VentureBeat

Social marketing is generally a matter of attracting like-minded people and aiming advertising at them. Getting at disparate and often amorphous groups who nevertheless still have something in common is quite a bit trickier, though — which explains the genesis of Disaboom.com, a new social-networking/marketing site aimed at bringing together people with disabilities, a group every bit as diverse as the general U.S. population.

(For a less ambitious, but perhaps more feasible, attempt to harness social networking on behalf of people with disabilities, see our discussion of Enurgi below.)

The site, featured in this NYT article yesterday, aims to draw together people from all socioeconomic backgrounds who happen to have some form of physical or mental disability. Although associations for people with disabilities exist, they have tended to attract only a tiny fraction of the 50 million Americans that the NYT says make up the “disability community.”

Disaboom, based in Lone Tree, Colo., has set some ambitious goals. The company wants to attract more than one million unique visitors each month by February, despite the fact that it just officially launched its site a month ago, and then plans to double that again over the coming year. Admittedly, it’s already attracted some serious backing: Its early advertisers include Netflix, J&J and Avis. (The NYT also lists Cricket Communications, a prepaid cellular-service company with really spotty coverage.)

(Oddly enough, Disaboom is also a public company, having offered its stock back in April — see its SEC filings here. Disaboom, however, didn’t raise any funds in the offering, which instead appears to have served entirely as a way for existing shareholders to unload their holdings onto public investors. Those shareholders sold 6.3 million shares at a price of 50 cents apiece; according to the company’s SB-2 filing with the SEC, those individuals had mostly just purchased their shares a month earlier in a private placement. The company currently has a market capitalization of $41 million.)

As for the site itself, Disaboom offers what looks to be a varied array of resources for people with disabilities, such as basic health information, lifestyle articles, a video-sharing section, chat rooms, online forums and the like. A month in, however, members still appear to be a bit few and far between — the classified section lists only nine items for sale (and zero events, auto sales, medical equipment, real estate, miscellaneous or free/trade items), only 12 members were online when I checked in a little while ago, and the chat room isn’t exactly in full swing. As for the forum — well, the statistics can speak for themselves (I’ve included some representative advertisers as well):

That’s a long way from a million visitors a month, even when you consider that only a fraction of any site’s visitors are actually going to participate in a forum like this one. Meanwhile, the social-networking aspect of the site seems to still be in its infancy; I signed up for an account and, once in, my only choices consisted of editing my bio, writing or editing an onsite blog, and managing my “favorites,” which turns out to be what other sites would consider “friends.” But finding other people to friend — sorry, to “favorite” — looks fairly awkward, as the only way to pick individuals out of the crowd appears to involve reading their blog posts or visiting the forum.

In other words, Facebook has relatively little to worry about here. It was also striking to me that in a half-hour or so of surfing through the site, I only came across one ad from a major advertiser — an Avis spot tucked away on an inside page about cerebral palsy. For the most part, the ads mostly appeared to pitch specialty products for those with disabilities, such as wheelchairs, rehabilitative services and easy-opening grips for doorknobs, not mass-market products.

So Disaboom, while clearly well-meaning, comes up a bit short. That might not just be an execution problem, either, since the site depends upon the notion that people with disabilities really want to think of themselves as a single community in the first place. Outside of political movements such as those that produced the Americans with Disabilities Act, that appears to be an unproven, if not largely untested, idea. In which case Disaboom may have a tougher road to travel than it first appeared.

By contrast, the startup Enurgi aims squarely at a primary need of the elderly or those with significant disabilities — finding professional caregivers. Essentially, caregivers — who must supply proof of their licenses — and those in need of care register and establish profiles, then begin searching for one another. Enurgi plans to track these relationships, schedule sessions and manage payments, even offering tools that can, for instance, determine how much service existing insurance will cover. The company envisions charging a fraction of all transactions that move through the site. It may not be anywhere near as ambitious as Disaboom, but since it addresses an existing and pressing need, it may find moving forward a whole lot simpler. (Hat tip: Techcrunch.)

(UPDATED: See below.)

Cambridge, Mass.-based Sermo, an online social network with a twist, offers physicians the opportunity to ask for and offer advice free of charge. The catch: Well-heeled investors can pay to listen in.

Sermo, which just raised $26.7 million in a third funding round (details below), offers doctors the opportunity to share, discuss and vote on the importance of each others’ medical observations. The intriguing notion here is that doctors are likely to identify emerging trends in disease, treatment methods, drug side effects and so forth simply by sharing their local knowledge with one another. The company aims to maintain a high-quality conversation by restricting full membership to licensed doctors.

But what the company bills as a way to advance public health by harnessing this social knowledge is also an exercise in hard-edged capitalism. For $100,000 to $500,000 a year, Wall Street firms are also welcome to beam into the online discussion in order to discover fresh sources of medical intelligence. These outsiders won’t be able to identify the participating docs, but can pose questions to the community and of course will be free to base investment decisions on whatever they learn, such as whether a given drug seems safe and possibly even whether an experimental drug seems to be working in clinical trials.

Complicating matters is that doctors aren’t asked to disclose conflicts of interest that might call their judgments into question. The doctors themselves are also eligible for bonuses from Sermo for postings or votes that are deemed valuable, although only after the particular topic has been closed. The company does eventually plan to give government officials, academics and other healthcare companies — read, insurers, drug companies and hospitals — access to the network as well.

In May, the American Medical Association joined the party, announcing a partnership with Sermo under which the AMA can post questions to doctors in exchange for including “Discuss on Sermo” links in its print and Web publications. The move attracted a certain amount of criticism at the time — see, for instance, some comments in this AP story and this post from Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman, who in a rare departure from his usual equanimity denounced it as a “new way to exploit docs.”

Investors in the latest financing round include Legg Mason, Longworth Venture Partners and Softbank Capital. A spokeswoman for Sermo said Legg Mason contributed $25 million, while the other investors made up the $1.7 million difference.

There’s a description of how the service works here, and here’s a screenshot, too:

UPDATE: Added screenshot and a link to how Sermo works, slightly revised the description of the service and fixed the link to the AP story.

UPDATE REDUX: Sermo’s spokeswoman confirmed details of the funding round, so I’ve rewritten those sections and further refined a description of the service.

(UPDATED at 3:10pm PT: See below.)

Featured companies: Agendia, EndoGastric Solutions, FlowCo, Gentris, MedManage Systems, ParagonDx, Presidio Pharmaceuticals, Xoova

Presidio Pharma raises $26M for viral treatments — San Francisco’s Presidio Pharmaceuticals, a biotech developing new antiviral drugs, raised $26 million in a second funding round. Investors included Panorama Capital, Baker Brothers Investments, Bay City Capital, Ventures West Capital, Nexus Medical Partners, Sagamore Bioventures, George Rathmann Fund and Peninsula Overview Partners.

Presidio’s lead drug candidates take aim at HIV, hepatitis C and other viral infections. None of its drugs have entered human tests yet.

EndoGastric Solutions pulls in $30M for “transoral” surgeries — Redmond, Wash.-based EndoGastric Solutions, a medical-device maker developing products for incision-free gastrointestinal surgery, raised $30 million in a fourth funding round. Investors included DeNovo Ventures, Chicago Growth Partners, MPM Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Foundation Medical Partners, and Oakwood Medical Investors.

In March, EndoGastric received FDA clearance for a device it calls the StomaphyX, a disposable surgical instrument that can be passed into the stomach or the intestines via a patient’s mouth. Although EndoGastric isn’t too clear on exactly what the StomaphyX is for — the company says it’s for use in “endoluminal transoral tissue approximation and ligation” — the device appears to be a sort of staple gun that can fasten together parts of the stomach or intestines. EndoGastric says the device can be used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease, and its Web site appears to suggest that it can also perform bariatric surgery from inside the stomach as a treatment for obesity.

Agendia gets $34M for gene-based diagnostics — Amsterdam-based Agendia, a developer of gene-based diagnostic tests for cancer, raised $34 million (€25 million) in a fourth funding round. Investors included ING, Van Herk Biotech, Gilde Healthcare Partners and Global Life Science Ventures.

Agendia, founded in 2003, sells diagnostic tests that assess the “activity level” of various genes in tumor tissue, a technique that allows it to predict whether, for instance, a woman has a high or a low risk of seeing her breast cancer return. That test, sold under the brand name MammaPrint, was approved in the U.S. in February. Agendia has developed similar tests for identifying unknown cancers and for assessing the prognosis of colon cancer.

MedManage Systems, a drug-sampling service provider, receives $5M — MedManage Systems, a Bothell, Wash., company that helps drug manufacturers push free samples into the hands of doctors in order to “build brands,” raised $5 million of a planned $10 million financing, PE Hub reports, citing a regulatory filing. Investors include Lilly Ventures, Prism VentureWorks, QuestMark Partners and Versant Ventures.

At heart, MedManage’s business seems to be a consulting service that uses a mix of technology, data analysis and old-fashioned legwork make it easy for physicians to hand out free drug samples, which the MedManage site calls “a proven marketing strategy” for “influenc[ing] physician prescribing behavior.”

The company’s Web site is larded up with all manner of marketing buzzwords, but it’s actually fascinating to read through. That’s because most folks in the pharmaceutical industry would never admit that drug samples are part of a sophisticated marketing program aimed at getting doctors used to particular brands and patients to request them by name. (Large drug companies would prefer you to believe that they give away free drugs out of the kindness of their heart and sympathy for the people who can’t afford their products.) MedManage, however, makes no bones about using samples to push particular drugs. So for a peek behind the curtain, check out MedManage’s description of what it calls its “OmniSample Solution” — it’s very illuminating.

Xoova raises $2.5M for medical social-networking — Santa Monica, Calif.-based Xoova, a social network for doctors and patients, has raised $2.5 million in a first funding round last year, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Spark Capital Partners provided the funding.

Xoova allows physicians to post profiles of themselves online, much the way Facebook and similar services do for the general population. Xoova CEO Tommy McGloin estimates that 20,000 doctors have already done so, a number he hopes will grow to 100,000 by the time he begins raising an expected $5 million round next year.

Consumers can search the doctor profiles and, in some cases, can make appointments online if the doctor has signed up for a free Xoova service. McGloin said the company intends to roll out new features in coming months, although the one cited by VentureWire — allowing patients to both book and cancel appointments online — sounds awfully mundane.

Cardiac-device maker FlowCo raises $250K — FlowCo, an Indianapolis medical-device developer, raised $250,000 in a seed financing. BioCrossroads provided the funding. FlowCo, which doesn’t have a Web site, is working on a new catheter for deploying arterial stents, the wire-mesh devices that prop open clogged arteries, more accurately.

ParagonDx acquires Gentris unit for early diagnostics — ParagonDx, apparently a newly formed Morrisville, N.C., biotech firm focused on molecular diagnostics, said it acquired the Gentris Diagnostics unit of Gentris, a pharmacogenomics firm also based in Morrisville. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

It’s not immediately clear exactly what this transaction means — I’m assuming ParagonDx was essentially spun out of Gentris, but the release isn’t terribly clear on that point. There are also some other oddities, such as the fact that as of this moment, the ParagonDx URL redirects to the Gentris site. It’s entirely possible that they’re just working out merger-day glitches, but it’s also possible something else weird is going on.

UPDATE (3:10pm PT): Added items on MedManage Systems, Xoova, FlowCo and ParagonDx/Gentris.

(UPDATED: see below.) 23andMe, a stealthy Mountain View, Calif., “personal genetics” startup, has raised a first round of funding from some heavy hitters — Google, Genentech and two blue-chip VC firms, Mohr Davidow Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

That’s some significant megatonnage for a low-profile and potentially controversial startup, although it all starts to make sense once you realize that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is newly married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. In addition, Genentech CEO Art Levinson sits on Google’s board. Those insider ties triggered disclosure requirements for Google, which revealed its new $3.9 million stake in 23andMe earlier this afternoon in an SEC filing. Among other things, the financing allowed 23andMe to pay back $2.6 million it had previously borrowed from Brin.

23andMe didn’t disclose the overall size of the round, although I’m told it’s in the vicinity of $10 million. None of the four named investors officially took a lead role in the financing, according to Michael Goldberg, a Mohr Davidow partner.

According to the company’s bare-bones release, 23andMe aims to help people “access, explore and better understand” their own genetic profiles via the latest DNA-analysis techniques and Web-based software tools. (The company’s name is a play on the 23 pairs of chromosomes that carry each individual’s DNA.) That service isn’t likely to launch until the end of this year, and in the meantime, 23andMe officials aren’t talking.

Which is not to say that 23andMe’s business is a total mystery. The company’s Web site suggests that it will allow people to analyze their own genomes and then share or compare that information via social networks of some sort (emphasis added):

Even though your body contains trillions of copies of your genome, you’ve likely never read any of it. Our goal is to connect you to the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint (plus your mitochondrial DNA), bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits. By connecting you to others, we can also help put your genome into the larger context of human commonality and diversity.

Toward this goal, we are building on recent advances in DNA analysis technologies to enable broad, secure, and private access to trustworthy and accurate individual genetic information. Combined with educational and scientific resources with which to interpret and understand it, your genome will soon become personal in a whole new way.

How this will work in practice isn’t entirely clear, although there are hints scattered here and there. Maverick tech entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, for instance, wrote on his blog in January that 23andMe will take in saliva samples through the mail, then subject them to a fast and relatively inexpensive genetic analysis. That data, he suggested, would go into a database that people could search for both personal and scientific reasons — a vision that, if true, would also help explain Google’s involvement, given the company’s oft-stated desire to index all of human knowledge. (An individual familiar with 23andMe told me that Varsavsky’s description sounds “well informed.”)

Mohr Davidow’s Goldberg explains that 23andMe hopes to stand at the intersection of “personalized medicine” and consumer-driven healthcare by offering individuals the tools they need to make medical decisions based on their genetic makeup. “Consumers have to become educated,” he says. “They have to understand that genetics isn’t scary science, that it’s all about what makes me who I am.”

Of course, no one knows at this point how people might react to the notion of storing — much less sharing — their genetic information online. Goldberg emphasized that 23andMe is “extraordinarily committed” to maintaining user privacy. It also can’t hurt that Congress appears poised to ban genetic discrimination with respect to employment and health insurance, which could do a lot to alleviate peoples’ anxiety about hanging out their genetic laundry online.

UPDATE: Turns out Martin Varsavsky is also a 23andMe investor. At least, that’s what he says on his blog. No wonder he’s “well informed.”

There’s a social networking site for nearly every person, animal, and interest – but what about a social network for the person who matters most? That’s right, a social network for YOU, the proud recipient of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

Look in the mirror. Do you really know yourself? Could you be happier? Thanks to a new web site called Inpowr, which launched yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, you can finally learn how to build a better YOU 2.0.

Inpowr bills itself as the web’s first platform for self-exploration.

Once you sign up for the site (beta test it with password: web2expo), you’re presented with a quick quiz that examines your well-being across 36 areas of life. After completing the questionnaire, you’re presented with a pastel-colored lotus flower that scores you in the six main categories of well-being.

I scored well in most categories, though I only got an 86 percent score for accomplishments, probably because I’ve been kicking myself lately for failing to coin the Web 2.0 label before everyone else. It was so obvious! But I digress.

Once inpowr politely informs you of your deficiencies, it guides you to create an action plan for improvement. It suggested I improve my altruism to boost my accomplishments score. Was it bad karma for me to pick up that quarter I found on the floor after yesterday’s VC session? Maybe I should have Twittered a lost and found.

The service emails you after 21 days and prompts you to re-evaluate yourself so you can measure progress toward your goals, and identify the specific actions that led to the progress.

The site will soon implement social networking features so that users can harness the collective experiences of other users. Kind of like a 12-step program where God is replaced by your social network and a friendly lotus flower.

The technology behind the site is based on developmental psychology theories about how human beings relate to the perceived environmental realities of their physical, mental and social environments. The general idea is that with a little hand-holding from the site and encouragement from our friends, we can all be guided toward healthier lifestyles and attitudes which in turn lead to a virtuous circle of ever-greater health and happiness.

Looked at another way, for example, if you lack physical energy due to poor nutrition, your work life may suffer, which could cause you to lose your job which would impact your financial ability to support yourself, which would make you sad. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, though any geek worth his salt will tell you Web 2.0 is also about the interconnectedness of everything.

Psychobabble aside, there’s probably a sizeable market for inpowr’s services if it can reach a critical mass of community participation.

As a society obsessed by self-improvement with the assistance of quick fixes, we already spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the pursuit of greater happiness, whether it’s via anti-depressants, stimulants, diets, plastic surgery, mental therapy or self-help books.

A free web site that gently guides us toward healthier actions, lifestyles and attitudes may be just what the doctor ordered.

Although the company hasn’t yet revealed its model for generating revenues, many other health and well-being sites such as WebMD have already proven the desirability of this audience to advertisers.

The site is owned and operated by Quebec-based Humanix. The company closed its first $150,000 angel funding round in September, 2006 and a second $350,000 angel round in March 2007. Michel Chioni, Humanix’s president, tells VentureBeat the company is in talks with Canadian VCs for a possible $1-$2 million round.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

Reunion is a social networking company that looks decidedly old-fashioned, compared to glitzy (or garish, some would say) sites like MySpace.

And yet its simplicity, like that of Facebook, is apparently part of its success. It now has 28 million registered users, and is adding one million users a month — and by that measure, it ranks among the top five social networks (Facebook, by contrast has slightly more than 19 million registered users). That’s why Reunion has just scored $25 million in venture capital from Oak Investment Partners, in what is the largest first round of venture capital any social network has received to date.

So why have you never heard of it?

Launched in 2002, Los Angeles-based Reunion is far more retro than Facebook. It shrugs aside the sexy “widget” doodads popularized by companies in Silicon Valley — and has slogged away through the years quietly, without marketing hype or verve. Reunion targets the 25 and older crowd. When you register, it provides you a straight-forward profile page, and then lets you add a range of information about yourself (bio info, favorite movies, character descriptions, etc). At its simplest, you can add your friends, and then stay in touch with them — as the name “reunion” would suggest. No video sharing or anything. Plain-vanilla stuff. See screenshot below. Many of its 28 million users registered years ago, and aren’t that active. However, it has about eight million unique users a month, which comfortably places it among the top ten networks.

Yet its new users — because they are older — are far more profitable than users at younger sites, such as MySpace, says chief executive Jeff Tinsley. Reunion brings in revenue of more than $30 million a year, though he wouldn’t be more specific. Cyworld, the raging popular Korean site, has said it makes $2.10 revenue per users, and Reunion makes much more than that on its recent users, Tinsley said. “It’s interesting, we don’t get covered nearly as much as these other guys,” Tinsley said.

One source of Reunion’s traffic is the “people search” technology it offers to other sites. It powers people search for AOL, Infospace, and Lycos, and will announce another big deal in two weeks, he said. People search is becoming more popular, and it will soon “bubble up” to become a staple feature at the top of most major sites, Tinsley said. Reunion powers 60 million people searches a month.

Reunion’s second largest outside investor is Richard Rosenblatt, former chief executive of Intermix, the parent company of Myspace. He joined the seed round, though invested less than Tinsley himself.

Reunion makes money from advertising. But it is more aggressive in pushing its premium services, charging between $3 and $5 a month to do things like contact people once you’ve located their profile pages, or to be able to see who is searching for you. You have to pay to see people’s full profiles, too.

We wonder how long it will be able to charge people for this sort of thing, given that sites like Spock (yet to launch, albeit), MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly giving you ways to reach people, and stay in touch with them, for free.

Reunion is using state of the art marketing tools: When we decided to leave the Reunion site, a box popped up and asked us to wait, and a woman named “Jenny” started IM’ing us in a chat box (see screenshot at bottom) asking us if we were sure we wanted to leave, and plugging Reunion’s premium services.

Updated

MingleNow, the latest social networking company that has been in development for many months, launches a public testing version tomorrow (Monday).

MingleNow is best compared with Yelp, because it focuses on the social community around bars and restaurants.

Only MingleNow goes further. It wants to give people hanging out at bars and restaurants ways to interact with each other online too. If you frequent a bar, for example, you can put your profile up on the bar’s page within MingleNow, share stories about the bar, and see the profiles of others who frequent that bar - getting a glimpse of the personal details of someone you might have flirted with (see screenshot below of an example for Suite181 in SF)

This fall, MingleNow will hold offline events at some of the more than 900,000 locales it features.

If MingleNow were to focus on just this, it would be enough. But the company also wants to be a one-stop shop for social networking. It provides users with a social calendar that can be exported to a Myspace or other blog pages — a way to show your friends whether you are busy or free on a given night. It also gives users blogs.

Indeed, it has produced so many networking features that we’re wondering whether it might be overkill. Some sites, like Google, work because of their simplicity. You type in a search term, and hit return, and don’t do much else. MingleNow requires quite a bit of investment to maximize your use of it, and that could be its main hurdle — since there are so many other sites out there. But it could also be a big strength, if the partying set were to fully embrace it.

MingleNow is owned by Blue Lithium, an online marketing company in San Francisco. Krishna Subramanian, the company’s lead developer, is a former club promoter, and DJ, and wanted to build something that bridged the gap between networking online and offline.

The idea came, he says, after he saw people at clubs and bars creating online profiles, and noticed nothing was connecting these two different lives. So MingleNow brings them together. MingleNow is building pages for every bar and restaurant in the country, so this is a massive effort. The company let us know about its plans early this year, so it has been in the works for months.

MingleNow also allows you to earn VIP points. You get points by inviting others to join MingleNow, and you can redeem the points offline, with free drinks at bars, for example. Bar owners see it as a way of reaching out to new potential customers, and letting them know about promotions.

The initial business model, of course, is advertising online.