Guest post on Pulse + Signal

by admin on July 2, 2009

robot_doctorIf you’ve been following the eHealth blogosphere over the last few years, then you will surely know the fantastic Pulse + Signal 0 blog written by Andre Blackman  . Today we were given the opportunity to write a guest post and so we decided to focus on the role of robotics in telemedicine. There’s a lot of action going on in this field, so if you’d like to find out about some of the latest advances, go over to Pulse +Signal and read “The Robot Will See You Now  “.

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598413_99638977Today, TechCrunch 0 came out with an excellent article about the high level of click fraud on Facebook, the latest example of just how broken the traditional online advertising model really is. Michael Arrington   gives an excellent summary of how online advertising click fraud  is perpetrated showing exactly why this form of customer acquisition makes little to no sense for advertisers :

“Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor. The search engines fight this via obvious and not so obvious means, and an arms race begins. To win you need access to a lot of good IP addresses and not get too greedy. And like inflation and the government, a little click fraud is tolerated by Google and others. It keeps the dollars flowing”.

He goes on to explain that in Facebook’s particular case “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI. As advertisers leave the system in disgust, prices go down and the people left win”. Google’s and other ad platforms are not immune to this same tactic.

The point of all this is actually really simple, it makes no sense as a seller/advertiser to pay an ad platform for a click (CPC). The only time an advertiser should pay the referring party is when a product or service is actually purchased by the user i.e. Cost Per Sale (CPS) model. This is why we like e-commerce widgets so much, since sellers know that there is no way they can be cheated because if there is no sale, there is no payment. We predict that within 5 years traditional banner and text CPC advertising will be all but extinct and will be replaced by transactional banners.

For the complete gory details of the click fraud on Facebook, Michael’s article 0 is well worth the read.

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Blogspot users, switch to WordPress today

June 22, 2009

Last week TechCrunch 0 ran a story analyzing the statistics on all the major blogging platforms. Still in the lead is Google’s Blogger software, but TechCrunch notes that although “millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than [...]

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Adgregate CEO explains the distributed e-commerce concept

June 18, 2009

We just came across this excellent video interview in which Henry Wong, CEO of Adgregate Markets, explains in very simple terms the “distributed e-commerce” concept. Although still relatively new, distributed commerce will be making a huge impact over the next few years as people adjust their online shopping habits.
Funnily enough, Adgregate got started at TechCrunch50 [...]

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AirStrip Technologies redefines possibilities of mHealth over iPhone

June 8, 2009

AistripTechnologies just gave a stunning technology presentation at the Apple’s WWDC Conference by showing off the possibilities that the new iPhone OS 3.0 provides them. What they presented was a demo of their FDA approved flagship product, Airstrip OB  , which provides the ability for patients to transmit data measured by medical devices directly to [...]

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Alensa article in Pharma Magazine

May 7, 2009

A couple of months ago I sent in an article to Pharma Magazine  , the leading B2B pharma industry magazine with over 150′000 readers, titled “Transformational Internet Technologies for Pharmacies” which explores some ideas on how pharmacies can take advantage of eHealth, Web 2.0 and e-commerce technologies to improve both their customer service and increase [...]

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SolarNetOne - effective internet connections for rural telehealth

April 28, 2009

SolarNetOne is a hardware system developed by GNUveau 6 that functions as a rugged, solar-powered, Linux web server with optional SAT-link broadband connection that provides “internet cafe” type services to rural villages that otherwise have no internet or mobile phone coverage. ALENSA has recently partnered with GNUveau to distribute this system since we believe that [...]

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First criminal prosecution of a telemedicine doctor

April 20, 2009

A few weeks ago we wrote about Christian Hageseth  , the first doctor to stand trial in connection with the practice of telemedicine. The details of the case suggest that Mr. Hageseth committed a number of legal and judgemental errors while providing care to a patient in another state. Firstly, he provided a prescription to [...]

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Mobile phones hold huge potential for improving public health

April 20, 2009

Here is an excellent slide-show on mHealth by Andre Blackman   entitled “The Advance of mHealth” which he recently presented at North Carolina Division of Public Health. It’s a nice introduction to mHealth concepts, and the potential that mobile phone based health applications can have on public health. The presentation highlights FrontlineSMS 3 and a [...]

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Microsoft Health Common User Interface

April 20, 2009

On its MSCUI.net 0 website, Microsoft presents a number of interesting ideas around the need for standardizing the graphical user interfaces of medical applications around best practices in complex data visualization. Apart from just showcasing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, the project seeks to “enable a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications” which [...]

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