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On Thursday, May 27, Snaptic hosted its first Developer Conference. You can find the Flickr photo set embedded above.

120 mobile developers from around San Francisco gathered at Mighty to hear a fantastic lineup of speakers at Snaptic’s conference “by developers and for developers.” The topics ranged from practical tools and techniques to new ways of thinking for mobile developer entrepreneurs seeking to change the world.

We also announced the winners of the Move Your App! developer challenge. Here is the schedule:

Snaptic Welcome

• 11:00 Doors Open
• 11:15 Steve Brown & Andreas Schobel, “Welcome to Snaptic’s First Developer Conference and Move Your App! Developer Challenge”

Opening Your Mind

• 11:30 Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL, “Scaling and Succeeding with an Open-Source-Mind”
• 11:50 Cindy Alvarez of KISS Metrics, “Analytics: Getting to Paid”
• 12:05 LUNCH

Using Apps to Solve New Problems

• 1:15 Marko Gargenta, Marakana, “Deep Dive into Android Developement”
• 1:45 Clay Graham, ServiceTattler, “Our Experiment”
• 1:50 Zhao Lu, OrangeLabs, “Bringing User Presence To The Voice World”
• 2:00 BREAK

New Core Tools for Developers

• 2:15 Jamie Taylor, Metaweb, “Semantic + Location”
• 2:35 Marius Eriksen, Twitter, “geo @ Twitter”
• 2:55 Adam Schwen, GravityMobile, “Interface in Your Face: 11 Ways to Break Your Heart”
• 3:15 Geoffrey Clapp, “Developing with the Snaptic API”
• 3:30 BREAK

Building a Business Around Your App

• 3:45 Charles Yim, Google AdMob division, “Latest mobile data and best monetization practices”
• 4:00 Ashish Toshniwal, CEO of Y Media Labs , “Goto Market Strategy”
• 4:15 Brian Chen, WiRED, “Hacking the Press”
• 4:45 BREAK

Developing with a Vision

• 5:00 Juan Enriquez, “We Know What is Now, But What’s Next”

Developer Challenge Fun

• 5:30 Richard Tate, HopeLab, and Steve Brown, Snaptic, “Why Move Your App”
• 5:45 Jamis MacNiven, Buck’s of Woodside, Neil Izenberg, KidsHealth.org, Juan Enriquez, Excel Ventures, “Judges Discuss the Finalists”
• 6:00 Move Your App! winners
• 6:15 Dinner, drinks, mingle, hacking

At the SF New Tech Mobile event in San Francisco on May 5, Andreas Schobel and I had another chance to present the Snaptic notes technology and some of the developers we are working with in the Android market.

When we presented at SF New Tech the first time in 2009, we were a simple notepad app for Android smartphones. Then we found a way to add value to dozens of other Android apps as a note-taking function that developers easily could call and integrate using three lines of code. We used our 15 minute presentation at SXSW 2010 to highlight some of the top developers in the Android market that are working with us.

Three million active installs later, we have published our API and are becoming a notes platform, in the cloud and on smartphones, designed to make it easy to capture information that is important to you personally. Where Twitter is for content you want to promote to the world, Snaptic is a more personal space for information and data that you want use to improve yourself in some way. We make easy to capture what matters and make that information more useful by innovating in how we use context and semantics.

At SF New Tech this time around, we introduced our Move Your App! Android Developer Challenge. We brought together partners like the TED Prize, HopeLab, and KidsHealth to make it really worthwhile for developers to come up with Android apps that promote and track physical activity. The developer who can convince the judges that his or her app will get people off the couch and burn the most calories could win a trip to TED Global 2010 in Oxford.

Snaptic and HopeLab Announce the Android “Move Your App” Developer Challenge
TED to invite winner to attend TED Global 2010 in Oxford
Snaptic Press Release

San Francisco, CA — Snaptic , a developer of smartphone and web applications that capture, organize, and share information has partnered with HopeLab, a non-profit focused on improving the quality of life for young people with chronic illness, to sponsor the “Move Your App” developer challenge in response to the 2010 TED Prize Wish.

It is widely recognized that the obesity epidemic and sedentary behavior are catastrophic to global health. Today’s smartphone platforms, such as Android and software APIs like those offered by Snaptic, offer new tools for developers to create apps that give individuals more power and control to improve their health.

“Onboard smartphone sensors, the growth of large online social networks, and mass adoption of mobile software offer fertile ground for a new breed of apps that encourage and measure movement,” said Steve Brown, CEO of Snaptic. “We are excited to work with HopeLab and the Android developer community to help everyone reach a higher state of health and well being.” (more…)

Last month, I had the chance to speak at South By Southwest 2010 — 15 minutes of fame in the Future 15 mobile track of the world’s hippest interactive conference. I was invited to talk about the Android ecosystem, where Snaptic is a leading developer with over 2 million active installs of our note-taking and geo-tagging applications. Here’s my presentation, entitled “Augmenting Your Brain With Android.”

SXSW started as a music and film festival, but has emerged as one of the biggest affairs for the Internet and new interactive technology. Since tech turned the music industry on its head and is in the process of disrupting the film business as well, it makes sense to combine tech with film and music. 2010 also was the first year SXSW had a track dedicated to mobile, which also makes sense as we enter another phase shift with the next billion connections to the internet coming through smart mobile devices.

With such powerful, always on, always connected technology in our hands around the clock, we posed the question of what this means for our brain. How can we use smart mobile technology to become smarter in managing the increased flow of information? With the flood of content generated by others people and important to other people, what is happening to the content that is most important to us?

Snaptic is developing technology to augment your brain, and we are looking to the brain for design inspiration. There are no database schemas, no tables with rows and columns, in your brain. Instead, your brain is a vast network of synaptically connected notes that grows and evolves as you capture and connect information that is important to you.

The information model for Snaptic note-taking applications is a network of interconnected elements of data, retaining and using context so that your notes make more sense and are easier to find with less effort. We have opened our notes platform to developers, making it easy to capture and connect information from any app.

We can’t do it alone, which is why we are open-sourcing more of our technology every day and inviting more developers to work with us to create a new information space designed like the brain and for the brain. Check out http://github.com/snaptic to follow our open source projects, and check out http://snaptic.com/events for information on our upcoming developer challenge and developer conference.

Yesterday, I built a contraption that turned my already hideous treadmill into something even more aesthetically questionable: a home office. I am typing this blog post on my MacBook as I walk on the treadmill at 3.5 miles per hour.

Like millions of people around the world, this New Years I again resolved to exercise more. After a bunch of failed attempts in prior years, this year would be different. I decided to word my New Years Resolution a little differently as well:

Find a sustainable exercise pattern that works for me, together with the tools to support it.

Emphasis on sustainable, as in beyond the first quarter. I also said I would find a pattern that works for me by the end of the year. That way I don’t need to feel like a failure even if I have not found the right thing for me when summer rolls around. There still will be plenty of time to keep looking.

This year I also told a few friends about my goal, which implicitly makes me feel more accountable. Actually, I did that before, and no one really cares about someone else’s exercise goal. What’s new this year is that I wrote this blog post, shared it on Facebook and Twitter, and now the whole world can see my New Years Resolution, and my laptop treadmill contraption, if they happen to stumble across this site. More importantly, I changed the context for exercise.

The first principle of behavior change is that our behavior is highly context-dependent. Our behavior at the office is different than at home. Our behavior at home is different than at the ball game. Our behavior at the ball game is different depending on whether our team is winning or losing. When it comes to behavior, context is everything.

In my 2010 exercise experiment, I am changing the context of my morning email routine so that the default behavior, the path of least resistance, encourages something healthier.

By nature, we are lazy. And even if we don’t think we are, the laziness assumption is always a better strategy when designing new tools and processes. We seem to be obeying one of the most fundamental laws of physics, to find an equilibrium point that minimizes energy consumption.

For a lot of us, this laziness equilibrium point is on the couch with chips and drink in hand watching American Idol, which, this time of year is on TWO nights a week.

Since it looks and feels kind of stupid to stand on my treadmill and type on my laptop with the treadmill turned off, I turn on the treadmill and walk. Next thing you know, I have walked five miles, answered all of my emails, reviewed a new contract, checked in on Facebook, written a couple of tweets, and completed this blog post.

Maybe this year my resolution to exercise more is actually going to work! If I only can convince my wife that my new treadmill office contraption is as aesthetically pleasing as it feels…

This is a short blog post on the way home from Connected Health 2009. I’m in the air on Virgin Atlantic typing on my iPhone connected to the web with inflight WiFi — that’s why it’s short and may have some typos.

First of all, Connected Health is a much bigger idea than the original idea of telemedicine, which was all about laying the painful last mile of technology to finally reach those with the greatest needs to communicate about health.

Connected Health, in contrast, is not about devices, sensors and gadgets. It is about the idea that how people connect with each other has a profound impact on health.

As Nicholas Christakis, author of “Connected”, reiterated in his keynote speech, our connections to each other, probably even more so that our connections to our doctors and nurses, has a measurable impact on our health.

Despite the big idea of connected health, too many of the Connected Health sessions followed the same format:

1. Most of the trillions in health spending is the result of chronic illness which in turn is the consequence of our lifestyle and behavior.

2. There is compelling evidence that connected health can improve quality and reduce the cost of care, referring to proactive care models that coach and monitor patients at home.

3. The only barrier to widespread adoption of a more rational model of connected care that will save our health system from impending collapse is Medicare coverage of remote health monitoring technologies.

This is the same conversation we had six years ago when we introduced the first connected health ideas as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. Six years later, it seemed like nothing had changed.

In fact, much has changed, and the next few years will be profoundly different than the past six. The fact is, we are all becoming connected in a tighter web of relationships enabled by technology. 300 million of us are on Facebook, maintaining a constant awareness of how our social network is faring. Soon we all will be able to keep tabs on our most important relationships on our smartphones.

When Grandma is also on Facebook, and her friends and family know how she is doing and she knows they still care, do you think there will be fewer crises that lead to hospitalization? I think so.

In a world where we can blog and tweet from an airplane while watching satellite TV, we surely have the tools to create the kind of connection that will improve healthcare. It’s going to happen, not because of policies and reimbursement, but simply because connected health is far better for everyone than isolation.

The “Share To Win” Experiment

Last month, my company sponsored a “crowdsourcing philanthropy” experiment in which we offered to donate money to causes based on their ability to rally supporters online. Our premise with the Share To Win challenge was that a cause needs two ingredients to be successful in the modern world: An idea worth spreading, and a core group of passionate people to light a fire online.

A recent Harvard study found that just 10% Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content on the popular and fast growing microblogging service. The numbers must be even more skewed when it comes to the much more involved act of traditional blogging. If you have an important idea that you want to spread, and especially if you are a non-profit cause that relies on the generosity of others to back your idea, you are going to need to have some of those Internet extroverts on your side.

The methodology of our challenge was straightforward: Anyone could nominate a cause by creating a note on 3banana.com describing why people should support their cause, and then share that note through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The five causes that attracted the most endorsements – as measured by unique visitors who left a comment – would win our donations, a total of $10,000. The challenge would give champions an excuse to spread the word about their cause, but without asking for money – which tends to reduce the virality of any idea online. (more…)

Here’s the presentation I gave at the Quantified Self meeting at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto this week. Sixty smart and passionate people on the frontier of personal life and health monitoring technology joined the discussion about using lifestream data to improve memory and cognition, enhance self-awareness, and understand health. Some attendees were researchers trying to discover signals in lifestream data, starting with their own. Some were developers and investors in health and behavioral monitoring companies. Some were from Google. Some were simply curious.

One presenter from Fujitsu demonstrated his around-the-clock blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring results in an effort to understand which medications influenced his sleep apnea. Esther Dyson showed her 23andMe genetic profile and compared it to her family members and colleagues, while another researcher showed the challenges of posting his genome on Twitter. (Hint: at 140 characters per Tweet and 1000 Tweets per day, it takes two years and you have a high risk of being flagged as a spammer.) Others logged symptoms and environmental factors related to medical issues, analyzed language to passively capture information and insights on mental health, while one person showed his 10 year mind map.

The common denominators at the Quantified Self meeting were that everyone was interested in taking notes on their life experience in a quantifiable way in order to better understand their own experience and to solve problems. In each case, the limiting factor seemed to be the ability and persistence to take notes that could be converted into something useful. It’s just too much darned work.

Simplicity is the key to any kind of self-monitoring and information capture, because no one needs a bunch of extra work. I learned the strength of simplicity working in the field of personal health monitoring for many years as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the developer of the Health Buddy System, a pioneering effort of electronic “lifestreaming” to improve chronic care. (more…)

Earlier this week, my company announced Share To Win, an experiment in crowdsourcing philanthropy. It’s not the usual campaign of trying to raise money from a lot of people in small increments over a social network. We are doing it the other way around: We committed to donate $10,000, and we will allocate the money to five charitable organizations serving unmet needs in health, education and the environment. We are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to help identify the recipients of those funds, and then we will write checks at the end of September.

As active developers and users of social media technologies, we can’t imagine how anyone with an idea that depends on the ongoing support of a community of people giving money, time and energy can survive without them. In fact, we don’t believe a cause will be sustainable for long in the modern world without a keen grasp of social media and an ability to use social networking tools to identify and recruit new supporters and to keep them engaged and informed. Social media channels are how ideas spread. Word of mouth facilitated by social media – the viral channel – is the only cost-effective channel to spread ideas.

There is a catch to social media for causes, however. You need two key ingredients for success: A story worth spreading, and a core group of people active in social media who care enough about your story to get the ball rolling. Share To Win was designed to identify and reward causes with these ingredients. (more…)

The panel picker for SXSW went live this morning, including our panel proposal called “Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies,” at the intersection of augmented reality, semantic web, mobile technologies, and brain science.

SXSW (South by Southwest) is one of the largest music festivals in the United States. In recent years, SXSW has also become a mecca for creative internet and new technology developers, entrepreneurs and designers. Augmenting Your Brain is a panel proposal for SXSW Interactive.

The next evolution of the web, the semantic web, is rapidly adding layers of intelligence to the connected information of the world. And we get to carry more and more of this intelligence around with us every day. How will that change us?

Soon we all will have two brains: one in our head and one in our pocket. At least one is getting smarter every day. How can we augment the squishy one? Learn how context-aware mobile devices connecting to semantic web services can give you ESP and new powers. Discuss how it might actually start to change our brains.

The questions that the panel will address include:

1. What are semantic web technologies?
2. What is augmented reality?
3. How can I augment my brain with technology?
4. How does context awareness change every application?
5. What is the bridge between human brains and silicon brains?
6. How will new media and semantic technology make me smarter?
7. What is brain plasticity?
8. How might semantic mobile technology change my brain?
9. What are the best use cases to illustrate the power and potential to augment our brains?
10. What happens when we connect a billion brains using mobile and semantic technology?

There are over 2200 proposals for panels for SXSW 2010, and the community vote partly determines which panels will be on the agenda at the SXSW conference. The Panel Picker is a fascinating list of ideas. This is a great way to organize a conference, with topics sourced from a very creative community of participants.

If you like the idea of Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies, and you would like to see this panel at SXSW 2010 or online, vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3253.

Thanks for your consideration, and please be sure to give this panel a Thumbs Up and leave a comment on the SXSW Panel Picker with your thoughts.

3banana Notes has been nominated as one of the best Organization & Productivity applications for the new Google Android smartphone!

3banana is a notebook that you can keep on your phone and on the web at 3banana.com. On your computer, clip stuff from the web or jot stuff down on your private 3banana page, and you also have it handy on your phone. Take a note or tag a photo on your phone, and you also have it organized on your computer. Your notebook is private, but you can selectively share and discuss pages from your 3banana notebook with your friends, like notes about books, restaurants, or wine.

3banana is free and simple to use. It functions like a private blog or private Twitter. We have been adding lots of new features to the Android smartphone app, like hashtags for organizing your ideas, barcode scanning and printing so you can connect virtual notes to physical objects, and easy sharing with Twitter and Facebook.

For a little more detail on 3banana, here’s my presentation from our launch at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference on March 17, 2009. I presented some examples of how you can use 3banana to organize information and notes around the home and attach virtual notes to objects using your own personalized scannable QR Codes, or two dimensional barcodes.

Next up, I will be speaking at CTIA, the International Association of the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, at the Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Diego, October 7-9, 2009. My talk is in the Mobile Healthcare Track. An easy to use mobile journal comes in very handy if you are tracking your health, especially when you make it less work, more useful, and easier to share with services on the web. Look for some special new features at CTIA on October 7, 2009!

This year, the US will spend $2.5 trillion on healthcare, and no one really understands where the money will go. All we know is that we will spend twice as much as the rest of the modern world and we apparently will get worse results. We also know that there are wide variations in how medicine is practiced within this country, and there seems to be no clear correlation between spending and quality.

Escalating healthcare costs and the current crisis in the healthcare system has something in common with the recent financial meltdown. Both crises are rooted in information challenges: The underlying systems have not been transparent, with too many opportunities to game the system, until eventually the inevitable crisis hits.

Much like subprime mortgage applications, the underlying healthcare data that might reveal the true status and risks of the system are buried on paper and in silos. As a result, the risk is misunderstood, mismanaged, mispriced and ultimately shifted to the next sucker, the last one always being the taxpayer.

Just as the mortgage crisis has its roots in policies designed to help more Americans buy a home, healthcare also is full of good intentions gone awry. The fact is, the system has become far too complex for our old information technologies and methods to handle. Without a new information model we will continue to fly blind.

New Models for Linked Data

In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the web standards that enabled the Internet to fundamentally change the way the world is wired, described his vision for the web:

The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web.

The original web enabled the documents of the world to be linked together, and now we can find the world’s smallest needle in the worlds largest haystack in milliseconds. The next generation of the web, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, is about linking data and meaning in much the same way we have already linked documents. This web of linked data enables a marketplace of ideas competing to create smarter and more useful services – without needing loads of capital to redevelop or integrate the old systems. (more…)

Here is the rough transcript of Today’s Healthcare IT Policy Committee Meeting. One of the active Twitterers on #hitpol asked someone with a blog to post it, and since I have been following these meetings on Twitter and via the webcast, here it is.

First, here is what the Health IT Policy Committee does:

The Health IT Policy Committee will make recommendations to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) on a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information infrastructure, including standards for the exchange of patient medical information. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides that the HIT Policy Committee shall at least make recommendations on standards, implementation specifications, and certifications criteria in eight specific areas.

What might look like mundane details in this work actually will determine the infrastructure of our future healthcare system, and we are about to spend a lot of money on it.

The biggest urgency is that if we don’t transform healthcare, our current approach will bankrupt our country. The biggest concerns are that if we act too quickly, we will lock in legacy approaches that have failed us already, and we will miss the opportunity for truly transformative approaches coming out of the Semantic Web and Open Source communities.

Here is the transcript, courtesy of  @cascadia on Twitter:

Event ID: 1364976
Event Started: 7/16/2009 9:50:16 AM ET
Please stand by for realtime captioning.

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You’d — you’dJudy, you’re all set.

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Judy, you’re all set.

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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the third meeting of the health information technology policy committee. This is a federal advisory committee which means it is being operated in public. We have an audience in the room, telephone lines are open if you care to listen to the meeting, and it is being webcast. Minutes of the meeting will be put on our website in about a week following the meeting. Members of the committee, please remember to identify yourself when you’re speaking so we have proper attributes in the transcript. Let me go around the room and you can introduce yiewrgs beginning with la ton I can’t. (more…)

Last week, a healthcare executive asked me “What is social media”? I point out that it was a healthcare executive because many people in the $2.6 trillion US healthcare field are having intense debates right now about how to make better use of information technology and possibly how to use Web 2.0 technologies to support patients, accelerate research, and improve care. Most people in the healthcare field, however, know they are coming from behind and they are not sure where to start.

Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the question. Working one block from Twitter in the South Park area of San Francisco, I had taken it for granted that social media has become part of everyday life. When I tried to describe the idea that sharing more of yourself on the web can make life richer and more interesting, the good doctor looked at me with confusion and maybe a tinge of disgust. Sharing in healthcare is not social, and to a lot of healthcare people, “social media” sounds more like a communicable disease than a great new idea or solution.

Sharing in healthcare has always been, and probably for most of us should remain, an intensely personal and private act. It is not surprising that social media and healthcare haven’t come together, at least not under the auspices of major health care institutions. Despite some forward thinking efforts of a few pioneers like Mayo Clinic, which recently even sponsored a “Tweetcamp”, most of the use of social media in health has come from grass roots efforts as people find information and support from other people who share similar needs, experiences and circumstances.

Sharing through social media is an act of faith that the benefits of being “out there” with your ideas and content will outweigh the risks to your privacy and personal space. Millions of people have already gotten over than hurdle and have determined that social media makes life richer and more interesting. Social media is about people having a conversation online. For many, this already includes health. (more…)

This June 8, Ruth Stone will turn 94. Author of 13 books of poetry and recognized by just about every literary prize there is, Ruth recently described on YouTube how she actually lost most of the poems that have ever come to her:

“I never felt that I wrote them anyways. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me, and if I didn’t catch them they went through me and went on, so I just figured they were part of the universe, and not me.”

In her TED Talk, Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love”) described creativity as more like a genie than genius, as something that possesses you from the outside and takes hold of you rather than something that you can possibly generate yourself or take credit for.

That the best ideas come in flurries of inspiration and seem like accidents may be a function of how our complex and wonderful brains work. While we are aware of our one focal point of attention at any given moment, billions of parallel connections are still churning. What are they thinking about?

Whether the source of creative ideas is a muse or something equally mysterious that emerges in the neural networks of our brain, what can we do to call our creativity into action and apply it to the very present needs and challenges around us?

(more…)