How a person feels has a lot to do with how they sleep and how they wake up. We all know how traumatizing it can be when the alarm clock rings just in the middle of a sleep cycle. That’s where a niftly little application on on the iPhone called Sleep Cycle comes in. According to The Next Web’s review of the application, Sleep Cycle “analyses your sleep patterns throughout the night and wakes you just at the optimum moment when it’s sure that you are in a relatively light sleep. Sleep Cycle produces a graphical analysis of your previous night’s sleep.”
Using the app couldn’t be easier, you just place your iPhone face down under the bedsheet next to your pillow and fall asleep. The app will then wake you with a gentle alarm sound at the correct phase of your sleep cycle, within a 30 minute window around your ideal wake-up time.
This app sounds perfect and I personally can’t wait to try it out.

Great news here in Zurich; we’ve just launched our NextWidgets transactional banners in Switzerland. These are the first ever shopping widgets to be used in Switzerland and hopefully represent the start of a move towards more performance based online marketing by brands and merchants. Read the full story on our NextWidgets blog.

Health 2.0 Announcement

On the 6-7th April, the Health 2.0 conference will be held in Paris for its inaugural European event. After three years of amazing success in the US, the conference is branching out and taking a look at what the European eHealth scene has to offer.

Health 2.0 conference has built its reputation on focusing on the latest technologies driving eHealth forward but there are plenty of opportunities for networking also.

It’s with great pride that we can announce that Alensa has been selected to present our NextWidgets shopping widgets product at this event. You can read more on this on our NextWidgets blog.

You can also follow all the latest news on Health 2.0 Europe on Twitter by following @health20paris and #Health2eu

Everyone knows that competition within the technology sector is fast and furious. Especially internet based businesses, where investment requirements are comparatively low, suffer from “hot today, outdated tomorrow” sydrome. However a few companies have recognized that there is more to building long-term competitiveness than just the technology itself, and that secret ingredient is corporate culture. It’s something that takes proper planning and hard work to implement, but if done successfully, can be the determining factor between long term success and failure. Over on the NextWidgets Blog, we’ve posted a few videos of Zappos, the clear leader in customer centric corporate culture on the internet. Check out the vids and let us know what you think about the importance of corporate culture and what it means to you.

One of the coolest demo’s at this year’s Health 2.o conference was Microsoft ‘My Health Info‘ portal. Microsoft has been doing a lot of work on user interface design for healthcare and it really shows in this demo video recorded by Chris McIntyre. I haven’t seen many mentions of this product on the web so far, but personally I think it was one of the most elegant pieces of software on display at the conference.

Microsoft “My Health Info” Demo at Health 2.0 2009 from chris mcintyre on Vimeo.

The current conventional wisdown is that the iPhone is so far ahead of the competition in terms of usability and number of applications available that it’s assured to be the smartphone market leader within a few years. But, according to a recent Vator.tv article, if Apple isn’t careful, history could repeat itself once again.

The year was1983 and Apple had just launched Lisa, the first personal computer to have a graphical user interface (GUI). Over the coming years the GUI operating system was copied by Microsoft which launched their own product under the Windows brand. Although Apple’s operating system was technologically far superior to Windows, it was Microsoft which quickly dominated the market. The main reason, and largest difference between the two, was that Microsoft understood that to gain market share you had to enable third party vendors to license and use the software for their own hardware systems. Apple, on the other hand, felt that to achieve maximum usability, they had to control their operating system completely and therefore didn’t allow any third parties to build their own computers with the Apple OS. This difference led to a far greater distribution power for Windows and nearly to Apple’s demise as their market share dwindled into single digit territory.

Fast forward to today, a miraculous resurrection and millions of iPods and iPhones later, Apple seems still not to have learnt the lesson. As the Vator.tv article points out, the iPhone operating system is still very tightly controlled by Apple which doesn’t allow any third parties to license and install the operating system on their own hardware. Contrast that to Google’s Android mobile operating system (the modern day Microsoft in this story), which was built on open standards (Linux) and developed by an entire consortium of organizations (the Open Handset Alliance), and you start getting a sense that Apple could once again lose out to a copycat product. The Gartner study that Vator.tv quotes, predicts that already by 2012, Apple will have lost out to the Android OS in terms of market share. Today the iPhone controls anywhere between 10 - 13% of the market and this is expected to increase only moderately while the Android OS is expected to grow from its current 1 - 2% up to at least 14 - 15% in the same time frame.

We at Alensa really love the innovation and design aesthetic that Apple brings to the table, so let’s hope that Apple realizes the mistake before it’s too late and finally embraces a more open business model after more than two decades of closed-door policy.

Have you ever wanted a device that can automagically track the distance you walk or run each day and even track how much you sleep. And what if that device could easily upload all that data into attractive web reports that would help you get an overview of your lifestyle. Well two new devices, the FitBit and the DirectLife, are designed to do just that.

FitBit is a brand new device that tracks a wearer’s “calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality”. The device costs USD 99.- and will start shipping out at the end of October ‘09 in the US. One of its very cool features is that you can connect a basestation to your PC, and every time your FitBit comes within 15ft of the basestation, the data is automatically sent over a wireless connection through your computer and onto your own personal website where you can track all the statistics about your lifestyle habits.

The second device, the DirectLife, is also based on 3D accelorometer technology and can also easily be clipped onto any piece of clothing. The cool thing about this device is it tracks your base level of fitness over an initial period and then incrementally increases your targets for the following weeks to motivate you to improve your fitness over the long-run.

Both of these devices seem perfectly suited for anyone interested in keeping track of their lifestyle and being able to monitor that data over a web based reporting function. The FitBit may have an advantage over the DirectLife in that it tracks your sleeping patterns as well, although we love the DirectLife’s ability to help your improve your fitness goals over time. Here’s a FastCompany story about what it’s like to use the DirectLife. If you have practical experience of using either of these devices, please let us know.

In comparison to last year’s excellent discussion of mHealth applications in the developing world, there was somewhat of a scarcity of discussion around the topic at this year’s Health 2.0. Except for the presentation by SMSMedic (pls follow their Hope Phones call to donate old phones), I didn’t see any other mention of the topic. In fact I was rather shocked to hear Maggie Mahar, a panelist on the “Can Health 2.0 Make Health Care More Affordable?” session, proclaim that “Health 2.0 is not useful for the poor”.

We strongly beg to differ. Not only are mobiles phones used by services like SMSMedic to provide healthcare, but they are used by many other organizations to improve the lives of millions of people in developing nations without using what we consider the normal way of accessing web services i.e. PC or Laptop screeens, or in the very worst case, our iPhones.

Green screen mobile phones can in fact still offer important services to the poor, from banking to paying bills and even communicating with large groups.

Here is a video presentation of Vodafon’es M-PESA service which I believe illustrates the point very well.

And here is a video about SMSGupHub, a twitter like service in India that runs entirely over mobile phones, and has accumulated 20 million users over just two years.

Clearly the poor do not need huge flat-panel screens and the latest pentium chips to make software applications work well for their lives. And it may just be that these ‘poor’ countries will end up much more advanced than the developed world in terms of what they are able to do with mobile technology and the business models around consuming applications through mobile devices. I for one, am not able to do my banking or pay my bills in Switzerland through my mobile phone, while people in Kenya are doing that on a daily basis.

Many thanks to everyone who came to see our presentation of NextWidgets at Health 2.0 Conference this year. The response from publishers was really great and I’m so happy to have gotten a chance to meet all of you as well as so many of the people that i’ve been communicating with over twitter for the past year.

Of course the maximum thanks go to Matthew Holt, Indu and the entire team at Health 2.0 for making a really fabulous event again this year. The content of the conference was, I believe, even more meaningful than last year, with a greater emphasis on patients through the very excellent “The Patient is in” session featuring Jen McCabe (Contagion Health), Trisha Torrey (Every Patient’s Advocate), Gilles Frydman (ACOR), Esther Dyson (EDVenture), Susannah Fox (Pew Internet & American Life Project) and of course the very insightful “ePatient” Dave deBronkart (The New Life of ePatient Dave).

Another great panel was “Payers and Health 2.0″, where there was some great discussion around what health insurers can do to help the US along towards a more progressive healthcare system. There was plenty of heated debate in this session with some of the insurers feeling slightly “demonized” (what a surprise

Right at the end of the conference the “Cats and Dogs” session really stood out as a highlight, withthe fantastically comical Jonathan Bush of athenahealth exchanging some great debate with Glen Tullman of Allscripts about who should be setting the standards and certifications for ‘meaningful use’ of electronic health records.

So overall another fantastic Health 2.0 Conference and I can’t wait until April ‘10 for Health 2.0 in Paris.

We’re just about packed and ready to make the long trip over to San Francisco for next week’s Health 2.0 conference where we shall be presenting our NextWidgets product in the “Health 2.0 Around the World” breakout panel at 3:30pm on the 7th of October. Please come down to see us and learn more on how we are revolutionizing the way Health 2.0 websites are monetizing their traffic. This session will be particularly interesting to health content publishers, bloggers and forum or social network owners which until now have relied on Adsense as their main revenue stream. See you there !