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.

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.”

HopeLab has joined with Snaptic on this challenge to help advance one of its key initiatives which is focused on addressing the obesity epidemic and sedentary behavior among young people. HopeLab is keenly interested in how mobile technology and mobile apps can inspire people to move more.

“Partnering with Snaptic on this Developer Challenge is a fantastic way to explore how these new tools might reach more people faster and ignite movement in unique and innovative ways” noted Pat Christen, President and CEO of HopeLab.

The World Health Organization’s latest global projections indicate that in 2005 approximately 1.6 billion adults were overweight and projects that by 2015, that figure will rise to 2.3 billion. In the United States, over one-third of Americans are currently overweight or obese, a figure projected to grow to 43 percent, or 103 million people by 2018 if current trends continue. This will translate to an estimated $344 billion in medical-related expenses, consuming 21% of U.S. healthcare spending annually.

The need for change is urgent, and the time is now for new ways to combat this growing epidemic.

The challenge calls on Android developers to create apps that get people to move, are fun to use, and are innovative in their approach to encouraging physical activity. Snaptic will be providing resources for developers to draw from to build their apps and the winners will be selected and awarded at its upcoming developer conference on May 27, 2010 in San Francisco, California .

The Move Your App conference also affords developers the opportunity to learn about what it takes to move an app to market, with numerous expert speakers presenting on a range of subjects, such as: running and financing a startup, marketing and promoting apps, tips and tricks for Android programming, and much more.

Developers can register for the challenge starting Thursday April 22, 2010 and must complete and submit their application by Friday, May 21, 2010. The top finalists will be given an opportunity to showcase their applications at the Snaptic developer conference and the winners will be announced live at the event by a panel of expert judges.

The panel of judges features luminaries and experts such as Juan Enriquez, Author, Futurist, & Partner at Excel Venture Management; Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems & former CEO MySQL; Amy Novogratz, TED Prize Director; Pam Omidyar, Founder and Board Chair, HopeLab; George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures, and others.

The first place winner’s travel and accommodations to TED Global 2010 in Oxford will be sponsored by HopeLab, and TED will extend an invitation for the winner to attend the conference. The Move Your App prize was inspired in part by Jamie Oliver, who was awarded the 2010 TED Prize for his tireless fight to improve the health of young people everywhere and turn the tide on unhealthy diets. Jamie’s wish states, “I wish for everyone to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

Amy Novogratz, TED Prize Director, said “Challenging thousands of app developers to make people move is a fantastic way to promote a healthier lifestyle.” She continued, “The Move Your App challenge embodies the self-organizing principle of the TED Prize and the spirit of Jamie’s wish in the fight against obesity.”

Complete contest rules and conference information can be found at http://snaptic.com/events

About HopeLab
HopeLab is a nonprofit organization that combines rigorous research with innovative solutions to improve the health and quality of life of young people with chronic illness. HopeLab works closely with young people themselves to understand their needs and to incorporate their critical and ongoing input into product development. HopeLab is committed to the scientific study of their interventions to ensure their products are effective. More information can be found at http://hopelab.org.

About Snaptic
Snaptic develops web and mobile applications that make it simple to capture, organize, and share information on the go and keep it connected in the cloud. Snaptic is the leader in note-taking and geo-tagging applications in the Android Market with over 2.5 million active installs and numerous integrations with many of the market’s top applications. For more information, please visit http://snaptic.com.

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, NgoziOkonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED Conference takes place in Long Beach, California; TEDGlobal is held each year in Oxford, UK. TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where three exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action, and TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world. Follow TED on Twitter, twitter.com/tedtalks, or on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/TED

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.

Treadmill Laptop Computer Stand

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…

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.

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.

To encourage participation, we reduced the barriers to posting content online down to a minimum. The first tactic was simply positioning: Asking users to share a note was less formal and less work than authoring a complete article for a blog or website. The second tactic was to further reduce the actual effort required. Users could sign in with their existing Google account, and then type their idea freeform into an input field atop a notes page, without worrying about titles and categories. Press save, and you have created a private but sharable webpage with full functionality for threaded discussions. We were soliciting raw input of thoughts and ideas with as few barriers as possible.

Then we worked on increasing the fluidity of sharing these freeform notes with Facebook and Twitter. We just launched Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth integration with 3banana Notes, enabling direct connections to those services so that users could share notes a with just a couple quick clicks. As a business, 3banana justified the cost of sponsoring the project as a “Beta That Gives Back”, creating an incentive to use the new sharing functions and giving the money we might have otherwise spent on traditional testing methods to some good nonprofit causes.

What Happened?

Over 50 causes were nominated for share to win. Some organizations nominated themselves, and some were nominated by one of their passionate supporters. We also asked our friends and family to nominate causes and to spread the word. The first big surprise was how the social media platforms we had taken for granted for some time now were still quite new and fresh to many people at non-profits. We found many causes to be extremely eager to figure it out, while other causes felt they needed to call a board meeting before even posting a note about their mission on Twitter.

Among the causes who were nominated, over 20 of them took Share To Win as a real opportunity to spread their message to supporters through Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and email. We had suggested at the beginning of Share To win that causes should consider the prize money as a token of appreciation, while the real benefit of the campaign would be to create an opportunity to reach out to more people and to galvanize support on social media channels without asking for any money, because we were putting up the cash if they could show they had supporters.

The top two contenders couldn’t have been more different on the surface. Grand prize winner SENS Foundation supports research in regenerative medicine and seeks to end aging. Runner up Los Angeles Habilitation House helps veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury get back on their feet. Underneath the surface, however, these two causes both are based on powerful ideas and both are championed by passionate supporters. Each cause was able to find over 2000 people who supported them enough to sign up for an online service they had never heard of, login and post their endorsement message. Remembering the Harvard study showing that most people don’t make the leap to generate content online, 2000 content generating supporters represents a much big number behind the scenes.

We also gave prizes to the top contenders in the fields of education, environment, and health, each of which gathered hundreds of passionate supporters to comment online: Art in All of Us helps kids express and share their experiences, their passions, and their dreams with peers around the world through art. Their vision inspired supporters from 80 countries to endorse them in Share To Win. Disaster Accountability Project recognizes that the number of climate-related disasters is bound to rise. Hurricane Katrina proved that we need better ways of responding to disasters, and DAP advocates grass roots monitoring and information sharing. The HeartMath Institute sees stress as one of the most important frontiers in healthcare and their research aims to help us better measure, understand and manage this driver of so much illness.

For some of the smaller causes, even though they did not have the numbers to win a top prize, they still found a way to bring together and galvanize dozens of supporters. These people felt part of a support community, and in the future will be even less inhibited to speak out online, to Tweet, and to tell a friend on Facebook. One of these causes is Friends of Kibera, a new non-profit started by students at Notre Dame to help people in Kibera, a very poor area in Kenya. Another was a group called Magical Bridge, raising money for new and better parks for kids. These causes and dozens of others were highly diverse in their missions but very similar in their ability to use social media to rouse the passion of supporters for very clear ideas that mattered to their respective communities.

What did we learn?

The final tallies of supporters were very nonlinear. The more support a cause received, the more rapidly the cause spread. Even though 3banana is an open and free service, and there were no barriers to signing up and commenting, we found surprisingly little abuse of the process, which we were able to validate by cross referencing the results of multiple methods of counting unique users.

It was very motivating to read comments from hundreds of people about why they supported their cause. On of the biggest fears that large donors sometimes have about helping small non-profit causes is that they will find themselves alone, and what started as an act of generosity will become a guilt-ridden dependency. When you see that a cause has hundreds of supporters willing to take the initiative to endorse the cause publicly online, it creates a lot of confidence that the cause has both an idea worth spreading and a critical mass of passionate support that will sustain the group through the inevitable ups and downs of any worthwhile mission.

Based on what we learned from a whole bunch of new users, we are refining both our note-taking applications and our methods for sharing notes. Then we may do something like Share To Win again, perhaps with partners who share our passion for using social media and mobile technology for good causes. Next time around, we will focus more on mobile information capture and sharing: We hope to make the engagement in the cause even more personal, allowing users to snap photos and to link them to locations, products, or events to connect with their cause.

If you want to be notified when we launch the next Share To Win challenge, simply start a free notebook at 3banana.com, create a note about your cause and about yourself, and use the share function to send us link to your note at sharetowin @ gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter at @brown2020. We will keep you posted!

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.

Initiated over 10 years ago, Health Buddy started as a rather limited pre-scripted four-button survey system to collect symptoms from patients while providing education and motivation on following a treatment plan. Despite its simplicity and limitations (or more likely, because of them), Health Buddy was tremendously successful in positively influencing health behavior and in reducing health complications for complex conditions ranging from diabetes and heart disease to mental health and obesity. Tens of thousands of patients are using Health Buddy daily. The Medicare project that we spent years in winning and implementing is showing great results where many others have failed. The company is now Robert Bosch Healthcare.

Earlier this year, my new company, 3banana Inc., introduced note-taking applications for iPhone and Android smartphones that offered the ability to sync with a free online notebook and share with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. My interest in Quantifed Self is to learn, share and discuss ideas about how to use smartphones to enhance our working memory and augment our brains by capturing information and connecting to useful services that can help us achieve our goals — and to do so with less work.

Can we shape our brains around mobile technologies to expand our working memory in much the same way we do in developing software? In developing software for mobile devices where memory resources are more limited, we don’t store all of the content in short term memory. Instead, we store the links to where we know we can find the rest of the information when needed, wherever it might be on the network. The same can work for our brains. Once we have a trusted memory accessory where we can easily park and retrieve notes, we can free up both short term and long term working memory.

The key to capturing information is simplicity, which is why 3banana Notes is freeform and unstructured. Who needs the work of thinking up titles and categories when you want to jot down a thought? Instead, structure can emerge from inline hashtags (the ubiquitous # sign that gives semantics to Twitter) and from context awareness: Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you took the note can improve pattern matching services that add value to your notes by appending useful information and filling in the blanks. On our Android smartphone app, for example, addresses within notes automatically turn into links to Google maps, and phone numbers automatically link to dialing a call.

The other way that 3banana on Android works to enhance your working memory is to enable you to store links to your content directly on physical objects by generating and scanning your own personalized two dimensional barcodes, or QR Codes. We have brain maps dedicated to the physical objects we find around us every day, and these objects can be powerful cues to recalling the information and actions associated with those objects if we can link to them in context. Simple examples include putting a QR Code on your furnace that you can scan with your phone to recall the logbook about changing the filters, or putting a QR code linking to your music practice chart or exercise log on the music stand or on the exercise bike.

At Quantified Self, I showed the example of scanning bottle of wine with a smartphone to access shared wine notes and wine tasting discussions with friends. Remembering bottles of wine is one of those “note to self” categories that always got lost until I started connecting it to my digital world. Now I can quickly snap a photo into my #wine notes, share with people who like wine, or post to social media sites Twitter and Facebook, using Twitter’s OAuth and Facebook Connect for one-click integration. Perhaps a wine distributor or retailer will want to use 3banana to tag expensive bottles wine so that each sale becomes a potential viral marketing channel leading to new customers and increasing the loyalty of existing customers.

Finally, we know from brain research that emotion is the most powerful trigger in the brain to put something in long term storage — to remember something rather than to forget it. That’s great when we need to remember something for survival, like how to get away from the lions and bears, but it doesn’t serve us well for all the non-life threatening content we might want to remember for business and personal interests. Just as teaching is the best way to learn something, I have found that writing, sharing, and discussing new ideas with real people is the best way to remember something. Sharing with other people using social media connects that information to our brain maps associated with people, and relationships are loaded with emotional content.

In the world of the brain, three is a magic number because we can remember and work with things in threes better than any other number. 3banana has three meanings: In the geeky world of code monkeys, 3banana describes those smart, flexible, fast learners adept with new technology. In the world Twitter and jotting down notes, 3banana is a unit of time that represents the minimum latency to capture and absorb an idea. And if you are looking at three bananas on your kitchen table, you probably know that bananas are brain food. Bananas are rich in potassium, which helps the brain transmit messages. But bananas don’t last long sitting around, so if you are looking at three, better share one.

Our mission at 3banana is to create tools that enhance your working memory and augment your brain. In addition to taking notes, we will keep enhancing these tools to become more and more useful in those areas of your life that you want to improve, both personally and for the planet. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

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.

The methodology of Share To Win is quite simple: Sign in at http://3banana.com and post a note answering the question: “Why should people care about our cause?” You don’t need to work for the cause to enter a cause in the competition, but your note must name a beneficiary that is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in good standing. Next, share the link to your note with friends by email, Facebook, and Twitter. Visitors who click the link to your note can sign in with a Google account leave a comment with their thoughts on your cause. We will run a software script to count the comments from unique users starting Sunday, August 23 after 11:59 PM when voting starts, until voting stops on Sunday, September 27 at 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time. The causes with the most comments can win cash donations and some attention.

Tweet the link to the 3banana note about your cause with the hashtag #sharetowin so we can find you. If you don’t know what that means, then share the link to your note with us by email at sharetowin [at] gmail [dot] com, and we will Tweet it for you. If your cause does not use Twitter or Facebook, you can still share the link to your note by email or by posting it on the web. We think you will see that even if you are not using Facebook and Twitter, the people who care about your cause and the people you need to reach with your ideas are using those channels already.

Why did we do it this way? First, we wanted to lower the bar to promoting your cause. We don’t want you to have to do a lot of work, like making a YouTube video, writing an essay, or making a fancy webpage design. ”Writing a Note” implies that it is informal, and you can just jot something down without being perfect. In fact, you can simply cut and paste your mission statement, organization, and website into the note and be done if you want to. On the other hand, the causes who take some time to make sure that their story is thoughtful and compelling are more likely to inspire support. What kind of story will that be? We have no idea, but we will soon find out.

We chose commenting as the method of voting because commenting requires more thought and engagement from supporters than simply voting something up or down with a voting button. We are looking for causes that inspire enough engagement and commitment that supporters are actually willing to leave a comment, hopefully a thoughtful comment and some words of encouragement. We are not asking supporters for any money, so this is purely a measure of moral support. If an idea is engaging enough that people are willing to type some words into their computer to indicate their support, we think that might indicate the kind of support community we are looking for. We’ll see.

Once a cause has a page and link, Share To Win is an opportunity to reach out to supporters and friends without asking for money, just moral support. In social networks, it is pretty unlikely that people will pass on to friends a request for money. Most people consider such requests to be spam. But if all you are asking for is a vote of confidence, and that vote can lead to funding, there are far fewer mental obstacles to passing on a request to more people. On Twitter, it’s just a matter of “Retweeting” the original Tweet with a link to the note describing your cause. On Facebook, your friends can see what you post, give it a thumbs up, and then all of their friends will see the link as well.

The list of comments could turn out to be a great list of supporter testimonials, something that the cause could reuse. In any case, these direct and unfiltered comments from people who care enough to sign-in and vote will be great feedback to any non-profit organization willing to listen. The non-profit world is full of passionate people who care about the causes they serve, but it also can be insular, with a lot of people preaching to those who already believe in the cause. Opening up a direct channel to more people who care, but without the usual filters, could be very instructive to cause leaders.

Once the five causes have been identified at the end of September, we will write checks to the winners. But the real work will have been done by the community of supporters who demonstrated their belief in the winning causes. That same community of supporters hopefully will continue to support and monitor the progress of the causes that they chose. If the methodology works, then it will be repeated, by us and by others seeking to support good causes that demonstrate that they have solid support communities.

Most cause-marketing campaigns you hear about are done by big brands and big companies, but as with a lot of things, the Internet changes everything. Even though we are a startup at a pretty early stage, we are moving fast. We hope more people will try 3banana, an easy way to take notes online or on your phone and selectively share notes on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Putting our money toward some good causes is a lot more fun, interesting, and unpredictable than buying online advertising (sorry, Google). We get to try some new social media ideas, meet new people, and learn some things about how and why ideas spread they way they do. The learning from this experiment will help us grow smarter as a business and will help out some good causes along the way.

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!

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.

Tim Berners-Lee continued in Scientific American in 2001:

The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.

The semantic web is a model for linking information and representing knowledge, and semantic technologies for linking data will be a vital tool in solving the healthcare information challenge. To understand why our current approaches to healthcare IT do not scale and don’t work for the problems of understanding and optimizing healthcare services while controlling healthcare spending, let’s go back to the beginning, of how we store and characterize data in the first place.

Traditional Data Models

Traditional databases organize the world into lots of two-dimensional tables. Someone needs to design the schema for the world and then neatly fit the world into that schema. It is quick, simple, and has been how the world has stored and processed information for a generation.

Let’s take a simple everyday example of John and Mary, two friends from college. The simple facts of John and Mary are as follows:

John lives at 234 Main St.
John graduated from Harvard
John plays Rugby
Mary lives at 432 Post St.
Mary graduated from Yale
Mary doesn’t have a sport.

In the traditional information model, we can put this story into a tidy two-dimensional table:

But the real world is more complex than that. What happens when we gather more knowledge of the world? For example, we now would like to add the following facts:

John rents at 234 Main St.
Mary owns 234 Main St.

Or the facts that:

Mary attended Harvard
Mary is a fan of Rugby

We can attempt to fit more and more of the world into the relational database by adding more and more columns to our table, or we can add more tables that go into more detail about the various elements of our data. Then we can join these tables in various ways.

This model worked for a long time, but as the knowledge of the world becomes more complex, the approach becomes brittle. We need more and more effort and people to maintain and manage the ever more complex set of databases.

When relationships become even slightly more complex, the system starts to break. Now let’s try to add the following everyday human story to our database:

Mary is a friend of John
Harvard is a rival of Yale
Harvard and Yale both have Rugby teams
Harvard beat Yale

Even the simplest human stories start to strain the old data model. What if the information about Harvard and Yale attendance and their respective sports teams and schedules are stored in completely different databases in different systems in different locations? What do we do to tell our story then?

We have a couple of choices: We could hire a systems integrator to figure out how to connect the various systems, and build gateways so we can tap into the respective data and assemble a new dataset to tell our story. Another alternative is to start over and build yet another new system that is optimized for our expanded story about Mary and John. Either way, integrating and redeveloping databases and applications starts to get very time consuming and very expensive. And in the end, we have yet another silo of unconnected data.

Every business has this same issue of multitude of systems designed for a multitude of functions: Inventory, payroll, accounting, operations, sales, customer service, legal, etc. The necessary data is in different systems designed for different processes by different vendors. The difficulty and cost of linking data in useful ways goes up exponentially as we add information to the system. The old model does not scale.

Semantic Web and Linked Data Graphs

The solution is not to design grander and grander database schemas for the world. The solution is in a different model of representing data and linking it together. This is the model of the semantic web, as originally envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee.

Rather than building and joining more tables, or replicating and moving data around from different systems, each data element can stay where it is. All that is required is that each data element has its own unique address, a way to describe what it is, and a way to link to other data elements expressing a relationship.

Two dimensional tables of rows and columns are replaced by a linked data graph, with data elements linked to other data elements in a relationship. Each relationship is a triple comprised of subject, object, and predicate, much like a sentence in human language. Mary owns 234 Main St. John rents at 234 Main St. This extra dimension of knowledge, the action that connects two data elements, enables vastly more complex knowledge to be represented without making our software more complex.

In this graph model, our data scales the way the Internet scales. Unlike the relational model, the more people who add information to a graph, the easier it gets to tell our story.

To make our data interoperable and to build applications, we do not need teams of database engineers to spend years designing and updating the database schema and then teams of systems integrators to spend years to connect the data from different sources. The method of pulling knowledge together for new applications is more like a search engine. Through search we can trace the relationships and reassemble the data we need at that moment we need it.

The semantic web model can profoundly increase productivity because it enables more creative energy to go into new applications without the bottlenecks of time and expense of needing to integrate all the data.

Consider the example of John and Mary, but in scale and with richer data sets and linkages about their academic, sports, financial, and personal interests. Might we be able to develop algorithms to predict whether or not John will pay his rent or Mary will pay her mortgage? Will John and Mary make a good couple? Will Harvard beat Yale next year? Business intelligence is all about modeling the world and trying to predict the future, and business intelligence requires linked data.

Now extrapolate our example to challenge of healthcare information. There is an energetic debate in Washington DC about demanding electronic healthcare information systems, stimulated by the mandate from our president together with new funding to start to make it happen. Medical data has been in silos ranging from clinics, hospitals, specialists, primary care, home care, pharmacy, insurance, and many other sources. This data is not connected. The system is far too complex to integrate by traditional means, and if we try by traditional means we will have spent the stimulus money with very little to show for it. It’s time for a new approach to healthcare information.

Semantic Web and Healthcare Information Challenges

The semantic web was designed exactly for such a challenge as integrating the complex and fast changing universe of health information. Rather than building more silos of data, everyone can keep their data where it is, but let’s give data an address and start to use the common language of the semantic web to express the relationships between the data and start to link it together.

The biggest bottleneck in the health care information equation is getting meaningful data into the system in the first place. Good doctors sit with their patients and listen to their stories. They do not want to be spending that time filling in structured forms of data. Every patient story starts as unstructured data about what is going on in the patient’s life. Many different illnesses can present similar symptoms, and medicine is full of nuance in deciphering such complex issues with many variables.

In the example of John and Mary, as their story unfolds, we can add linkages to the data graph. Because human language also works as triples of subject, action, object, it is more and more possible for machines to understand the human story and to extract meaningful data to add as linkages to our graph.

I chose the story of John and Mary because for all we know, the most important data in driving cost may not be in the existing healthcare databases in the first place. We already know that lifestyle factors like diet and exercise drive obesity and high blood pressure, which drive complications and cost of care. But what medical system has anything to say about the fact that John has been binging on Big Macs and Big Gulps because he is stressed about his relationship with Mary and he can’t pay his rent? The linked data model will allow for vastly greater intelligence in the system and for the first time will enable more research on the root causes of most of our healthcare spending: our lifestyle and behavior. Not only is semantic technology a better way to link existing data, we can start to expand horizons beyond the existing silos.

We talk about the cost of changing things, but the only certainty in the health system is that we will spend $2.5 trillion on healthcare this year, and we will spend at least $2.6 trillion next year by doing nothing. The fact is, this is not a “lack of money” problem. There is more money in the system than every before.

The problem is that we have been using the wrong model, a model that has long become brittle and cannot scale with the complexity of healthcare, not to mention the information approaches that we will need to understand and address the root causes of health and illness in America.

The risks which have become apparent in the healthcare IT debates happening on the health information technology policy committee meetings is that we will further delay or lock in the legacy approaches that have failed us in the past, rather than enabling new and better – and simpler and less expensive – models for representing and using the explosion of health information and knowledge.

The good news is that a better model exists, it has been the vision for the web for over a decade, and the world wide web consortium already has agreed on the standards. We need these new models for complex health information challenge, and we need them now.

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.

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.

Since I didn’t do such a great job in explaining social media at the time I was confronted with the question, I thought I would list the top 10 social media tools that I use routinely and explain why I use them. Some of these tools could have a profoundly positive impact on health, particularly in chronic care, wellness, and prevention, but I will leave that to a different discussion. These are the tools I use personally.

1. Facebook: Facebook is a website that helps you communicate with the people you already know, or at least with people you don’t mind publicly declaring that you know. It is great for sharing photos, videos, notes about your experiences and adventures, parties and get-togethers, books you are reading — things that you find interesting but would never send out in a mass email. Facebook is not really for work. It’s for friends. Although you shouldn’t expect your kids to “friend” you, it can be a great way to keep an extended family connected. You also can keep in touch with people you used to work with or used to go to school with, people in your community, or people you met along your life journey. Without Facebook, many of those relationships would wither and fade away over time. With Facebook, you maintain a constant awareness of your extended relationships and often find a surprising number of ways to reconnect.

2. Twitter: Twitter is for sharing thoughts and ideas and with people you don’t necessarily already know but with whom you share a common interest. These are the people you might want to get to know better in the future. Although there has been much hoopla about sharing trivial or mundane personal details, Twitter has actually evolved rapidly into a professional media. It is a great way to discover new people and professional connections as you cumulate a group that cares what you have to say. If all you have to say is what you had for breakfast, don’t expect to make a lot of interesting new friends. I used to get my news from the front page of Google News (the newspaper subscription is long gone). Rather than news from a front page determined by popularity, I am much happier to see what the people I follow on Twitter are reading and find interesting. Twitter is a broadcast channel, kind of like a modern ham radio. The whole world can hear your messages, and some of them start to tune in and talk back.

3. Meetup: Meetup is a fabulous platform that has been underrated and underreported in the past few years, despite the fact that milllions of events, mini-conferences, clubs and organizations regularly organize, recruit, and connect through Meetup, all over the world. If you want to meet real live people who share your interests, find interesting speakers, artists, or entrepreneurs sharing their stories and talents, or if you want to learn or try something new, look for a meetup near you. There are groups about everything, from semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence to rock climbing and paint dancing. I try to go to at least one meetup on some topic of interest every month, and it has been better than most conferences that I used to pay thousands of dollars to attend.

4. WordPress: WordPress is the leading blogging platform, a content management system that makes it easy to create your own website in a blog format. You can personalize your blog by choosing from thousands of styles and themes, or create your own with just a beginner knowledge of web design. This blog is done using WordPress, and as you can see I created a style to make it look just like my Twitter page. In addition to changing the theme or style, many people have developed free extensions to the functions and features of WordPress through plugins. These extensions and themes together with a thriving open source community makes WordPress an extremely powerful content management system that you can use for just about anything.

5. YouTube: Millions of people use YouTube to discover and share videos. It has replaced television as the primary source of interesting new content that we talk about around the water cooler. YouTube feeds my secret desire to make a movie some day. I have posted a few videos of my own, which are extremely easy to edit and upload from a Mac using iMovie. Get ready for an explosion of real-time video content sharing on YouTube as it gets even easier for anyone with a modern smartphone to shoot, edit and upload short videos without even touching a computer.

6. Basecamp: Basecamp combines the functionality of blogging and discussion boards with to do lists, milestones and file sharing. It is designed and optimized to help small teams collaborate on projects, whether it is organizing a family reunion or developing an iPhone app. Basecamp is famous for not responding to user requests for new features and insisting on a minimalist set of functions. Because of their focus on simplicity, Basecamp is a project management tool that does not require a team a training session to instantly improve productivity and communication. Each project only can be accessed by those people who belong on the project team. Basecamp is a great example of social media tools applied to collaboration online.

7. Slideshare: When I make a presentation at a conference, I like to post the powerpoint file on Slideshare so that the participants can view it and discuss it after and even before then actual presentation. Viewers also can embed your slideshow in their blog, tweet about it, or share it on Facebook if they are so inclined. The presentation format remains the most pervasive way to share and idea and lead a group discussion, and Slideshare is a great way to share your presentations online. It is also a great way to find ideas and discover other the presentations of other people.

8. 3banana: 3banana is the easiest way to take notes online and on your phone and keep them synchronized wirelessly and always handy. I like to jot things down that I want to remember, clip things I find on the web, or draft random ideas that I might want to blog about or share later. I need the fastest and easiest way to get my thoughts and ideas into the system, and know that I can come back to them. With Facebook, Twitter, and even WordPress, you need to have a pretty good idea that you want to share with the world before you start typing. I like to start with 3banana, because every note is private by default, but if I decide to share a particular note I can easily post a private link to it. Every shared note is then the onramp to a conversation because people you share with can leave comments.

9. Blip.fm: Blip.fm is like Twitter for music. You can find just about any song, add it to your channel as a DJ, and stream it right from the web rather than downloading it to your computer. You find songs because they were posted by other DJs, and then you can see what other songs that person was posting. You can follow and cheer other DJs that you like, and DJs that share your taste might start following you as well. It is a great way to discover music by discovering people with whom you share musical taste. The website design is great and it’s a lot of fun.

10. Ning: For most social networking activities, I like Facebook, but sometimes you are part of a private group or club that wants to have a dedicated private network with the same kind of functionality. Ning makes it easy to set up your own private Facebook-like website for your own group. You can use the content management system to design just about any web functions and modules you like, plus you have the ability to administer groups, blogs, friend list, mailings and all sorts of other things that are useful to just about any membership organization.

There are lots of other great social media tools that help you collaborate on documents, review books and restaurants, make and sell T-shirts, and even become a contributor to the world’s largest encyclopedia.

One question I will get from my professional friends is “What about LinkedIn? Isn’t that a social network?” LinkedIn is a place to post your resume, and maybe other people and recruiters will find it. But it isn’t really social in the same ongoing and interactive manner as my top 10, despite some attempt to add social networking features. If you use it once and rarely go back, it is not a conversation. It’s not social media.

Social media is about sharing and discovering, building and enhancing relationships with other people. It has already changed the world, from social life to the political landscape. Since healthcare is such an important institution in modern society, approaching 20% of our country’s economic activity, there is no doubt that social media will find tremendous uses in health as it will in every other field.

This is my current top 10 social media tools. I would love to hear your top 10, as well as your ideas for how to use them.

Poet Ruth Stone describes her creative inspiration

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?

Declaring our intentions to ourselves and to others is powerful because it sets in motion the rest of our brain, the part that is out of our current field of view, but which keeps scanning and processing and thinking. That is why the key to innovation is the clear definition of a problem. Once a problem is well defined and focused, ideas may surprise us when we least expect them. We truly may wake up in the middle of the night with a novel idea or even solution.

John F. Kennedy’s challenge to go to the moon was so successful because he defined one clear and unambiguous problem. Though complex and varied in the details of its execution, the moon shot was crystal clear in the statement of the challenge. Everyone could understand the goal. Everyone could visualize it. Many minds could synchronize.

In contrast, the current challenge of climate change is vexing in its ambiguity. Al Gore’s climate crisis challenge in “An Inconvenient Truth” generates in us more stress than inspiration. “All of the above” might be the right answer to the question of what to do, but such a task is hard to lead. We can’t even start to visualize the solution.

With the large and amorphous cloud of problems and challenges in the world today, our brains do not know were to start. On the other hand, when we define and envision a very clear mission, the wheels can turn and the neurons can fire, even when they are not in the focal point of our current and immediate attention.

Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, one of the most powerful companies in the world, defined his company’s mission as focused on the great sustainability challenges of the century — water, energy, health. For GE, the reason to engage in the great challenges of the century is because the solutions represent the great opportunities of the century.

When it comes to the big challenges of the day, even when the problems are broken down into sub-problems and sub-domains, they are still daunting. They appear to require large institutions and large amounts of capital rather than individual creativity. It appears we need to “boil the ocean” in our attempt to slow it’s warming.

Where can our own individual creativity have an impact, and what intentions can we declare for ourselves as individuals that will rouse our muse to inspire us?

At the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi on January 20 of this year, the World Wildlife Federation director Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud presented the most focused statement of the challenges facing our planet: The people of the earth currently consume resources at a rate that actually requires more than one planet earth – another three planets if everyone consumed resources like developed countries. But we only have one earth, and we need a one-planet strategy.

A one-planet strategy can be translated into a one-community, one-home, one-person strategy–something that we all can ponder.

To muse is to meditate on something. A muse is a guiding spirit and source of inspiration. Amuse is to cause joy and laughter. Ruth Stone’s poetry creates visions of a simpler life in a magical, funny, and beautiful earth. Today, Ruth Stone is my muse.

April 20, 2009, Page 9

In “Wrong Prescription,” Dr. Scott Haig correctly suggests that digital medical records are no silver bullet for the costly, inefficient U.S. health system, but for the wrong reasons [TIME, April 6, 2009].

Information technology (IT) improves efficiency with the rules of the game currently in play. If the rules reward treating disease complications but discourage management and prevention, IT will help health-care businesses churn out more complications per hour.

The fundamental flaw in our current system is that despite decades of debate, no one has an adequate stake in preventing those costly complications in the first place.

Steve Brown — Published in TIME

1. 3banana Inc. develops mobile apps and services that help people capture and share more information in more ways with less effort. On March 17, 2009, we introduced 3banana Notes for Android smart phones, connecting shared online notes and discussions to physical objects by creating and scanning personalized QR Codes from your phone. You can follow our talk in these stickies. Dow Jones Wireless Innovations Redwood Shores CA, March 17, 2009 Steve Brown, Co-Founder and CEO
2. 3banana Notes for Android smart phones helps you capture information and take notes with less work. 3banana also makes it easy to share and discuss your notes with the people and services you choose. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 2
3. How often have you made a “note to self” of a nice bottle of wine you wanted to remember? (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 3
4. With 3banana Notes on your Android, it is easy to capture that information on your phone, and keep it synchronized with your free online notebook. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 4
5. With inline labeling and titling, you never have to repeat yourself. The first line is always the title and any word you place a # mark in front of automatically becomes a label. More information with fewer keystrokes. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 5
6. Add photos to your notes using your Android phone’s built in camera. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 6
7. Keep your notes private, or selectively share links to notes and discussion threads through a variety of services including email, Facebook and Twitter. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 7
8. When you post a note to Twitter, your 140 character Tweet connects your friends to your own richly threaded online discussion group. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 8
9. This is my “social graph,” or set of friend connections, on Facebook. When you use 3banana to share your notes with your friends on Facebook, you retain more control of your content. You also can easily invite non-Facebook users into the discussion. Your friends can use their Google accounts to login without creating yet another login to remember. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 9
10. Sharing notes with friends independent of social net work membership is particularly useful, for example, when the people you want to share your wine tasting notes with are not on Facebook! (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 10
11. Sharing and discussing notes with friends can enhance the value of the information you want to capture — and reduce the work — for everyone. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 11
12. With 3banana, you can connect your notes and online discussions to physical objects by creating and scanning QR Codes, or two dimensional “quick respose” barcodes, right from your phone or computer. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 12
13. Trying to decide if that wine in your cellar is ready to drink? Scan it in on your phone and see what your friends are now saying about it! (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 13
14. As you and your friends add more information to your notes, they become more and more useful over time. Compare that to your old paper notes or emails to self! (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 14
15. Notes that turn into conversations over time can be particularly helpful for assets that might be around for a while. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 15
16. What was in this box in my garage, anyways? And who has added to it or removed something in the last year? Label it with QR Code attached to your notes using your handy label maker, and you can scan with your Android to pull up the notes you share with your family. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 16
17. Sharing a book with a coded link to your book notes can be an invitation to your private discussion group. Ask your friends pass the book on to their friends and see how the conversation grows. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 17
18. Another example: Have you ever used your GPS for the global treasure hunt knows as Geocaching? Now you can leave objects that link to your notes. It’s like putting a message in a bottle or tying a note to a balloon. What stories and adventures might unfold? Try 3banana Notes for yourself. Scan to link to this note, and leave a comment with your own stories! (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 18
19. 3banana Notes: Capture, Share, Label Come up with your own ideas, and stay tuned for new applications and uses! (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 19
20. Steve Brown Co-Founder and CEO 3banana Inc. steve@3banana.com Twitter: Follow @3banana (c) 2009 3banana Inc. Patents pending. (c) 3banana Inc. Patents Pending March 17, 2009 20

Matthew Holt, the author of this presentation on Health 2.0, is the founder of The Health Care Blog and the Health 2.0 Conference, an event that has defined a new paradigm for ehealth and brings together a new generation of creative thought leaders. This year, the Health 2.0 Conference will be held jointly with the Center for Information Therapy on April 22-23, 2009 in Boston.

My Reaction to Health 2.0 and the Convergence with Information Therapy:

Health 2.0 makes Information Therapy practical and possible. Health 2.0 is about individuals creating and sharing more of themselves online in a way that improves their own health, the health of others they are connected to, and the health of the community as a whole.

Information therapy is based on the idea that what we think and believe — the content of our minds — can influence our health, either directly or through our behavior. We can change and influence the content of our minds and therefore also our health through information media.

Personalized health, however, is highly diverse, and if we had to design the right information therapy for the right person at the right time, we would never finish the job. So how does Health 2.0 make information therapy possible?

The needs in health care are complex, personalized, and ever changing. How can information therapy derived from a scripted template ever fully address them? Without Health 2.0, the greater the number and diversity of people with health needs, the more infinitely complex the situation becomes.

Health 2.0, on the other hand, changes the information therapy equation. The participants are co-creators, selectors, navigators, recommenders, and reviewers of content, so the more people involved and the greater their diversity, the more possible it is to meet an ever greater diversity of needs.

While some traditionalists might argue about the need for evidence-based information, the reality is that rich and diverse Health 2.0 communities are enabling an acceleration of evidence gathering. In the social media world, randomized controlled trials or A/B and multivariate experiments on the impact of information and ideas on user behavior are conducted every day.

This same quantitative and experimental methodology of the modern Web 2.0 Internet, when applied in Health 2.0, will start to advance our knowledge about information therapy, so that we may discover how the right information, at the right time, and in the right way can truly improve health.

Health 2.0 as a new data source – Presentation Transcript

1. User-Generated Healthcare & its potential as a data source research vehicle User-Generated Healthcare NCVHS 26 February, 2009 Matthew Holt Founder/Author, The Health Care Blog Co-Founder, Health 2.0 matthew@health2con.com
2. Media sources people trust User-Generated Healthcare Source: Globescan/BBC/ Reuters 2006
3. User-Generated Healthcare is Web 2.0? What the hell
4. User-Generated Healthcare
5. User-Generated Healthcare
6. eThis, That & The other vs. Web 2.0 WWW, born 1994-5 Web 2.0, nee. 2005-7 publishing, searching, uploading, sharing, reading collaborating, searching • Content Management • Social networks – Syndicated – Blogs, microblogging (hi, Tweeps!) – Subscribed – Wikis User-Generated Healthcare – Internally created – Forums, Groups, Discussions – Integrated from data sources – Video/content sharing • “Webmaster” regulated • Sharing Tools – Institutional publishing – Community policing standards – Posting guidelines – Prescribed branding • Dominant letters • Dominant letters – r, z, x, 2.0 – e, later i – Dash optional – Periods, but no vowels allowed Adapted/stolen from Gale Wilson-Steele, CareSeek; Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
7. Web 2.0: O’Reilly’s Core Competencies • Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them User-Generated Healthcare • Trusting users as co-developers • Harnessing collective intelligence • Leveraging the long tail through customer self- service • Software above the level of a single device • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models Source: Tim O’Reilly What is Web2.0 9/2005
8. What the hell ? is ill st User-Generated Healthcare u yo g? e r rin A de n o w
9. What is “Health 2.0” Matthew Holt’s best guess at the constituent parts • Personalized search that finds the right answer for the long tail • Better presentation of integrated data • Communities that capture the accumulated User-Generated Healthcare knowledge of patients and caregivers; and clinicians • Intelligent tools for content delivery And just maybe…. Patients (really!) in charge of their own care?
10. Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare Social CONTENT Networks User-Generated Healthcare Search Tools TRANSACTION
11. User-Generated Healthcare Personalized search
12. User-Generated Healthcare Intelligent Communities
13. Intelligently presenting content User-Generated Healthcare
14. Highlights from the 1st Edelman Health Engagement Barometer 7 in 10 adults demand engagement… especially for personal health issues that matter most to them • 22% of the population are Health Info-entials • Most frequently accessed channels of health information: User-Generated Healthcare – Conversations with friends/family (69%) – Conversations with my doctor or healthcare provider (65%) • Social media is more credible when coupled with health expertise – Top social medium: Health expert blogs (86%) – Other most credible media include personal blogs, social networking sites, video-sharing sites, and Wikipedia Source: Edelman Health Engagement Barometer, survey of 5,000 consumers in USA, UK, France, Russia, China.
15. Search & Online Communities + User-Generated Healthcare
16. Emergence of Consumer-Focused Tools • Personalized • Analytical User-Generated Healthcare • Supporting Decisions • Enabling Transactions
17. Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare Social Content Networks User-Generated Healthcare Search Tools Transaction Data
18. So now what is “Health 2.0”? Holt’s evolving view of a moving target • Personalized search that looks into the long tail, but cares about the user experience • Communities that capture the accumulated knowledge of patients and caregivers; and clinicians – and explain it User-Generated Healthcare to the world • Intelligent tools for content delivery – and transactions • Better integration of data with content And it’s not a maybe anymore… Patients increasingly guiding their own care
19. A continuum of Health 2.0? User-generated Users connect to Partnerships to Data drives health care providers reform delivery discovery Use of Web2.0 Tools and communities Reforms in payment All the data collected in User-Generated Healthcare technologies for created as part of structures, a combination of a, b & patients and Web2.0 in health care, transparency, and c produces leaps physicians to which then becoming technology produce ahead in the process communicate and connected to the changes in delivery of care and eventually investigate without system (i.e. creating structure and process in drug and procedure connecting to the appointments, around chronic care discovery. health care system conducting treatment, excellence transactions, centers for particular managing clinical procedures, etc. events)
20. The Present and Potential of Health2.0 Data drives Ultimate discovery Impact Partnerships to User-Generated Healthcare reform delivery Users connect to Providers User-Generated Healthcare Likelihood
21. Data/Research: Patients’ opinions User-Generated Healthcare
22. Data/Research: Doctors’ opinions User-Generated Healthcare
23. Communities as Research Vehicles User-Generated Healthcare
24. User-Generated Healthcare A Health 2.0 trial?
25. User-Generated Healthcare A Health 2.0 trial?
26. User-Generated Healthcare A Health 2.0 trial?
27. User-Generated Healthcare Individual & Crowd Data
28. Delving into the long tail: CureTogether User-Generated Healthcare
29. Understanding the whole “integrated” patient User-Generated Healthcare
30. Communities as Research Vehicles User-Generated Healthcare
31. User-Generated Healthcare
32. So what should NCVHS & AHRQ do? (how should you spend your $1.1 billion!) • Figure out partnerships • Fund some of these little online patient communities—too important to let them die & it will be cheap! User-Generated Healthcare • Integration, integration, & smart use of big & disparate data sources • Suggest to those with the $17 billion, to reach out to their patients everywhere they are & enforce reporting back

PALO ALTO Ca., January 23, 2009 Health Hero Network said today that the first large-scale, multi-year rollouts and evaluations of its Health Buddy® System have shown success in helping improve the care of high-cost Medicare beneficiaries and veterans while reducing costs and hospitalizations — signaling a new era of telehealth that will reshape an American healthcare landscape strained by an aging population, a reduction in caregivers and shrinking financial resources.

VA Results reported in TELEMEDICINE and e-HEALTH, VOL. 14 NO. 10. Care Coordination/Home Telehealth: The Systematic Implementation of Health Informatics, Home Telehealth, and Disease Management to Support the Care of Veteran Patients with Chronic Conditions. Adam Darkins, M.D., Patricia Ryan, R.N., M.S., Rita Kobb, M.N., A.P.R.N., Linda Foster, M.S.N., R.N., Ellen Edmonson, R.N., M.P.H., Bonnie Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N., and Anne E. Lancaster, B.Sc. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Care Coordination Services, Washington, D.C.

“Every evaluation of health care interventions supported by the Health Buddy System to date shows a profound impact on the health and utilization of health care of individuals with chronic conditions,” Health Hero CEO Derek Newell said. “We believe that chronic care programs supported by the Health Buddy System offer real hope that we can provide a superior quality of life for individuals who struggle with these conditions while making the costs of their care manageable for the health care system and society – not just in the US, but around the globe.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced this month that it is extending and expanding Health Hero Network’s Health Buddy Project, designed to show how doctors, nurses, and patients using telehealth technology can improve care and reduce hospitalizations associated with chronic conditions such as heart and lung disease and diabetes. The three-year project, which began in 2006 at medical groups in Wenatchee, Washington, and Bend, Oregon, has been extended to January 31, 2012. The project, being conducted in partnership with the American Medical Group Association, will also potentially be allowed to expand to one additional site in the second year of the extended program.

The announcement comes on the heels of the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ publication of four years of data showing a reduction of 19 percent in hospitalizations and 25 percent in bed days of care among a population of 17,025 veterans enrolled in the VA’s Care Coordination and Home Telehealth (CCHT) Program. Health Hero Network has been the leading provider of telehealth technology to the CCHT program.

The company’s Health Buddy System, the telehealth platform deployed extensively by the VA and used in the CMS Health Buddy Project, helps individuals with chronic conditions stay healthier while empowering their caregivers with knowledge to keep complications from worsening to the point where those individuals need to be hospitalized. Since late 2007, Health Hero Network has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Robert Bosch North America.

The Health Buddy System supports individuals with chronic conditions in self-care, while keeping them in daily contact with their care givers. Individuals who use the system get support in self-care behaviors – including medication compliance, diet, and exercise – tailored to their unique conditions. Their caregivers get an actionable stream of knowledge to make targeted interventions at the first sign of symptoms or gaps in behavioral or knowledge that – left unremediated – could lead to a painful and expensive hospitalization.

The Health Buddy Project is being conducted under Medicare’s Care Management for High-Cost Beneficiaries Demonstration. The project brings Health Hero Network together with the American Medical Group Association, as well as Wenatchee Valley Medical Center in Wenatchee, Washington, and Bend Memorial Clinic in Bend, Oregon. The program’s design involves supporting physicians, nurses, and Medicare beneficiaries with the Health Buddy System in a relationship that keeps those beneficiaries healthier and out of the hospital through self-care and early detection of complications.

“The programs in the demonstration have had a positive impact on selected high cost Medicare beneficiaries and have met and/or exceeded the savings target required in the demonstration agreement,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a news release announcing the extension of the Health Buddy Project, as well as two other Care Management for High-Cost Beneficiaries programs.” By extending the demonstration for another 3 years and frequently evaluating their financial status, each of the programs would have the opportunity to continue to impact their populations, maximize savings, and assist CMS in determining the replicability of the programs.”

In a groundbreaking study published December 31 in The Journal of Telemedicine and e-Health, VA clinicians revealed the outcomes of the first multi-year evaluation at scale of the agency’s Care Coordination Home Telehealth Program. Researchers reported that telehealth initiatives successfully reduced hospitalizations by up to 20 percent and improved the overall health conditions of patients who used the systems.

VA researchers praised telehealth systems for being able to provide daily contact with a patient base dispersed over wide geographies and for the behavioral improvements seen in patients who were presented with daily assessments through telehealth devices. The study also cited the program’s modest cost of $1,600 per enrolled patient per year. The VA plans to rapidly expand the deployment of its telehealth program, forecasting more than 50,000 patients will be monitored on telehealth systems by 2011.

“The policy effects that result from the implementation of CCHT are profound,” VA researchers said in the findings of their recent paper. “If 50% of patients requiring (non-institutional care) can ultimately be managed in a way that means they get improved access to care at lower cost and higher quality, then this represents an important advance. It means that a low cost and flexible solution will be available to deal with the large numbers of patients with chronic care conditions that health care systems know they need to serve.”

Renowned for ease of use, the Health Buddy System empowers patients and the people who care for them by improving patient self-care and behavior while enabling care providers to access timely information and intervene before conditions become acute. The system’s features start with the Health Buddy® Appliance and other licensee devices that allow patients to communicate with healthcare professionals by answering a small number of daily questions related to their medical condition and activities. The system offers analytics that then stratify and present this data – through a secure Web-based interface called the Health Buddy Desktop – to empower healthcare professionals to quickly identify problems and take corrective action.

The Health Buddy System features health management programs delivering personalized daily monitoring and patient education in order to promote positive behavior change and provide timely, relevant, and actionable information to care providers; many Health Hero Network programs are certified by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). Health Hero Network customers are using programs, delivered on the Health Buddy System, that cover a wide range of conditions including heart failure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma, COPD, and mental health.

About the Bosch Group and Health Hero Network
The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. In the areas of automotive and industrial technology, consumer goods, and building technology, some 271,000 associates generated sales of 46.1 billion euros ($63.2 billion) in fiscal 2007. The Bosch Group comprises Robert Bosch GmbH and its roughly 300 subsidiary and regional companies in over 50 countries. This worldwide development, manufacturing, and sales network is the foundation for further growth. Bosch spends more than three billion euros each year for research and development, and in 2006 applied for over 3,000 patents worldwide. The company was set up in Stuttgart in 1886 by Robert Bosch (1861-1942) as “Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering.”

In North America, the Bosch Group manufactures and markets automotive original equipment and aftermarket products, industrial automation and mobile products, power tools and accessories, security technology, thermo-technology, packaging equipment and household appliances. Bosch employs approximately 25,000 associates in more than 80 locations throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with reported sales of $9.5 billion in fiscal 2007. For more information on the company, visit www.boschusa.com.

Based in Palo Alto, Health Hero Network develops and markets the Health Buddy System for health improvement. The Health Buddy System serves as the interface between patients at home and care providers, facilitating monitoring of and self-management support for patients with chronic conditions. The System includes monitoring technologies, clinical information databases, Internet-enabled decision support tools, health management programs and content development tools. Through increased communication, behavior modification, and prevention, the Health Buddy System improves the quality of patient care. Health Hero Network’s systems are protected by 57 issued US patents. For more information, visit www.healthhero.com.

Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, at WFES

Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, opened the summit by describing the vision and rationale for Abu Dhabi’s plan to invest $15 billion to build a carbon neutral future energy city from the ground up in the desert of Abu Dhabi. Masdar has already attracted the leading innovators in cleantech, not only for energy supply from the sun and wind, but also for smarter consumption: smart utility grid and metering, transportation and water systems, energy efficiency and consumer education.

More than just an early cleantech customer, Masdar seeks to become a development and innovation center for future energy, green technology, and sustainability, reversing the brain drain from the Middle East and becoming a magnet for the brightest minds in the field. To help do this they have partnered with Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a Masdar Institute of Technology.

Dr. Jaber cited the undeniable momentum in renewable energy: America will invest $150 billion in future energy over the next 10 years. Europe has committed to carbon reduction targets for its members. Not only will Abu Dhabi invest billions in cleantech, Abu Dhabi also has committed to an energy plan that calls for 7% of the emirate’s energy to come from renewables by 2020, creating a $6 billion to $8 billion market.

“Our progress is irreversible,” said Dr. Jaber, and Masdar intends to be at the forefront across the complete value chain of renewables, helping Abu Dhabi maintain its position as a leading energy supplier to the world. Dr. Jaber stated the reasons clearly: “Because we can, and because we should. This is still true, despite the economic downturn. We still can and we still should.” Dr. Jaber concluded, “If you invest in cleantech, the first place to visit is Abu Dhabi and the first organization you should talk to should be Masdar.”

Health Buddy Telemonitoring Device

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has granted three-year extensions, subject to certain conditions, for three participants in the Care Management for High Cost Beneficiaries Demonstration (CMHCB) that have demonstrated success in helping to manage the care for high cost patients.

“We have been striving for years to find ways to improve the quality of care for Medicare patients through greater coordination in a way that would also save money for Medicare,” said CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems.

“The success of these three partners shows us that better coordination and the introduction of information technology can improve a Medicare beneficiaries understanding of their condition and their ability to follow medical advice,” Weems said. “These programs are showing us yet another way to develop programs that will improve communication between health care providers and their patients, eliminate duplicative and unnecessary care, and improve overall quality.”

Care management for high cost beneficiaries is a provider-based service to improve quality of care and reduce costs for fee-for-service beneficiaries who have one or more chronic diseases. The services support collaboration among participants’ primary and specialist providers to enhance communication of relevant clinical information. They are intended to help increase adherence to evidence-based care, reduce unnecessary hospital stays and emergency room visits, and help participants avoid costly and debilitating complications.

The extensions were awarded to Key to Better Health, a division of Village Health; Massachusetts General Care Management Program; and Health Hero Network, Health Buddy Project.

The Key to Better Health program provides targeted disease management directed by clinical nephrologists to identify potential problems and avoid complications, coordinate early intervention plans, and prevent acute hospitalization for beneficiaries identified with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Key to Better Health operates in New York.

Massachusetts General Care Management Program, located in Boston, provides highly integrated care management services through the use of practice-based case managers, individualized plans of care, 24-hour access to care managers, and electronic medical records.

The Health Hero Network’s Health Buddy program is unique because of its focus on the telemonitoring device, and it is representative of the remote health monitoring industry, a growing sector in health care. Health Buddy provides participants with an appliance for use in their homes as a means to monitor participants’ symptoms, physical status, and condition-specific knowledge. This program currently operates in Bend, Oregon and Wenatchee, WA.

All of these programs are unique because of their defined intervention focus on the fee-for-service Medicare population. The programs in the demonstration have had a positive impact on selected high cost Medicare beneficiaries and have met and/or exceeded the savings target required in the demonstration agreement.

By extending the demonstration for another 3 years and frequently evaluating their financial status, each of the programs would have the opportunity to continue to impact their populations, maximize savings, and assist CMS in determining the replicability of the programs.

The CMHCB demonstration was approved to provide disease management services for thousands of beneficiaries by awarding six organizations with populations in sizes from 1,800 to 15,000. The demonstration originally approved for 3 years, tests provider-based intensive care management services as a way to improve quality of care and reduce costs for fee-for-service beneficiaries who have one or more chronic diseases and generally incur high Medicare costs. The sites were chosen in different areas of the country, with the primary focus on disease states of congestive heart failure (CHF), diabetes, and/or chronic kidney disease (CKD).

CMS pre-selects beneficiaries for the demonstration projects according to eligibility criteria, but participation in the demonstration is voluntary. Program services are intended to increase adherence to physician prescribed care, reduce unnecessary hospital stays and emergency room visits, and help participants avoid costly and debilitating complications.

News Release: The Knot Inc. Announces Acquisition of Breastfeeding.com

The Knot Inc. (NASDAQ: KNOT) is pleased to announce the acquisition of Breastfeeding.com (www.breastfeeding.com), the number-one website dedicated to providing advice on breastfeeding—one of first-time mothers’ biggest challenges. The addition of Breastfeeding.com further enhances The Knot Inc.’s already robust pregnancy and first-time parenting offerings, which include TheBump.com and LilaGuide.com.

Features on Breastfeeding.com include:

UNPARALLELED BREASTFEEDING CONTENT

With thousands of breastfeeding Q+As, articles and videos, Breastfeeding.com has the deepest easy-to-understand, easy-to-find collection of breastfeeding content on the web.

EXTENSIVE BREASTFEEDING PANEL OF EXPERTS

Breastfeeding.com has assembled the ultimate team of breastfeeding experts and a medical advisory board of the world’s foremost authorities, including Dr. Ruth Lawrence and Dr. Jane Morton.

LACTATION CONSULTANTS

Looking for a lactation consultant? Breastfeeding.com has a directory of nearly 4,000 lactation consultants, Plus, first-time moms struggling with breastfeeding can log onto the website to join in 2-hour live chats with lactation consultants four times a week.

LARGEST COMMUNITY OF BREASTFEEDING MOMS

With one out of two moms in the US and Canada visiting Breastfeeding.com, the site is home to the largest community of breastfeeding mothers.

“We are thrilled to add Breastfeeding.com to our suite of number-one websites for women in key lifestages,” said David Liu, CEO of The Knot Inc.

About The Knot Inc.

The Knot Inc. (NASDAQ: KNOT; www.theknotinc.com) is a leading lifestage media company targeting couples planning their weddings and future lives together. The company’s wedding brands, The Knot and WeddingChannel.com, and newlywed brand, The Nest, reach millions of engaged couples and newlyweds each year. The Knot Inc. Baby Network brands include The Bump, which focuses on pregnancy and first-time parenthood via TheBump.com website and local guides, and LilaGuide.com, a local baby services and community website.

Lincoln, Neb. – After piloting its Hudl coaching system with over 150 coaches and hundreds of athletes in Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, Agile Sports is officially launching the video editing and analysis software nationwide this Sunday at the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) Convention in Nashville, Tenn.

Hudl was developed by taking Agile Sports’ Hudl Pro software, which is used by the University of Nebraska Husker football team and the New York Jets, and transforming it into a lighter-weight, web-based system that is made to work with every sport and fit in the budget of even small high schools.

“As the level of competition continues to intensify in high school sports, it has become increasingly important to put powerful tools in the hands of your coaches and athletes,” said John Wirtz, Agile Sports’ Chief Operating Officer.

“Coaches recognize that video is one of the most impactful ways to improve their athletes’ performance and study their opponents – they just haven’t had the means to get the right video to their team quickly and in a format that really engages players, until now.”

Coach Randy Dreiling and his Hutchinson (Kan.) High School Salthawks put Hudl to the test this season as they took aim at their fifth-straight Kansas state football championship. Coach Dreiling and his staff found Hudl to be a valuable ingredient to add to the winning mix as they again took home the title in 2008.

“The ability for our kids to access the video from home at night, right after practice, was essential,” Dreiling said.

Hudl not only gives coaches secure access to their video from anywhere at any time, it also provides the same tools used by the New York Jets and quarterback Brett Favre, including the ability to draw and speak on top of video, instantly share it with specific players and coaches, and quickly exchange video with opponents.

“Hudl is really quick, really easy to access, and really easy to use,” Favre said. “Things that you could only do here at the facility you can do just as quickly from home. If it’s 10 p.m. or if you’re on the road, you can still watch your film just like you’re in the building.”

The Division II University of Nebraska-Kearney Lopers were another team that added Hudl to their arsenal for the 2008 season. Grant Mollring, wide receivers coach and video coordinator for the Lopers, found that his players very quickly latched onto Hudl.

“With Hudl, our players wanted to watch more film,” Mollring said. “Both our players and coaches loved being able to watch video from their homes and generate reports and breakdowns with point-and-click ease.”

About Agile Sports Technologies

Agile Sports Technologies was founded in February 2006 by David Graff, Brian Kaiser, and John Wirtz, and officially incorporated in May 2006 to address the changing battlefield in sports. Graff, Kaiser, and Wirtz started the company as graduate students in the Raikes School at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and have grown it to a staff of 15 with clients across the country.

The company’s mission is to bring together talented, passionate technology leaders and put them on the front lines with world-class sports organizations to develop solutions that enable teams at all levels to reach their full potential. For more information about Hudl and Agile Sports Technologies, please visit www.agilesports.com.

Hudl currently offers customized tools and reports for both football and basketball and provides video sharing and analysis for all sports. Significant discounts are available for organizations that sign on to use Hudl for multiple sports.

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. and NASHVILLE, Tenn. – January 06, 2009 Robert Bosch North America, Inc. (RBNA) and Healthways Inc. (NASDAQ: HWAY) today announced the immediate availability of a single patent license under their joint patent portfolios related to remote health monitoring, automated diagnostics and health and disease management.

Both companies collectively hold extensive catalogs of patents in the U.S. and other countries in the area of remote health monitoring, automated diagnostics and disease management. The combined portfolio will give licensees the right to practice over 105 U.S. patents, 154 U.S. patent applications and 78 corresponding non-U.S patents.

The joint licensing program announced today will be managed by Health Hero Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of Robert Bosch North America. Health Hero Network will be able to offer licensees a single license that, depending on the needs of the licensee, may include patents owned by Healthways and Health Hero Network. A licensee may elect to take a license from Health Hero Network under the Healthways patents – alone or in combination with the Health Hero Network patents.

“In recent years, health care costs in the United States have relentlessly increased,” said Derek Newell, president of Health Hero Network. “With this increase in costs, employers, payers, and providers will continue to turn to technology as a critical part of their solutions both for their disease management and wellness programs.”

“Under this single license available from Health Hero Network, manufacturers who develop products, and companies that provide health management services can conveniently obtain rights to both the Health Hero Network and Healthways patents,” Newell continued. “This agreement will make it easier for the marketplace to utilize the innovations owned by Health Hero Network and Healthways to extend the range of health management solutions available in our industry.”

“The market demand for comprehensive, integrated health, wellness, prevention and care management solutions, including automated patient diagnostic activity and the accurate retrieval of healthcare information by consumers and all of their providers, will require defined technologies that automate the proven processes the industry currently provides to its customers and to the millions of individuals who participate in our programs,” said Ben R. Leedle, Jr., CEO of Healthways. “We are excited to share with Health Hero Network, and make available through this single license opportunity, the extensive intellectual property portfolios we both own and maintain in order to better serve our customers and business partners.”

The joint patent license contains a provision that waives royalties for practice of the technologies for the period prior to Dec. 31, 2008 for companies who become licensees on or before June 1, 2009.

Joint licensing programs provide the market with a convenient and cost-effective way to obtain licenses to the patents essential to practice health management technologies. The programs encourage greater adoption of the critical technologies in a cost effective manner.

Companies that sell, offer, make or use products and services that practice remote health management or disease management should contact Sandeep Jaggi, Sr. Vice President of Intellectual Property at Health Hero Network (sandeep.jaggi@us.bosch.com), to learn more about the joint patent license and to request a sample agreement for review.

Specific inquiries regarding Healthways participation in the joint patent licensing program should be directed to Healthways Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Mary Chaput (mary.chaput@healthways.com).

About the Bosch Group and Health Hero Network
The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. In the areas of automotive and industrial technology, consumer goods, and building technology, some 271,000 associates generated sales of 46.1 billion euros ($63.2 billion) in fiscal 2007. The Bosch Group comprises Robert Bosch GmbH and its roughly 300 subsidiary and regional companies in over 50 countries. This worldwide development, manufacturing, and sales network is the foundation for further growth. Bosch spends more than three billion euros each year for research and development, and in 2006 applied for over 3,000 patents worldwide. The company was set up in Stuttgart in 1886 by Robert Bosch (1861-1942) as “Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering.”

In North America, the Bosch Group manufactures and markets automotive original equipment and aftermarket products, industrial automation and mobile products, power tools and accessories, security technology, thermo-technology, packaging equipment and household appliances. Bosch employs approximately 25,000 associates in more than 80 locations throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with reported sales of $9.5 billion in fiscal 2007. For more information on the company, visit www.boschusa.com.

Based in Palo Alto, Health Hero Network develops and markets the Health Buddy System for health improvement. The Health Buddy System serves as the interface between patients at home and care providers, facilitating monitoring of and self-management support for patients with chronic conditions. The System includes monitoring technologies, clinical information databases, Internet-enabled decision support tools, health management programs and content development tools. Through increased communication, behavior modification, and prevention, the Health Buddy System improves the quality of patient care. Health Hero Network’s systems are protected by 57 issued US patents. For more information, visit www.healthhero.com.

About Healthways
Healthways is the leading provider of specialized, comprehensive Health and Care Support(SM) solutions to help millions of people maintain or improve their health and, as a result, reduce overall healthcare costs. Healthways’ solutions are designed to help healthy individuals stay healthy, mitigate and slow the progression of disease associated with family or lifestyle risk factors and promote the best possible health for those already affected by disease. Our proven, evidence-based programs provide highly specific and personalized interventions for each individual in a population, irrespective of age or health status, and are delivered to consumers by phone, mail, internet and face-to-face interactions, both domestically and internationally. Healthways also provides a national, fully accredited complementary and alternative Health Provider Network, offering convenient access to individuals who seek health services outside of, and in conjunction with, the traditional healthcare system. For more information, please visit www.healthways.com.

WASHINGTON – Veterans with chronic conditions can manage their health and avoid hospitalization by using special technology provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in their homes, according to a recent study.

VA Home Telehealth from http://www.carecoordination.va.gov/telehealth/ccht/

“The study showed that home telehealth makes health care more effective because it improves patients’ access to care and is easy to use,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. James B. Peake. “A real plus is that this approach to care can be sustained because it’s so cost-effective and more veteran-centric. Patients in rural areas are increasingly finding that telehealth improves their access to health care and promotes their ongoing relationship with our health care system.”

The study found a 25 percent reduction in the average number of days hospitalized and a 19 percent reduction in hospitalizations for patients using home telehealth. The data also show that for some patients the cost of telehealth services in their homes averaged $1,600 a year – much lower than in-home clinician care costs.

The authors of the study in the current issue of the journal Telemedicine and e-Health are VA national telehealth staff members. The study looked at health outcomes from 17,025 VA home telehealth patients.

VA’s home telehealth program cares for 35,000 patients and is the largest of its kind in the world. Clinicians and managers in health care systems, as well as information technology professionals, have been awaiting the results of the telehealth study, said Dr. Adam Darkins, chief consultant in VA’s care coordination program, who led the study.

“The results are not really about the technology, but about how using it helps coordinate the full scope of care our patients need,” said Darkins. “It permits us to give the right care in the right place at the right time.”

VA’s Under Secretary for Health, Dr. Michael J. Kussman, said the key to the program’s success is VA’s computerized patient record system. “Data obtained from the home such as blood pressure and blood glucose, along with other patient information in the electronic system, allows our health care teams to anticipate and prevent avoidable problems,” he said.

VA health care officials emphasize that home telehealth does not necessarily replace nursing home care or traditional care but can help veterans understand and manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and chronic heart failure. Patients’ partnership with the medical team can delay the need for institutional care and maintain independence for an extended time.