the proposition and business plan - in short, your strategy. It's worth reading Guy Kawasakis 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint; itll provide you with an idea of what should be included in your business plan and strategy. Your actual business plan should...