VentureBeat

DEMO: Ringful provides personalized healthcare service through your mobile phone

Ringful provides healthcare services and preventive care through your smartphone. The company’s platorm, previewed at the DEMOfall 09 conference, lets hospitals, clinics and insurers build health-monitoring apps on consumer cell phones.

It offers services such as monitoring patients via their phones and delivering data from the patient to the caregiver. The service can thus reduce visits to doctors and hospitals and keep costs lower. Patients can upload data through the phone to their doctors via...

New asthma app: Track your wheezing and coughing in Google Health

Ringful, a company making a series of health-related applications for the iPhone, has just launched one that tracks your asthma symptoms — and it lets you track it all in an online account at Google Health.

It’s another sign that enterprise mobile apps could come on strong in the future; called Asthma Journal, the application is the first app integration with Google Health. It is also just the latest in a series of applications that...

MobileBeat: Seven startups making cool mobile apps

The second half of the startup competition at our MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco is starting now. This morning, a group of companies presented a range of mobile services; now, seven more companies (selected from hundreds of applicants) are presenting a number of cool mobile applications.

Here are the companies, what they do, and the news they’re announcing on-stage:

Aloqa tells you about events and friends around you, based on your location. Unlike many...

Roundup: Google Health’s profiles, Oodle’s Facebook marketplace, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Google Health lets you share profiles — With this feature, users can invite family members, doctors, and other trusted folks to view their medical records and personal health information.

Oodle launches new version of Facebook marketplace –  Inside Facebook describes the new marketplace as more social and conversational. Facebook announced it was handing its classifieds service to Oodle in December.

Why Intel will let TSMC make its Atom processors...

Appointment-scheduling startup ZocDoc gets $3M from Khosla

ZocDoc, the startup that helps users schedule doctors’ appointments online, has raised $3 million from Khosla Ventures.

The New York startup launched last September at the TechCrunch40 conference, and chief executive Cyrus Massoumi says growth has been climbing at an average rate of around 50 percent per month since then, both in terms of users and doctors. There are now 90,000 appointments available on the site, and 35,000 patients have used ZocDoc in the last...

Roundup: IT spend trending down, Google’s next move, our many privacy issues, and more

Spending in IT trends downward — Growth in spending is slipping from 7 percent to 5 percent this year, according to a Goldman Sachs report summarized on CNET. Cost cutting measures are getting the most new investment, with server virtualization topping the list.

Google may start auto or music service — Having successfully predicted that Google would start Google Health and a virtual world, which turned out to be...

Health sites get their own ad network with HealthSTAT On-Demand

With the intensifying race between different ad networks, as well the growth of specialized networks like Glam, I guess it was time for health sites to get their own ad service. That’s what search engine Healthline Networks is betting, anyway — it’s launching an ad network called HealthSTAT On-Demand.

The idea behind HealthSTAT is to go beyond keyword targeting. Healthline has built a taxonomy of different “health concepts”, so that...

Roundup: Supreme Court’s new patent ruling, gas prices at record, multiple services give up the ghost, and more

Supreme Court gives supply chains protection from patents — In a notable ruling today, the Supreme Court has ruled that patent holders can’t demand royalties from supply chain customers who bought products from license-holders further up the chain. The decision should help reduce “patent exhaustion” in the system, not to mention the overall level of silliness.

Gas hits record $4 average, but cleantech may not always benefit — Average...

Google Health launches (no, really)

Updated

Google Health, the search giant’s site for sharing medical records and finding health-related services, has gone live.

There have been plenty of false alarms on this front — most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the site would launch in February, but Google quashed that rumor. This time, however, you can log in and see the site for yourself.

With Google Health, users can build a personal health profile, import their records from...

The Health 2.0 glut, and how one startup adapts

The Health 2.0 movement, as I’ve noted before, makes some big claims about the Internet’s power to transform the relationships between patients and doctors, hospitals, insurers and each other. Some of that is undoubtedly true, and there’s a fascinating amount of innovation going on in this area– helped along by a recent torrent of venture capital.

There’s a downside to the movement, though, and that’s a bizarre oversupply of sites that are all doing slight...

Google Health has arrived — except maybe not

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will announce its long-awaited online health service featuring “personal health records” today. A closer reading of that story, however — bolstered by a timely CNET piece — suggests that Google will simply preview its service at a healthcare-IT trade show now underway in Orlando.

A preview is better than nothing, of course. But if that’s all Google has planned today, it’s really not much of a launch. We unpack the...

Google Health is here — or is it?

(UPDATED: See below.)

Well, the WSJ says so in this somewhat breathless report that states Google will announce its long-awaited personal health-record service today.

My first thought was that the announcement was timed to get Google on the record in advance of the Health2.0 “Spring Fling” conference in San Diego next week, which will feature lots of talk about the role of the Internet in improving healthcare. Another possibility is that Google is pulling...

Google Health and its Cleveland testbed

The impending — or so it’s seemed — launch of Google Health has spurred any number of comparisons, invidious and otherwise, to Microsoft’s flashier but ultimately disappointing launch of HealthVault last October.

Now that Google has finally announced its first big health project with the Cleveland Clinic, though, it’s far from clear exactly how its platform is going to address nagging privacy issues and the fundamental question of how much control patients will have over...

Google Health’s Cleveland pilot program — and the nagging questions it doesn’t come close to answering

So Google Health has finally made its first formal announcement — not a splashy rollout along the lines of Microsoft’s HealthVault (see our coverage), but a limited — and closed to the public — testbed launched in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.

Here’s what we know about the project: The Cleveland Clinic, which already has a sophisticated electronic medical-records system serving some 100,000 patients, will allow 1,500 to 10,000 of them to sync up their...

Roundup: Google to float cellphone towers in air? Google to buy Ukraine portal?

Here’s the latest action:

1. Google sending balloons up to act as cellphone towers?
2. Google to sell ads on third-party sites’ Web videos
3. Google acquiring Ukranian portal for $100M?
4. Google gives patients control of online medical records
5. EU invests $22 million in BitTorrent client for TV
6. EBay boycott continues
7. Intel, Sun, Nvidia and AMD named in patent lawsuit
8. Sharper Image, electronics...

Google Health launching soon?

Trust the reliable folks over at Google Blogoscoped to unearth a login page for the long-awaited Google Health service before it actually launches. Neither the login nor any of the links on the page seem to work, but it’s another tantalizing glimpse at what Google may soon be unveiling.

It’s worth noting that Marissa Mayer, who took over the Google Health project after Adam Bosworth unceremoniously decamped to launch his own health-related startup, said...

Gene Security Network aims to bolster IVF genetic tests

(UPDATED: See below.)

Many infertile couples undergoing in-vitro fertilization rely on genetic screening of their fertilized embryos to improve their chances of delivering a healthy baby. But that technique, known as preimplantation genetic screening, has recently taken some hits on the scientific level, with one recent study finding that it not only fails to improve fertility rates, but may actually worsen the odds for older women. (See this WSJ story for details.)

For one thing,...