Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices.

These days, we take free scalable, online platforms for granted, but at the time, Practice Fusion’s approach to EMR was far from being the norm in the healthcare market. Since then, the company has gone on to raise $70 million, attract some 150K medical professionals and grow to over 250+ employees. Today, Practice Fusion hosts digital health records for over 64 million people in the U.S., making it one of the largest web-based EMR platforms out there.

With the success of its EMR software, Practice Fusion is now looking to extend the functionality of its platform with the goal of building a true end-to-end health service. Setting its sights on becoming the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health, last month the company launched Patient Fusion — a new complementary site that allows anyone and everyone to compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office.

The new service takes Practice Fusion into ZocDoc’s territory, combining Yelp-like reviews with an Uber-style on-demand booking service. However, unlike Yelp, which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well.

With several million reviews now live, today Practice Fusion is taking the next step toward being a full-service health information platform with the launch of a free tool that aims to help patients keep better tabs on their health spending. Now, along with the ability to book appointments and access digital health records, Patient Fusion allows users to track their health spending across their entire history of medical visits.

The platform, which officially launches in beta today, is available to Practice Fusion patients who are covered by national health insurance providers like Anthem Blue Cross and United. If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory, then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health.

By aggregating patients’ health information and family health bills, Patient Fusion allows users to track and visualize the history of their health costs, including out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles, for example. The idea is to help users more accurately plan their flexible spending account (FSA) contributions and estimate the cost of future visits to the doctor’s office, for example.

Another key piece of the new service is that it includes insurance claims information to enable patients to view their claims history and determine which claims have been rejected, which have been accepted and which may need to be disputed. By allowing patients to more effectively stay on top of their health bills, the company also sees a potential upside for doctors — as easier expense management could lead to an increase in payments that are more accurate and are actually on time.

With the average person now spending $3,000/year on out-of-pocket medical costs and with medical bills now representing one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., Practice Fusion is hoping that its new tools can alleviate some of this financial stress. While the company is far from being the only service to allow patients to track their health spending, the service has the benefit of being tied to one of the largest EMR platforms in the U.S. and a search and booking service that now includes more than 27,000 verified providers.

By simplifying health expense tracking and by allowing people to view out-of-pocket expenses incurred to date (as well as costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible) — all for free — Patient Fusion comes with plenty of appeal.

This is especially true for doctors and practices already using the company’s EMR platform, as they can now direct their patients to its appointment booking and expense tracking tool without worrying about the high costs of ZocDoc or other similar services. And, for its new tool, having access to the huge network of medical professionals using its EMR software, this means ready-made scale.

The new service will be of particular interest to startups like Simplee, which launched its own “Mint.com for healthcare expenses” service and medical wallet back in 2011 to enable people to better track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online. More recently, Simplee has expanded its reach by bringing a payment and loyalty platform to hospitals in an effort to give them a better way to distribute bills (digitally), and, last month, it launched a new mobile app that allows people to pay their family’s medical bills from their phone — on the go.

While Simplee has managed over $2 billion in medical bills to date, Patient Fusion’s new service puts the two companies in direct competition — at least in regard to this functionality. However, Practice Fusion’s version does not yet support bill payments, only expense management, nor does it yet have the mobile piece. Though Simplee’s platform is (arguably) more extensive at this point, it likely won’t be long before Practice Fusion fills the remaining gap.

What’s more, as the company further extends it health platform, potentially adding integrations with popular health-tracking devices (like, say, Fitbit), Practice Fusion will begin to compete with a whole new category of startups and companies. While it remains to be seen which tools the average patient will find more accessible (and usable), at this point, given the ridiculous cost of healthcare and medical expenses, the average American will welcome any help in this regard with open arms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The following is an excerpt from my new book Don’t Go Back to School: a handbook for learning anything.

To someone who has never tried, it’s not obvious how to learn the things you want to learn outside of school. I’m on a mission to show you how. To do that, I became obsessed with how other people learn best, and how they do it without going to school.

My research based on interviews with 100 independent learners revealed four facts shared by almost every successful form of learning outside of school:

• It isn’t done alone.
• For many professions, credentials aren’t necessary, and the processes for getting credentials are changing.
• The most effective, satisfying learning is learning that which is more likely to happen outside of school.
• People who are happiest with their learning process and most effective at learning new things — in any educational environment — are people who are learning for the right reasons and who reflect on their own way of learning to figure out which processes and methods work best for them.

This interview with Harper Reed is a great example of how independent learning works. Reed served as the Chief Technology Officer for Obama for America during the 2012 election; before that, he was CTO at Threadless. He is an engineer who builds paradigm-shifting technology and leads others to do the same.

I love computers and I’ve always been around computers. I can’t really talk about education without talking about computers. I went to high school and I actually really loved it. I took all the classes I could, I was prom king, student council president. I did everything I could to be more involved in high school and that is obviously not the normal path you’d expect for a computer geek.

But, along with that, I was constantly getting into trouble with computers. Never with the cops, but I was always getting banned from all the computers in the school district. Then, they would let me back in, and I would mess up again for whatever reason. It happened over and over. I was caught in this dichotomy of trying to be involved, but whenever I was trying to get involved with computers, I messed it up because I was curious and experimenting outside what was allowed. After that, I went to a small liberal arts college. I studied history along with computer science, because I knew ultimately I was going to work with computers and I wanted to learn something else, too. I studied Catholic history and the history of science, which overlap a lot. I’m not Catholic. I’m not a religious person at all, but it was really fascinating to learn all of the idiosyncrasies of Galileo and Bruno and all these different weird scientists who got burned at the stake for their discoveries.

I realized about probably three-quarters of the way through my education that in terms of computers, I actually wasn’t learning anything I needed to learn to get a job later on. I did learn some coding concepts in college, but more importantly I figured out that I’m an experiential learner. I need to put my hands on things and really see them, and really chew on them. It was better to do it in a real context, where it mattered if I did it right. Like where there was money at stake. So, I did an internship in Iowa City, IA. I worked for a real company that was trying to make a profit. The company built ecommerce apps. As an intern I started learning web apps to build web pages. Given my way of learning, it was fascinating to see how the management dealt with me. I was a child. I asked questions like a child does. “Why is the sky blue?” They just said, “It’s just blue. Go with that.” I said, “No! Tell me why we’re doing it this way. What is this?” It was client services, so we were just doing it because the client wanted it done, with no thought behind it. But all the questions I asked gave me this opportunity to see how things worked and the value of asking things that seemed obvious to everyone else. It gave me a lot of hope. It really kicked off the career that I have now.

The methods I used to learn technology don’t work for everything. I’m struggling with learning Japanese. My wife is Japanese and I want to learn the language, but I don’t know how. I take classes, I fail, it doesn’t work out. I have to figure that out. With technology, I immediately find a problem I want to solve. It’s usually about learning a new programming language or learning a new technology. If it’s a real problem, I want to get to where I can actually picture the solution and be able to see it through from the beginning to the end. For me, I can’t learn from videos. That just doesn’t do it for me, although there’s a lot of video learning right now. I find it very frustrating. So usually what I do is I just go through a tutorial of some sort and then really start iterating, doing it over and over. I start trying to be creative on top of that, and say okay, now that I can figure out how to do this, how would I use it? So I set a new goal pretty close in difficulty, and when I achieve that, I do that again, until suddenly I’ve learned something. When you’re in that process, it can also be the best time to teach someone else. A tech writer named Mark Pilgrim, who writes manuals for learning coding languages including Dive into Python, and Dive into HTML5 said, “The best time to write a book about something is while you’re learning it yourself.” So you know what’s hard to learn and can talk in an excited, confident, honest way about how you got to the place where it’s not hard anymore.

For me this whole process is really collaborative. I treat everything like I’m the CEO of my life. CEOs have boards of directors and boards of advisors and these are groups of people who they’re using to really rely on for help and advice to be successful. I think every person should treat their life like that. So, if I’m stuck, I know I can reach out to a buddy, or I can reach out to my brother. I know I can reach out to these people who are experts in whatever I’m trying to do. I try to surround myself with incredibly smart people who are often, if not always, smarter than me. Because other people are so important to learning, I also think one of the most significant things about the internet is democratization of access. Anyone can email you about self-learning and you’re probably going to respond. Probably. I think it’s about how you phrase it. We are all very busy, but we’re probably going to respond if you approach it efficiently.

You can learn a lot about this from a really good book called Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick. It’s actually about project managing software development geeks, but it applies to most things with communication. It should really be called “Interacting with People,” because all it is, is just little tricks on how to interact with people, how to make those interactions better. There’s a section called “Interacting with an Executive,” and that part should be called “Interacting with Busy People.” It says if you want to connect with someone who is very busy, tell them three bullets and then a call to action.

So if someone wanted help from me, it might go like this: “Harper, I’m interested in what you’re doing with the campaign. I’m going to be doing technology for a campaign in the coming election. Do you have a hint for product management or project management software that you guys use?” I can answer that quickly. It’s very simple. Then all of a sudden there’s this person who probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to talk with me, and I can help them out. I love what that kind of efficient communication does for you.

Kio Stark is a writer, researcher, teacher, and passionate activist for independent learning. She teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is also the author of the novel Follow Me Down. You can find out more about her work at KioStark.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Whom do the idols idolize?

Lei Jun, the CEO of Android handset and OS maker Xiaomi, is arguably the face of tech entrepreneurship in China as a long-time angel investor and serial entrepreneur behind companies like Amazon-acquired Joyo.cn and the recently IPO’d YY.

He’s been called the “Steve Jobs of China” in the sense that Xiaomi is an integrated hardware and software maker that has altered Android for Chinese tastes. They sell high-end Android phones at or slightly above the cost of materials and profit through accessories and eventually, software and services. While the country has been known for lower-end hardware makers, Xiaomi is pushing the idea that world-class products can be both made and designed in China.

The company has its own fanboys to prove it. Just two years after launching their first device, Xiaomi plans to sell 15 million devices this year, bringing the company $4.5 billion in revenue. Last year, they sold 7 million phones. Sales in batches of 200K to 300K phones on their website regularly sell out — sometimes in less than an hour.

But Xiaomi also has incredibly high expectations to realize; the company’s valuation is not just predicated on raw hardware sales, but also on the idea that Xiaomi will eventually be able to monetize software services — something it has yet to prove against giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the ridiculously competitive Chinese market.

While founding the company three years ago, Jun thought about the history of Chinese business and entrepreneurship to find role models.

“What kind of company in China can last for a century?” he asked at the GMIC conference in Beijing this week.

He said he ultimately looked up to two companies: a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company called Tongrentang and hot pot chain Hai Di Lao.

He said Tongrentang’s mission taught him two things — never produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost and never spare any effort in creating the best quality products.

Hai Di Lao, which is indeed a delicious hot pot chain (yes, I’ve tried it), taught him about the value of customer service. In a separate interview, co-founder and president Lin Bin suggested that I order items not on the menu or even praise the dishware in the restaurant.

“They take customer feedback very, very seriously and always leave you with a surprise,” Bin said.

In a way, Jun is critical of the prevailing business culture in China. “There’s a big problem with integrity in China,” he said. “People sell pigs but you’re not eating pork,” he added on-stage, alluding to recent health scares where rat meat has been marked as lamb.

Appealing to a Fanbase

Paired with this focus on high-quality parts is a marketing model that’s unusual for any handset maker globally.

Xiaomi sold 72 percent of its phones directly through its online store last year, bypassing the costly logistical headache of dealing with brick-and-mortar retailers. Right now, they have two models: one that retails for 1999 renminbi ($326) and a more basic version that goes for 1499 renminbi ($245).

They can do this because the company has cultivated a unique participatory model of designing phones. Every week, the company releases a new version of its customized Android experience: the miUI.

Of their millions of customers, there are a few hundred thousand “hardcore” fans who do the teardowns, scrutinize every spec and offer suggestions on how to change the phone.

“Chinese consumers are actually very critical in the sense that they compare not just the build and look and feel of phones, but also everything that goes inside — the CPU, memory, speed, the specs,” Bin said. “They are pretty savvy about the money they pay for these phones.”

Jun uses Weibo, the public Chinese social networking platform that sometimes draws comparisons to Twitter, to solicit advice and communicate with Xiaomi fans. He’s offered different levels of hard drive storage based on user feedback. He said they even added a sound recording app at the behest of a reporter.

“We co-develop the phone,” Jun said in another interview. “I’ve used more than 70 phones in the last couple years. I have lots of suggestions, but will they change their phone? Even Nokia? Most likely not. So I created a model where I’ve invited all of my fans to be involved in designing the phone. It’s one of the most exciting things for them.”

He says this is a key part of why Xiaomi spends less than its peers on marketing.

“If you invented a feature in the Xiaomi phone, will you tell your classmates and friends that you invented a feature? Most likely you will.”

Their approach ties into a big trend that is fueling a hardware Renaissance globally: the ability to feel out product-market fit through social media before a capital-intensive manufacturing process — be it through Twitter, Weibo or a Kickstarter campaign.

Through that feedback and Xiaomi’s own in-house engineers and designers, miUI includes improvements over the standard flavor of Android. Jun says that they’ve tweaked how applications run in the background so that a Xiaomi phone can go up to six or seven days without a recharge. (I’ve been carrying an older Xiaomi around and it has held up for a few days at a time, unlike my iPhone, which needs to be recharged every day.) There are also lots of UI flourishes that are, frankly, Apple-like.

Software For Profit And As A Protective Moat

While Xiaomi has done well at positioning itself as much more than a commodity hardware maker, one of its next challenges will be to prove that it can make money off software and services. Because it sells phones at or near the cost of the build of materials, Xiaomi will rely on accessories and services to boost its margins.

Jun is reluctant to say whether Xiaomi is at heart more of a software or hardware company (a question that has also perplexed analysts of Apple).

“We positioned ourselves as triathlon athletes,” Jun said. “We do software, hardware and Internet services, so if you would ask which part of the three is stronger, my answer is: would you ask a triathlon athlete whether they are best at running, swimming or cycling?”

They’ve shared some vanity stats showing traction, although it’s hard to understand what they mean. Xiaomi’s app store sees 3.5 million app downloads a day, 3.5 million photos uploaded to its cloud service a day and has seen 2 billion messages uploaded cumulatively. Its messaging app MiTalk is way behind Tencent’s WeChat, which is the other big China tech story of the year with 190 million active users.

There are some promising metrics, though. Bin says Xiaomi’s customers are twice as active on the mobile web as those of other manufacturers. That sort of engagement could lend itself to interesting revenue opportunities down the line in gaming and e-commerce, although the company declined to share specifics.

Two other growth areas for Xiaomi are international markets and in other types of hardware. The company is expanding to greater China — or Taiwan and Hong Kong. Bin is reluctant to talk about even more international markets, saying that the company just wants to prove itself in these two areas first.

There are unique challenges. For one, these markets rely on more of the subsidized model that’s common in the West where carriers lower the list price through post-paid plans. In China, many consumers pay for the full cost of the phone upfront. They also don’t know whether the marketing model where they heavily engage a core set of fans will work outside of mainland China.

The other growth area is with Xiaomi’s new set-top boxes.  It was a rocky start with the initial sales of the set-top boxes blocked by Chinese regulations around TV content. But they re-launched two months ago. Bin and Jun declined to share figures on sales so far, except to say that Jun has seen second-hand models show up on eBay and Taobao for $90 (which is about twice the list price of 299 renminbi).

Bin is hesitant to share too many targets, because he claims that Xiaomi doesn’t really even have that many internally. Even the goal to get to 15 million handsets is to produce that many, not necessarily to sell that many (although they invariably sell out).

“We don’t have any KPIs (key performance indicators) — not even internally,” Bin said. “Our KPI is to get handsets to everyone who can place an order online and make a full payment.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

The mere mention of those particular articles of clothing that protect our private bits from coming into contact with our clothing (or perhaps vice versa) has long been enough to drive children into hysterics. As adults, the decision to abstain from them invokes the belligerence of a commando operation. Despite the choices of boxers, briefs, bikini bottoms and beyond, however, some still feel there is ample room for improvement. To prove this, some have been willing to break with convention and actually put videos of people in their underwear on the Internet.

Backed: Thinx. The three women  behind Thinx underwear spent nearly three years developing their product. Accepting their ingenuity is easy as they get through their nearly three-minute campaign video using a number of euphemisms to avoid directly mentioning menstruation, the main inspiration for raising the panty ante. By incorporating moisture-wicking and a dry outer layer into a microbial fabric, Thinx is designed to offer a woman protection against leakage and stains during that period when she might have need and to look good regardless of what time of the month it is. To the latter point, the New York-based project owners are not beyond dropping trou to show off the Hiphugger design. It’s one of four variations that include a lacy limited edition by twin designers Naven, whom you’re probably talking about right now. Funds from backers flowed freely, and the campaign beat its goal of $50,000 with nearly $15,000 to spare.

Whacked: Snowballs. Addressing a male concern regarding bodily emissions, Joshua Shoemake came up with the idea of Snowballs, “the cooling underwear for conceiving men,” a year after the birth of his daughter — a celebrated event for which he and his wife had spent much time and effort. After enduring the Sperm und Drang of infertility treatments, a doctor suggested that he apply cooling to his scrotum and get tested for a varicocele, an enlarged blood vessel in the testicles that can lead to raising their temperature and affecting semen. The proof was in the procreation.

Adding relief to the boxer brief, Snowballs was inspired by the difficulty that Shoemake faced cooling the center of his potency production for up to two hours per day. The recent candidate for a World’s Best Dad mug sought to create underwear that was “as close to nature as possible” (a redundant requirement in at least one sense). To fight against temperate testes, Snowballs accommodate a gel pouch that can cool the cojones for up to 30 minutes. However, despite the effort put into an animated campaign video, something other than oval organs were put on ice. The campaign cleared just over half of its $20,000 goal.

Whacked: Jockgods. New Yorker Sebastian Barone asks, “How well do you really know your underwear?” Were you once close but just don’t talk as often as you used to since you started going to therapy? Like the other undergarments featured on Kickstarter, Jockgods undies seek to be comfortable and stylish. And like many other Kickstarter projects in general, they are to be made in those North American states united. However, unlike Snowballs and Thinx, Jockgods is available for everyone. Barone takes advantage of his experience shooting underwear campaigns for 10 years by breaking into a steamy video in which two neighbors eagerly kiss and caress each other while keeping their underwear on. The video juxtaposes seductive glances with the insertion of keys into locks, which wins it the award for Least Subtle Metaphor Ever in a Crowdfunding Video.

With the absence of undergarment deities in major mythologies, Jockgods failed to attract divine intervention. However, it did attract the intervention of its campaign owner, which ended the campaign less than two weeks in. At that time, only five backers had pledged a total of $130 of the $22,000 goal.

Backed: HELUX Gear. If you’re searching for a personal underwear mantra, you could do worse than the one of Greg Donmayer. The Harrisburg, Penn., resident lays it on the line: “I believe the need exists for men’s underwear that is both comfortable and functional.” Indeed, instead of salacious appeals, the clothing designer takes bampaign video viewers on a relatively cerebral tour through the history of men’s underwear starting with the boxer and evolving past the boxer brief. Donmayer has addressed the oft-problematic fly with a new design that interweaves two pieces of fabric reinforced by elastic for what he claims gives men easy access to the room they need. Backers provided plenty of elbow room to accommodate for other body parts as the campaign finished up with nearly double its $2,500 goal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really!

I’m not alone. AnyRoad co-founders Daniel and Jonathan Yaffe almost ended up doing the same thing, but they were smarter. They asked around and found out about remote parts of the wall where you could walk for miles without seeing another soul. It took hours to get there, but they got lucky and met a courteous taxi driver who showed them exactly what they wanted — that endless, breathtaking view of the crumbling Wall stretching for hundreds of miles into the distance.

With that as inspiration, they decided to do a startup together that would offer custom tours to people in cities like Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, San Francisco and more.

The Yaffe brothers have a colorful background. The older one, Jonathan, founded and was a principal of a charter school named KAIS International in Tokyo for several years, while the younger one, Daniel, ran and sold a drinking magazine called Drink Me and is releasing a book on whiskey later this year. Their technical co-founder Michalis Polakis is a former Soundcloud engineer.

They say they’re not quite like YC-backed Vayable, or other marketplaces for experiences, because they’re partnering with established tour guides and small companies instead of regular, everyday locals that want to give people experiences in their spare time.

AnyRoad has 200 tours available through 150 guides so far in five countries. The average ticket price being about $180. These include experiences like a Candomble tour in Rio de Janeiro, which teaches people about the history of the dance and music or a visit to a whiskey distillery in Brooklyn. About 80 percent of the company’s booking are from outside the U.S.

In their two month beta, they said that bookings are tripling each month and more than 1 percent of visitors to the site book a tour. AnyRoad takes a 14 percent commission off each one.

They had to meet with more than 3,000 tour guides throughout different countries over 18 months to figure out different pain points in the booking process.

The challenges are, of course, about scaling. The strong existing online travel startups have really strong SEO strategies, and are easy to find atop any search for hotels or tours in different cities. The company said it’s focusing on unique distribution channels and other partnerships, without offering too many specifics.

On the supply side, AnyRoad is basically a very customized CMS for tour guides. It’s a self-serve model although AnyRoad curates the marketplace and doesn’t let every potential tour onto the platform. They also verify the guides’ credentials for safety and trust. The startup is bootstrapped so far.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Skype has officially announced the availability of its BlackBerry 10 app, out initially for Q10 devices, which means not many people will have access to it, since the Q10 doesn’t ship until the beginning of May. As you my have seen from my review, I do have access to a Q10 currently, and the Skype app is one of the ones that I’ve been testing alongside the device itself. The good news is, the app provides does indeed provide access to Skype VoIP and chat services. The bad news is, it does so with a bare minimum of elegance resulting in a painful UX.

Users of Skype for Android will find the app familiar, since it’s one of the many apps that’s actually an Android port running on BB10 via a virtualization wrapper. In many cases, that arrangement works fine, delivering a perfectly functional app (see Songza, for instance). But in the case of Skype, the non-native nature of the app, combined with the already sub-par Android version, results in an experience that is probably best left unexperienced by most.

The issues are mostly around lag, unresponsive taps, chats that take forever to update and show you their history, and notifications that seem only loosely tied to actual in-app events, and which also ignore your device audio settings. With both media volume and notification audio turned all the way off, Skype was still making its trademark new message notification noise, even when no new messages seemed to be coming in. When the app is closed, these ghost notifications persist, even for a little while after I’ve actually gone so far as to sign out within the app itself and closed the app in the multi-tasking view on BB10.

As mentioned, it works, allowing you to conduct calls and send and receive messages. But if you’re a heavy Skype user (we use it at work for one-on-one communication with fair frequency), you’re gonna have a bad time. This version is admittedly beta, but it’s a perfect example of why, while it may solve some of BlackBerry’s app issues, Android porting isn’t a great long-term solution.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SecondMarket’s CEO Barry Silbert just confirmed that the company had layoffs this morning. From a tipster, we had heard it was as much as one-third of the company’s headcount but SecondMarket says it was less than that.

The rationale? Basically, Silbert said that the company had grown a “bloated cost structure,” from when it had a model that was based on transaction fees. SecondMarket offers liquidity to privately-held companies by letting shareholders sell equity in a manner that’s largely controlled by the companies and compliant with SEC rules.

He called the decision “gut wrenching” and “stressful,” but said that the move would enable the company to have $25 million in cash in the bank and function on a break-even basis.

It’s not the first time the company has had layoffs. They had to let go about 10 percent of staff last year in the wake of the Facebook IPO. The social network had made up a meaningful number of private stock transactions on the platform and when it went out to the public market, the company couldn’t justify certain positions. In spite of the loss of Facebook, SecondMarket’s overall transaction volume even grew a little bit, buoyed by other growth-stage companies that have decided to hold off on IPOs and reward their long-time employees in other ways.

The company seems to be diversifying a bit beyond privately-held tech companies as well. Earlier this week, they convinced a boutique bank named First Advantage to delist itself from public markets and join SecondMarket’s platform.

Here’s Silbert’s statement and the company says it’s not commenting beyond this.

SecondMarket Org Changes
I admit it, I screwed up. While the transition of SecondMarket from a telephone broker of illiquid assets in 2005 to the technology-driven reinvented stock market that we are today has been quite successful, I have done a poor job managing our cost structure during this transition. As a result, there are a number of high quality, hard-working SecondMarket family members who are now looking for their next challenge.

So what went wrong? Reflecting on the past few years, the biggest mistake that I made was treating our cash in the bank and top line revenue as the ultimate gauge of the health of the company. The problem with that approach is that it helped obfuscate the bloated cost structure that we had in place from the period in our history when our model involved collecting a transaction fee by connecting buyers and sellers. Great business, but not predictable, not very scalable and requires substantial infrastructure costs – regardless of transactional volume.

Today, SecondMarket is solely focused on delivering a robust suite of capital, liquidity and communication tools to issuers (private companies, community banks, funds and student loan issuers). With this more scalable, predictable business model, we have decided to double down on what is working, eliminate any unnecessary costs and get our company back to the lean, mean, high performing organization that we once were before hubris took over. Basically, we need to act more like a startup and less like the large, bloated, slow moving organizations that we’re trying to disrupt.

This cost rationalization process has been gut wrenching for me, stressful on my leadership team and, quite frankly, the worst experience of my professional career. Yet I know it is the right thing to do and it is the right time to do it. Emerging from this process will be a company with over $25 million of cash in the bank, an expected break-even bottom line and a rapidly growing list of companies, banks, funds and student loan issuers that are joining SecondMarket. I remain extremely optimistic about SecondMarket’s future and the important role we plan to play in reinventing the stock market and redefining the modern company.

Finally, as I mentioned, there are a number of fine individuals who are now searching for an opportunity. Smart, capable people who would be an asset to any organization. I encourage those of you looking to add talent to consider welcoming them onto your teams.

Thank you for your continued support and encouragement.

Barry Silbert, Founder & CEO

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: David Lieb is co-founder and CEO of Bump, creators of the popular app that lets people share contact information, photos, and other content by bumping their phones together. Bump has been downloaded more than 130 million times.

It’s been hard to ignore the massive shift in the last decade toward simple products. The minimalist design aesthetic pioneered by Dieter Rams in the 1960s on alarm clocks and toasters was popularized by Apple and Google in the 2000s on iPods and search boxes. Soon after, Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users. Startup accelerators and design gurus popped up proselytizing “simplicity!”, and the rapid growth of mobile in the last 5 years has created an almost strict requirement for simple products that work on our new small screens and increasingly small attention spans. Some of the most popular products today (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram) all have simplicity of design and experience at their core.

This Ain’t Is Your Grandma’s Internet

So why did this happen, and why mostly in the last 10 years? Some say that good design simply lags technology and design has finally caught up. Others point to the evolution of our devices and our environments; definitely a major factor.

But I believe the high order bit is even more straightforward: It’s only been in the last 10 years that technology products have reached the mass market. The market size of the entire broadband internet in 2000 was 50 million people; today it is 2 billion people; in a few short years with the shift to mobile it will be more than 5 billion people. This mass market is comprised mostly of people who sit in the middle of the tech adopter bell curve, and since they aren’t product designers, computer programmers, and tech bloggers, they require an even higher degree of simplicity.

“Simple” Isn’t What You Think

But “simplicity” comes in many flavors. We can make products simpler by optimizing along a number of vectors:

• minimize number of steps in the flow
• minimize time required
• minimize number of features
• minimize elements on each page
• ….

But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity. This is an idea that slowly emerged as my company, Bump, tried to understand exactly why Bump is so popular, especially in the non-tech crowd. We believe product builders should first and foremost minimize the Cognitive Overhead of their products, even though it often comes at the cost of simplicity in other areas.

Cognitive Overhead

There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field. The best definition on the web comes from a web designer and engineer in Chicago named David Demaree:

Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc) into meaning and purpose. We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products’ patterns are well practiced.

This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products. Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead, now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another. This isn’t 1999, when your users were sitting in their quiet bedrooms checking out your website on a large monitor while waiting for their Napster downloads to finish; they are out in the real world being bombarded with distractions.

My, What Big Cognitive Overhead You Have 

To illustrate the difference between generic simplicity and cognitive simplicity, let’s look at a couple products that, on the surface, might be regarded as being simple to use, but rank in my book as some of the most cognitively complex products of late.

QR Codes –  Designed to check the simplicity boxes of speed, ubiquity, and small number of steps, QR codes really dropped the ball on cognitive overhead. “So it’s a barcode? No? It’s a website? Ok. But I open websites with my web browser, not my camera. So I take a picture of it? No, I take a picture of it with an app? Which app?”

iCloud / PhotoStream –  When we heard Steve Jobs preach the utopian future where all of our photos and data would be seamlessly synchronized among all our devices, we smelled the Apple simplicity we’d all grown to love. But in practice, iCloud is rife with cognitive overhead — it only backs up your most recent photos, it works on certain select apps but not others, you have to create an icloud.com email account for it to sync your mail and notes but not everything else. Oh, and it works on new iPhone and iPads and Macs running OS X v10.7.4 or later, but not your PC or Android tablet. Try explaining that to your mother.

Cognitive Simplicity Winners

So which products really nail cognitive simplicity? Here are a couple examples:

Shazam — An app that magically hears what song is playing and tells you what it is? Seems pretty complex, and what’s happening under the covers actually is. But Shazam does a phenomenal job keeping the user’s cognitive burden low. They force people to press a button to “start listening”, show real-time feedback that shows the app is hearing the sounds, and it buzzes when a result is found. Shazam could have made the flow faster or fewer taps, but it would come at the cost of cognitive simplicity.

Nintendo Wii –  In most ways, the Wii was far more complicated than its game console peers in 2006. It used accelerometers and IR blasters and detectors that required setup and calibration, and it was a departure from the mental model most people had for video games. But the payoff was a system with low cognitive overhead — you swing the controller to the left, and the little avatar on screen swings his racquet to the left. And voila, toddlers and grandparents alike suddenly became gamers.

Could Go Either Way?

Finally, a couple of my personal favorite daily-use products that could be argued either way. What do you think?

Dropbox –  I love Dropbox. All of my stuff is in my Dropbox; Dropbox is on all my devices; so all my stuff is on all my devices. Pretty cognitively simple. But there are certainly some potential cognitive hurdles, or, perhaps better put, cognitive activation energy required before reaching the low cognitive overhead state. Is Dropbox a folder on your desktop or a cloud-storage website? Oh and it’s a program to install on my computer too? When do things get backed up? Did it work?

Facebook –  Facebook started out with very low cognitive overhead — it was a digital version of the paper facebooks that already commanded high engagement and retention of college kids. Question: Has Facebook’s cognitive overhead increased or decreased as it has expanded to the mass market? What cognitive hurdles have arisen recently that weren’t present in the past? Should this worry Facebook?

How To make Cognitively Simple Products 

Make people work more, not less.

Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully. (Bump puts the user in the middle of the flow quite physically. While there were other ways to build a scalable solution without the physical bump, it’s very effective for helping people internalize exactly what’s going on.)

Give people real-time feedback.

If your user has to wonder, “So, did it work?”, you’ve failed. Walk people through using your product like a magician leads the audience through an illusion. Point out the steps along the way, or whatever magic your product is providing could be lost to the user.

Slow down your product.

We’ve all heard stories of Google’s relentless quest for search result speed, but sometimes you need to let your user understand and appreciate what your service is doing for them. Studies have shown that intentionally slowing down results on travel search websites can actually increase perceived user value — people realize and appreciate that the service is doing a lot of work searching all the different travel options on their behalf.

How To Know If You’ve Succeeded

Test on the young, old, …and drunk.

The very young and the very old are even more sensitive to cognitive overhead, as their brains aren’t accustomed to the sort of logical leaps our products sometimes require. Grandparents and children make great cognitive overhead detectors.

When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation. In fact, while building Bump 3.0, we literally took teams of designers and engineers to bars in San Francisco and Palo Alto and watched people use Bump, tweaking the product to accommodate.

Ask your users/customers to repeat what your product does and how it works.

Let people use your product, and then ask them to tell you what it does. They’ll think you are crazy for not knowing already, but what you hear can point to cognitive hurdles you’ve missed. One technique that scales that we use at Bump is to show a one question survey to a small fraction of users inside the app right after they are done bumping, asking “What is Bump for?” or “How do you use Bump?” The answers help us eliminate cognitive hurdles that remain.

There’s never been a time when cognitive simplicity matters more. As the mobile wave continues over the next 5 years, the world will see arguably the most rapid deployment of any new technology in our history. Products that are truly mass market will need to simultaneously target the Silicon Valley early adopter and the kid riding on the back of a motor scooter in Thailand. Which products will win, and which will lose? My money is on those that focus on cognitive simplicity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hackathons are to developers what state championship games are to high school quarterbacks. The pressure is on, time is running out, and in the case of the Disrupt NY Hackathon, there’s never been a better audience of peers, judges, and media to impress.

That’s why we’re incredibly lucky to have some of the best platforms in the industry coming to New York to run workshops on how you can stand on the shoulders of their giant APIs and build something truly awesome.

More Hackathon spots are now available. Register here.

If you participate in the Hackathon (that is – you make a hack and present it on stage), you’re granted a general admission ticket to Disrupt. Yep, the same one that costs $2,995 and gives you access to all three days of Disrupt and the after parties.

We have a full roster of API sponsors and partners putting up a large number of prizes for the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They include: Microsoft BizSpark, Wrigley Energy Gum, Box, CrunchBase, Exadel Appery.io, GM OnStar, Microsoft SkyDrive, NewAer, Pearson, Samsung, Visa, Yammer and Volusion.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon developers will be on hand to demonstrate how to leverage and simplify using AWS. More info can be found here.

Box

Go beyond storing files with the Box API. Our API provides access to all of the file management, collaboration, and sharing features used and loved by over 92% of the Fortune 500.

Our workshop will introduce developers to the Box API and show them how to take advantage of several of our most popular endpoints, including social features such as commenting, collaborating, and liking as well as enterprise-level features like user event logging and user management. Attendees will get to see a live Box API application built from scratch. Beta access to several exciting, new APIs will also be provided to attendees of the workshop.

Evernote

Want to develop an app with the power to never forget? Join Karolyn from Evernote to get first hand advice, hints and tips on how to use the Evernote Cloud API. With the Cloud API, your application can create, search, read, update and delete notes, which of course are then synchronized across all devices the user has connected to Evernote. When you access the Local API, your application is interacting with a local Evernote client such as Evernote for Mac or Evernote for Android – awesome for pulling in someone’s digital brain and mashing it up with other services to create a personally relevant, rich and insightful app with ease.

Facebook

Facebook’s new mobile SDKs make it easier than ever for app developers to implement social features directly into their apps. To learn and get your tough questions answered, join Bear as he and Fred, Abhinav, and Sarah get hands-on and help you leverage the world’s most popular mobile app.

Foursquare

Join New York’s favorite startup, Foursquare, as they share insights on how to leverage their powerful API and deep data set to make your hack location aware. David from Foursquare will be joined by Akshay, Anna and Marcie to show you how to integrate with Foursquare’s API to access to all of the data used by the Foursquare mobile applications, and, in some cases, even more. Your users can check in, view their history, see where their friends are, create tips and lists, search for and learn more about venues, and access specials and recommendations.

The New York Times

Imagine having all the news that’s fit to print available at your fingertips! That’s what the recently released The New York Times’ APIs gives developers, providing easy access to the Time’s archives of high quality information. Join James from the New York Times Company and learn how easy it is to access, search and distribute Times content. Including articles back to 1981, over a dozen APIs provide rich access to content including Best Sellers, Movie Reviews, Real Estate and the Semantic API for Times tags and topics.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Launched last June, Beachfront Media‘s Beachfront Builder platform was designed to allow video producers to quickly roll out apps across a number of devices. Those apps would have custom skins and could even serve ads, with videos streamed out either via the YouTube API or by connecting to creator’s own content management system. In the time since then, it’s gotten a few content producers on board, most notably YouTube network Big Frame.

The Beachfront platform basically enables creators to engage directly with their audiences through their own branded apps, without having their videos hidden within the broader YouTube experiences. And it helps them do so across a wide range of devices all at once. Rather than having to individually develop apps for iPhone, iPad, as well as a whole bunch of Android phones and tablets and phablets, and a bunch of connected TV devices as well.

Using Beachfront Builder not only speeds their time to market, but it also gives them the ability to test out different ways of displaying and distributing their videos. In addition to building apps for individual channels, they can highlight certain topics or characters, allowing them to see which videos and categories viewers engage with most. And, if popular, they can easily break those out into their own apps as well.

Those apps can be customized with branded skins and can also be monetized. Beachfront customers can add video ads, banners, and the ability to buy merch — all going beyond their traditional YouTube ad monetization.

That’s attracted interest from some big YouTube networks, most notably Big Frame, which is using Beachfront Builder to build video apps for a couple of its channels. By teaming with Beachfront, they’ve rolled out multiplatform experiences for urban lifestyle channel Forefront.tv, as well as its brainy female channel Wonderly. For both, they’re providing the ability to display channel videos on the web, mobile and tablet devices, and connected TV platforms. It’s also being used for multiplatform distribution of Maker Studios’ Epic Rap Battles of History, as well as getting Plum.tv onto like, connected TVs.

Beachfront Media is kind of the successor to video search and discovery platform MeFeedia. Launched in 2007, that company is now working to help video providers get onto more devices. Because everyone loves devices. And video.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch