Back in August, Lift launched the first rendition of its snappy-looking iPhone app that aims to help people build healthy habits and achieve their goals. Initially incubated and seed funded by Obvious Corp., the hybrid accelerator and seed vehicle created by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone and early Twitter VP Jason Goldman, the startup added $2.5 million from Spark Capital, SV Angel and Adam Ludwin from RRE, among others, in November.

Today, Tony Stubblebine, Jon Crosby and team are making their goal-tracking app available to everyone by bringing it to the browser. Up until now, Lift has been iPhone-only, but beginning today, users will be able to sign up for an account and use the app across Windows and Android phones.

The browser version of Lift includes many of the same features that have been available on mobile, including tracking, streaks, graphs, progress and community support, as Stubblebine explained in a blog post this morning.

As we’ve written previously, Lift is among a new set of startups experimenting with the best ways to present behavioral design on mobile — to “find the right incentivization and motivation structures” that can help people better achieve their goals.

Many companies have opted to take a health-centric approach to activity tracking, offering monetary rewards or social graph-leveraged peer pressure to help people unlock healthier lifestyles. Using methods inspired by the Quantified Self Movement’s penchant for data tracking, psychology and behavioral research — along with cheerleading and positive support from its community — Lift is taking a more general approach.

It’s not intended to just be a health-tracking app, although it works in many health-related contexts by helping users keep track of say, the number of push ups they managed in any given week. The team doesn’t want Lift just to be a “tracker” in the same way that many Quantified Self enthusiasts have come to see health trackers as a system bereft of intelligence where users can simply keep tabs and notes about what people do on a daily basis.

And, rather than simply being a habit tracker, which sounds like another chore that people have to suffer through, and because it’s not automatic or daily — the focus of many habit trackers. Instead, users can create or join existing “habits,” using the app to record those habits when and if they meet them. All activity on the app is public, and users can offer support to others (and receive it in kind) when goals are reached.

The idea is to make it simple to record your progress for any and all of your regular habits or activities and get pushed along by the positive reinforcement of community applause. As Lift sucks in more data on your aspirations and progress, it populates groups of charts and graphs with that data, giving users a visual sense of just how well (or not) they’ve been doing when it comes to sticking to their goals.

I like to think of it this way: You know when you make all those brave New Years Resolutions about how you’re going to get in shape and be a better son/daughter/husband/wife/sister/brother/mother/father, stay in touch with friends, be kinder to animals and re-tweet Rip’s articles more regularly? Well, usually, those resolutions are attacked with gusto for about a week before life gets in the way and one month later, you’ve driven by the gym once.

Lift is the app that helps you keep track of all those life goals and remind yourself how close you are to getting there. As Stubblebine writes: “You can’t change what you don’t measure and tracking your progress is the first step toward achievement.” And the second step, going beyond goal tracking, is to make the community foundation deep enough that it becomes a legitimate source of answers, accountability and positive support.

In terms of what Lift is launching today, beyond progress and quick tracking, Lift for the Web includes a “Me” tab that allows users to view trend charts in bar form among others. [See below.]

Lift for the Web is also a product of responsive design, meaning that it’s optimized for mobile use as well, adjusting in size to work with the format and screen type of any mobile device, phone or tablet.

In terms of what’s up next: Lift says that a native Android version of the app isn’t quite ready yet, but it’s on the way. In terms of features, Lift is also testing “expert guidance and accountability in the form of groups,” which Stubblebine says one can think of like “training plans.”

Skeptical? For more about the “Science of Lift,” find it here. But, with its responsive design, Lift (at the very least) keeps the bar high in terms of the clean look and appeal of its simplicity. The team is taking great care not to just create another blunt instrument for health tracking, as seen by the “intelligent” push notification system it launched late last year (care of Matthew Panzarino of TNW), and its user experience is all the better for it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Irish startup Galvanic has just launched a Kickstarter to crowdsource funding a wireless stress biosensor it’s calling PIP. PIP — which stands for ‘personal input pod’ — is a Bluetooth biosensor that monitors its user’s stress levels by measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR) as they hold the PIP pinched between thumb and forefinger. GSR means skin conductance — so basically how sweaty you’re getting and therefore how nervous you’re feeling.

PIP isn’t just a quantifiable self-tapping biosensor; it’s been designed to work in conjunction with iOS and Android phone and tablet apps to provide a gamification element. The company has created three games designed to be played using the PIP, which utilises Bluetooth as its data transport tech. The user’s stress level is then incorporated into each game as the core gameplay mechanic — with the ultimate aim being to help the player learn what they need to do to relax.

It sounds a bit counterintuitive, since competitive gaming can be synonymous with sweaty palms, which is presumably why Galvanic’s project extends to designing stress-busting games. It’s created three games to be used in conjunction with the PIP — a relaxing racing game, a seasonal mood game where  players meditate on a wintery scene to turn it into spring, and a more playful lie-detector multi-player game — but it does also plan to launch an SDK in future to get third party developers expanding the PIP’s gaming ecosystem.

With this initial handful of in-house games the PIP can only be so interesting, but if Galvanic can convince enough people to buy in to the gadget and thus lure enough outside developers to join in, there’s plenty of potential for other cool biosensing software ideas. The price per PIP is $79 for a limited number of early bird Kickstarter backers, or $99 thereafter. Presumably each new PIP-compatible game may also carry a consumer price-tag.

Galvanic is gunning for $100,000 in Kickstarter funding, with the money to be used for finalising manufacturing and readying its own apps. Assuming it hits this rather ambitious funding goal, the company reckons it can gear up for mass production by the end of 2013, and expects to be shipping in Q1 2014. In future it said it plans to expand platform support beyond Android and iOS, to add Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows, MacOS and also game Consoles and set-top boxes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Buried in the ongoing PRISM debacle, there was actually some hopeful news out of Washington D.C. for startups this week.

The Supreme Court ruled this week that naturally occurring genes can’t be patented, which should be a boon for the host of emerging gene testing and patenting companies that are coming out of the Valley. Silicon Valley VCs like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Felicis Ventures and SV Angel have been making more bets in the space, on the assumption that biology is becoming a space that can be attacked by software.

In the case, a company called Myriad Genetics had acquired patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes that are strongly correlated with breast and ovarian cancer. Because of their patents, the cost of testing for those genes had been pushed higher, sometimes beyond the $3,000 range. That would have made it too expensive for many middle- and low-income women to learn if they were at risk for the cancers.

At the same time, other human genes were being scooped up with somewhere north of 20 percent of all human genes being covered by patents, according to the National Society of Genetic Counselors. The leading gene patent holders are unsurprisingly pharmaceutical giants like DuPont and GlaxoSmithKline, that startups would have a financially hard time competing against in courts.

The court ruled that human genes can’t be patented, but that synthetic genes can be protected.

Now that naturally occurring human genes can’t be patented, expect gene testing companies to benefit broadly with lower-cost products across the board. The costs for full human genome sequencing have already fallen to about $8,000 today from $100 million in 2011.

One of the remaining barriers preventing lower-cost testing has been whether consumers would be on the receiving end of high licensing fees to the patent owners of these genes. Patent holders like Myriad could also monopolize the testing market for these genes too, which would have also forced prices higher.

One company that I’ve written about, Counsyl, tests prospective parents for any hereditary diseases they might pass onto their children like Tay-Sachs Disease. They’ve gotten such broad adoption in medical clinics across the U.S. that they’re now testing for approximately 2 percent of all births in the country every year.

While CEO Ramji Srinivasan didn’t want to comment for this story, you could expect that gene testing companies which don’t currently offer tests linked to patented genes to start considering offering them. 23andMe also didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

At the same time, the host of emerging synthetic biology startups won’t suffer either since the court ruled that synthetic DNA and cDNA or complementary DNA that is synthesized from messenger RNA, can be patented.

“For me, it never made sense that you can patent genes from nature,” said Omri Amirav-Drory, who is the CEO of Genome Compiler, a company that makes software where you can design your own synthetic DNA. “It does say that synthetic DNA is patentable, which means that if one designs a novel sequence…. it will be patentable. That makes a bit more sense as you’ve made this novel sequence yourself.”

But maybe, synthetic biology patents will become less relevant anyway — just like software patents — as computational genetic design power increases, according to Austen Heinz, who runs Cambrian Genomics. He thinks synthetic gene patents may eventually become outmoded in the same way that software patents seem obsolete because the slow and often bureaucratic patent application process can’t keep up with the pace of change in the industry.

“Think of Windows 95′, 98 or Vista,” he said. “Like in the software business, synthetic biology companies will need to ship an updated improved OS (i.e. genome) every few years to stay competitive.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hampton Creek Foods, a food tech startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, is getting ready to expand beyond its initial product Beyond Eggs — though it’s not leaving eggs behind entirely.

The company recently released the YouTube video embedded below, which gives a brief glimpse of its upcoming scrambled egg replacer. And founder/CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just got off-stage at TEDxEdmonton, where he gave the full demo.

Hampton Creek’s larger mission is to move the world away from animal-based foods by developing replacements that are cheaper, healthier, and tastier. Its first product, Beyond Eggs, is supposed to replace eggs in baked goods and other food products (the cookies with Beyond Eggs that I tasted earlier this year were delicious). Tetrick told me that the response to Beyond Eggs’ launch in February has been better than expected, with “more of an interest in the mission/purpose of our work than we anticipated.”

But Beyond Eggs doesn’t replace eggs as a standalone food. That’s what the scrambled egg product is supposed to accomplish. In Tetrick’s words, it’s “the whole damn thing – not an element in other food products.” And he’s hoping to start selling it in the next six months.

“We’re just using one plant to make it happen… and this one plant has awesome coagulation, texture, and springiness properties,” he added.

In a preview video for his TEDxEdmonton demo, Tetrick also offered some thoughts on the broader vision:

We think the food industry will change quite a bit. It will become a lot more humane, a lot healthier, and a lot more sustainable. And right now I think the big problem is that our food system is incredibly broken. And it’s broken because of its devasting impacts to our environment (greenhouse gas emissions), its devastating impacts to our health (rising rates of diabetes and heart disease), and its awful, almost bizarre brutality to animals.

Hampton Creek has raised a total of $4.5 million from Khosla, Founders Fund, Kat Taylor, and the Collaborative Fund.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vitamin sales is big business: in the U.S. alone in 2012, it was worth $9.3 billion in sales, and the opportunity is only growing, as more consumers turn to preventative medicine and health strategies in the face of tightening budgets and less access to health care. Toronto startup Koge wants to revolutionize the process of vitamin sales, using the recently-popular subscription goods model, along with leveraging data analytics for personalization.

Koge thinks that there are inherent problems in the way vitamins are currently sold and distributed, with problems at the sales level (customer service reps recommend expensive, big-name brands over other cheaper options that are just as good), busy schedules prevent people from sticking to a supplement regimen, and there’s an overabundance of choice and not enough help to sift through all that information. Koge wants to address all those pain points, starting with the process of choosing what works for each individual and making ordering easy.

Users of its website select a specific track of vitamins they want to take, depending on their goals or identity. Right now, Koge is keeping that to a very simple formula, by offering a choice between four different categories: one for general energy, one for women, one for men and one for protein content specifically. The aim was to get some level of tailored product out the door quickly, but still keep things simple, but in the future Koge’s goal is to launch personalized vitamin selections tailored to each individual, something which Koge co-founder Alex Hyssen says the startup should be ready to launch sometime later this year.

Hyssen is another of the startup’s key differentiating factors, since he brings to Koge years of experience in the family business of supplements and vitamins. His family is behind the Herbal Magic chain of vitamin-powered weight loss clinics, and his ties to the vitamin industry mean that unlike others, Koge can access supply cost effectively and at smaller scales, so they don’t need to worry about competing with big volume orders. Koge is vertically integrated with North America’s largest vitamin manufacturer, Hyssen says, and that company is investing in its next round of funding, too.

Finally, Koge has just secured a relationship with Loblaws, Canada’s leading grocery store chain, to provide Koge products in-store. They’ll offer the same kind of tracked vitamin shopping experience, but from store shelves, as part of the pilot project. It’s big in terms of getting the brand out there and earning consumer trust, which is key for anyone trying to sell health and wellness products on the internet.

Koge still has big challenges: it needs to figure out the right way to make sure that customers actually follow through on sticking to a regimen of taking vitamins, and Hyssen says they’ve been testing things like text-based reminders, phone calls, virtually anything and are still looking for the right solution. But it’s off to a good start, and plans are quickly coming together for the imminent U.S. launch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At the SourceDigital13 conference this morning, Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf offered a look into how mobile users on iOS are spending their time in apps, as well as the differences between men and women’s app usage, and trends particular to advertisers’ favorite demographic (those aged 25 to 34), the latter which led to some surprises.

Flurry, whose analytics offering for mobile developers has allowed the company to gain broad insight into mobile user behaviors, has seen its network grow to over 300,000 apps and three billion app sessions per day over the past five-plus years, says Khalaf, which allows it to track trends across more than a billion mobile consumers worldwide.

During the month of May 2013, the company took a random sample of its data to gain insight in a number of areas, one being a look at what time of day apps are used the most. Flurry found that app usage steadily grows over the course of the day, and peaks in the evening – something that again the company positioned against TV viewing behavior, noting that TV viewing peaks strongly in the evening, while apps are used all day.

The company had previously said in December that the time spent in mobile apps was starting to challenge television, for example, but today notes that for ad-buying purposes, there’s more to consider than just total hours spent. Ad spend in apps can be effectively spread throughout the day, Khalaf says, because consumers are on their mobiles consistently, despite the evening peak.

Though the above usage data is fairly common sense, a deeper look into trends among the highly-desired young adult (25-34) demographic led to a few surprises.

Probably the biggest finding is that this group under-indexes on mobile games, as compared with the rest of the mobile population.

“Given the popularity of game apps you might expect that Millennials drive that usage,” explains Khalaf, “but in fact they under-index for game app usage. It turns out that it’s the middle-aged Gen X-ers who grew up with gaming consoles who are over indexing on games.”

Go figure.

This group also under-indexed on time spent in Utilities and News, while over-indexing in Sports, Health and Fitness, Music, Media and Entertainment, Lifestyle and Shopping. In other words, they have a healthy appetite for apps and content in general, just oddly not as much for mobile games. (That’s not to say that games aren’t popular with this group, they’re just less so than other categories compared with other demographics.)

In particular, it’s females ages 25 to 34 who dramatically over-index in the Sports, Health and Fitness category, spending over 200 percent more time in these apps than the rest of the population because of what appears to be a greater interest in self-improvement (or at least, using apps to help them with that goal). They also – stereotypically – turn towards Lifestyle and Shopping apps more so than men, where they spend 75 percent more time than the rest of the population.

Males, meanwhile, over-index in Music, Media and Entertainment, as well as Social and Photo-Sharing, while under-indexing in News & Magazines.

Image credits: charts – Flurry; iPhone - Hello

Update: clarified headline, which could have confused some into thinking games are not popular. 

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Moves, the smartphone app that does away with wearables and uses just software and your existing iPhone to track activity, telling you how much you’ve walked, cycled, run or driven during the course of any given day. Moves is the product of Finnish startup ProtoGeo Oy, and hopes to capture the attention of a broader market segment than the somewhat niche crowd that currently goes in for wearable fitness trackers like the Jawbone UP and Nike+ FuelBand. Today, Moves is launching its API, which will allow other app builders to integrated Moves data into their own offerings.

Moves promised an API would arrive in the coming months, and with its arrival developers can extract information gathered by the app including bike, run and drive data, as well as places visited and entire routes tracked. These can then be used to either supplement data gathered by other apps (you could easily see a partnership working between Moves and something like Withings’ home health monitoring app, for example), or for making games to incentivize activity and more.

More and more, quantified self and personal health monitoring tools are reaching out to partners via APIs and SDKs, mostly in an effort to expand their appeal to a broader cross-section of users. When I recently spoke to RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs, he said that his company (another software-based activity tracker) is extremely interested in what it can accomplish with partners like Pebble, and plans to identify other similar opportunities. Moves looks to be inviting the same kind of synergy by throwing the gates wide open, with an API designed for use with mobile, web and desktop applications.

To get started with the Moves API, devs need to register their app using their Google Account. The startup has provided an API demo that shows how simply API data can be used to create a basic mobile web app that displays Moves data in a unique visual style. But the real possibilities lie in much more creative integration of Moves data; it is likely that this space can do more still once partnerships evolve and apps start to cluster around a core set of devices and services.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was just about two years ago that Jake Winebaum (who had previously sold Business.com for $360 million) quietly launched Brighter.com, an online marketplace for discounted dental care. Within a few months, Winebaum and Brighter, which had launched with $5 million in its coffers, added another $8 million from Benchmark, Mayfield Fund and a few others.

The reason for this was simple: As data published by the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging showed last year, more than 130 million Americans are currently living without dental insurance. Even with insurance, a trip to the dentist’s office can be pricey; without insurance, it’s equivalent to root canal. As such, the need (and demand) for more accessible and affordable dental care is high — and getting higher.

Brighter has remained fairly quiet over the last year, as new startups like 500 Startups and SV Angel-backed HealthSouk have moved into the space in an attempt to bring affordable dental care to the masses, beginning with California. And today, Brighter followed suit with a service that targets the 40 percent of Los Angeles residents who are living without dental insurance and can’t afford proper care.

When Brighter launched in 2011, it followed a familiar roadmap for startups focused on providing more affordable dental care, offering 20 to 30 percent discounts on insurance to users for free, while promising those who shelled out for its $80 premium platform access to even larger discounts of up to 60 percent. With its new service, Brighter is now claiming that anyone can purchase dental insurance for up to 50 percent off the standard rate — for free.

The company started by building out a network of dentists nationwide, in attempt to build a kind of Progressive Insurance price comparison site, or ZocDoc for the nation’s dentists. But to provide real discounts and actually bring insurance to the uninsured, Brighter realized it had to narrow its focus and bite off a smaller piece of the pie. This means that, starting today, Brighter.com members can compare and select from over 350 (fully vetted) dentists in Los Angeles. Not only that, but Winebaum said that the team soon realized that, if it really wanted to make a difference, it would have to slough off the subscription model and go for broke. In other words, they’d have to go free.

So, the dentists currently listed in LA are listed at pre-negotiated prices that are “comparable to those secured by large insurance companies, but without the premiums and complications of insurance,” Winebaum says. Now, instead of charging users a subscription fee to access these discounted listings, Brighter is now charging the dentists to list their procedures and services on the platform.

Brighter gives each dentist an SEO-friendly profile on which they can list their procedures, location, background, qualifications and degrees, accompanied by an introductory video from Brighter and Yelp reviews. The idea is to make local dentists easily searchable for users, while giving dentists an easy way to list their qualifications and availabilities. Dentists negotiate lower prices for each procedure in hopes of attracting those in need by offering lower prices than the next dentist. The idea is to attract customers who are willing (and able) to pay up front for discounted dental services, without having to worry about filing paperwork, claims and all of the time-consuming stuff that comes along with insurance.

For dentists, this should provide an easy way to market their services, to be found in pre-qualified dentist-specific searches, and get credit for offering discounted service to those who need it. Plus, Brighter integrates with dentists’ scheduling software (like ZocDoc mentioned above), making it easy for them to list times, book appointments and fill vacancies. Or so the thinking goes.

Of course, without insurance being a bigger part of the picture, a lot of responsibility falls on Brighter’s vetting process. If one quack falls through the cracks and starts doing low-quality procedures that cause more pain or require patients to return again and again to the dentist’s chair, the trustworthiness of the platform begins to disintegrate. Of course, some of this can be prevented by making it easy for patients to view dentist ratings (and provide their own feedback), but a few bad seeds trying to game the system can spoil the game for everyone.

To its credit, however, Brighter is confident enough about its extensive vetting process for its certified dental providers that the startup is offering its members a money-back guarantee on all appointments made through the service. At least it’s putting its money where its mouth is, and that’s worth a lot in the early stages.

Brighter is one among a handful of startups and more established players looking to bring greater transparency to the health insurance market, including bigs like Castlight and startups like HealthInReach and SimplyInsured, for example. For the dental market, Brighter was competing with services Careington, First Dental Health and DentalPlans.com, but services like these are still largely relying on the subscription model.

Thus, when it comes to dental platforms offering free alternatives that eliminate those annoying monthly fees, that leaves Brighter alone with HealthSouk to duke it out in California and, going forward, the rest of the country. And, if these startups live up to their claims, the more successful they are, the better it will be for the millions of Americans currently living without dental insurance.

Find Brighter.com at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s a lot of exciting and head-turning technology out there today, and it’s changing our world in a multitude of ways, some more obvious than others — and at a fairly astounding rate. But many of these services, while making our lives more convenient or connected, aren’t necessarily helping people or having an impact at a more fundamental level. There are, of course, many exceptions, and Ben’s Friends is one of them — another example that for-profit, social enterprises can have a big impact even without venture capital, or big budgets.

For those unfamiliar, today Ben’s Friends is one of the largest platforms and support networks for people with rare diseases. Software developer and startup veteran Ben Munoz conceived the idea in 2006, after suffering from a life-threatening and rare form of stroke (as a result of a condition called “arteriovenous malformation”), which led to several years of intensive treatment, radiotherapy and neurosurgery. Unable to find the information or support he was looking for on the Web, he launched a site to find others who suffered from the same (and similar) conditions.

A community of people quickly formed around AVMSurvivors.org, and, joined by his friends Scott Orn, a partner at VC firm Lighthouse Capital, and Eric D. Kroll, the founders started Ben’s Friends to apply the concept to other diseases. In 2012 alone, the platform added seven new patient support communities to bring its total to 33 (which is now 35), allowing people to connect with others who share the same conditions or symptoms, whether it be in networks like “Living With Narcolepsy,” Traumatic Brain Injury or Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

The concept is similar in practice to that of a network called CureTogether, which was acquired by 23andMe last year. The difference between Ben’s Friends and other startups with similar ambitions, Orn told us recently, is that each disease has its own dedicated network and site. Everything on those pages, he says, revolves around that particular condition and the community of people who suffer from that condition. In turn, Ben’s Friends is volunteer-driven, with support communities adding content, resources and moderating each site themselves. The network of volunteer operators has grown to several hundred, Orn says.

The technology behind these sites isn’t necessarily new or sexy, originally built using a combination of Ning and Basecamp to keep the costs of hosting, scaling and project management low. And the community isn’t enormous, either. Ben’s Friends today only has about 30,000 members, but the engagement is high and the information collected by its community on these rare diseases is extremely valuable.

But it works, Orn says, because “the entire network is powered by volunteer moderators. We have 150+ people who keep the networks humming. They are also patients and understand what members are going through. They tell us that becoming a moderator changed their relationship with their disease. It took something negative and turned it into a positive.”

Comparatively, CureTogether took arguably an even greater quantitative approach to its community (which is what 23andMe found appealing), while Ben’s Friends has focused more on providing this kind of support — on making it easy for people to find and make those critical emotional connections with others who’ve experienced the same conditions. Of course, the importance of that shared community is something that holds true far beyond the scope of rare diseases and is as old as the earliest Web forums and, well, offline communities well before that.

Orn tells us that the look and feel of the site is owed to an approach the founders adopted early on: Capital efficiency. Monetizing rare diseases just isn’t an acceptable business model, Orn explained in the Harvard Business Review, which is why the founders felt they couldn’t justify raising venture capital. For it to work, everything had to be free and scalable, while avoiding as many fixed costs as possible. Since 2010, they’ve raised about $65K in donations from foundations, members and friends, as well as by running a campaign on Indiegogo — bootstrapping the rest of the way.

And, today, Ben’s Friends is launching its first native app (for the iPhone) to give patients around-the-clock, on-demand access to support groups while on-the-go. Reflecting macro trends, the founders say that mobile traffic to the site has increased significantly over the last year and now makes up over 25 percent of total traffic as patients turn to their mobile devices to access support groups and health info.

People with rare diseases also tend to find themselves spending a lot of time in waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, hospitals and clinics, making an iPhone app a fairly natural extension of the platform. Accessing support groups and relevant information at the time of diagnosis or surgery helps reduce anxiety, fear and figure out the right questions to ask. The same is true of Cancer.net’s iOS app (and these patient support apps), as well as more information-centric health resources like HealthTap, HealthKeep, HealthGuru and more.

To that end, Ben’s Friends has collected over 2,000 recommendations for doctors who specialize in rare diseases, which will be available in the app’s next update, coming soon. Recommendations like these are particularly critical for those with rate diseases, the founders explain, considering how frequently they are misdiagnosed. Naturally, being referred to a doctor who is aware of rare symptoms and conditions can potentially reduce the chance of being misdiagnosed.

“We never wanted to become one of those nonprofits that have massive overhead and have to spend half of their time raising money,” Munoz says. “We thought of it as a little software startup … in a garage eating Ramen noodles and peanut butter. How do we do it cheaper? How do we automate?”

And so far, it’s been working.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thanks to an update to its Route 53 DNS web service, Amazon now makes it a bit easier to host sites that need high availability in multiple AWS regions. Route 53 has been offering DNS Failover since February, but that wasn’t really an option if your application was also running behind Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service. ELB allows you to automatically distribute traffic across EC2 instances. Route 53′s failover service needs to be able to check a specific IP address for availability, but that didn’t work with apps behind ELB because they don’t have a fixed IP address in Amazon’s architecture.

Now, however, Amazon has added a new feature to Route 53 that allow it to check up on the health of an application on EC2 that runs behind ELB. Route 53 can now, in Amazon’s words, evaluate “the health of the load balancer itself and the health of your application running on the EC2 instances behind it.” If any part of the architecture goes down, Route 53 will detect this issue and simply route traffic to the next available ELB endpoint.

Thanks to this, Amazon says, you can run your primary application in multiple AWS regions around the world. The service will automatically remove any region from service where the application isn’t available. Here is Amazon’s description for how to set this up.

Another nifty feature DNS Failover allows for is to route traffic to a backup site hosted on Amazon’s S3 storage service, which makes it easy to host a simple static site. If all else fails, you can always route your traffic there, after all, and at least give users an update as to when they can expect the full site to come back up again.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch