Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks, or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations, and electronic medical record (EMRs) systems are generally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At VentureBeat’s HealthBeat today, Verizon managing principal of connected health care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network. But we have a $6 billion health care practice and a chief medical officer ,” Green said onstage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the U.S. nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people, and it is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power tele-medicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

Today, the digital notebook service announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom which means nearly 60 million of the telecom giant’s customers will be eligible to receive one year of Evernote Premium. With over 45 million users, worldwide reach, and over $250 million in venture capital, Evernote is well on its way towards world domination, of online note taking that is.

Through this offer, subscribers can request an upgrade for Evernote Premium through their Deutsche Telekom account or by launching the latest version on their Android smartphones. The deal is the latest in a string of international telecom carrier partners- Evernote has also struck deals with NTT Docomo in Japan, Orange France, KT in Korea, Taiwan Mobile, and Docomo Pacific.

These types of agreements serve to cement and expand Evernote’s global footprint by distributing it to millions (upon millions) of potential global consumers. Once they are given a taste of Evernote Premium, the hope is they will continue to pay for it after their free trial is up. Evernote Premium costs $5 a month or $45 a year. In exchange for the fee, users have access to larger upload capacity, top priority customer support, offline notebooks, PDF and document search, collaboration tools, note history, larger files and bigger notes, and hidden promotions.

Evernote’s tagline is “remember everything” and it is a useful tool for keeping track of life’s (and thee web’s) little details. The service can be used for anything from recipe documentation to meeting minutes, and CEO Phil Libin told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview that his goal is to actually boost cognitive abilities by turning Evernote into an “external brain.”

The company recently began focusing more on its business platform. Evernote Business has all the features of the consumer-facing products with additional business-only tools like an administrative console to invite, add, and manage new employees and keep all of the business notebooks organized in a shareable library. Earlier this year Evernote continued the expansion of the business product into 26 new countries in Europe, signaling a transition towards making money from businesses rather than consumers.

Evernote is the top note-taking app out there, but just last week reports came out that Google is working to release a note-taking app called Keep that would challenge Evernote’s dominance. While 45 million is a hefty user base, Google Apps has more and could steal users away from Evernote because it is already part of the Google ecosystem.

Partnering with Deutsche Telekom will help Evernote gain a hold in Germany, which is rising quickly as an international tech hub. The two companies are also co-hosting a Hackathon in Berlin in April, which will be held at Deutsche Telekoms new startup space. The event will “encourage developers and designers to imagine and create new apps” using Evernote API and Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden.

Photo Credit: momentcaptured1/Flickr 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s been a long day of traveling, but a sunny day in Barcelona can lift a lot of spirits.

I’m heading to Mobile World Congress. This is one of my favorite weeks of the year. MWC is still an important conference (I’m thinking of you CES), and Barcelona is a great city.

I’ll be posting on industry events during the coming week, but I also hope to capture a little bit of the experience beyond the press releases, demos and meetings. Think of this as a guide for planning your trip next year.

The first thing to know about MWC is that the show is big. Something like 70,000 people attended last year, and it creates a sense that foreigners are overrunning the city. That started at the airport when I was departing the U.S. When they called boarding for “Executive Platinum” cardholders, 100 people rushed the podium. The hard-core road warriors were migrating.

This year MWC is at a new venue. Barcelona has great mass transit. But on Sunday the metro was empty except for the line heading out to the Fira, the conference venue. That platform was crowded with people who exuded “telecom.” And I saw two friends in line.

Moving the show to the new venue has caused all kinds of consternation among long-time attedess. Everyone remembers last year’s transit strike, and the Fira Europa is in a remote location. The old venue was in the middle of town, and very compact. No meeting was more than a 5 minute walk from the next meeting. The new site is much bigger, which is why they moved it. Still, any gathering of attendees (for instance in the waiting lounge of the airport for a five-hour delayed flight) will eventually have someone fretting about the new locale. A good cure for this is to say, “I remember when the show was in Cannes 10 years ago. They never had enough hotel rooms, and we had to rent a car and drive an hour each way.”

Personally, I think all this anxiety about the new venue stems from something deeper. Five years ago, this was a telecom conference. The big exhibitors made switches, antennas, signalling sytems, testing boxes, subscriber databases, and microwave radios.

Today, half the show is apps, mobile software, and tools for making apps and mobile software. This conference literally used to be filled with men with grey beards. The grey beards are now in a shrinking minority, and no one is quite sure what that means. It’s a new industry.

Regardless, registration is now much easier. Its a sunny day in Barcelona. And now it’s time for sangria and paella.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Photo credit: VentureBeat/Jonathan Goldberg

One thing that’s almost too good is AT&T’s mobile share plans, in which a subscriber can buy a single data plan for multiple devices, such as a laptop, phone, and tablet.

The plans are superpopular, AT&T said, with 10 percent of its customers, or 6.6 million people, having signed up. Users average three devices each, and a quarter of them have purchased plans with 10GB/month or higher, all of which add up to a much higher uptake than AT&T anticipated.

That was a bit of a problem for the company, as it reported, saying that “data revenue growth was slowed somewhat by the growth of Mobile Share plans.” In addition, sales of tethering plans and mobile Internet devices such as MiFi’s were also down due to the share plans.

Which is probably more shocking to cellular subscribers than anything else: a massive telecom actually did something pretty customer-friendly, even at the cost of some extra revenue.

AT&T did not break out how much it lost due to sharing plans. Nor did it speculate on how many customers the carrier might have lost if it did not offer the customer-friendly option.

photo credit: Linh H. Nguyen via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AT&T took a moment to toot its own horn this morning, announcing that it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the last quarter.

And while the company didn’t announce a product-level breakdown, thanks to Kantar Worldpanel data released last week we can guesstimate that this translates to 7.2 million iPhones, 2.2 million Android phones, and some small number of BlackBerry and Windows phones. Those numbers are interesting, as Apple’s Q1 2013 financials are coming in just a couple of weeks, with estimates as high as 55 million iPhones sold.

“During the quarter, we averaged more than 110,000 smartphone sales a day as customers flocked to our leading portfolio of the latest Android, Apple, and Windows devices,” AT&T President and CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement.

Significantly, de la Vega did not mention BlackBerry in his statement. Windows Phone has become the third contender in the U.S. mobile market — because, according to that same Kantar data, Microsoft surged into third place with 2.7 percent of the U.S market, while RIM free-fell from seven percent the previous quarter to just 1.4 percent in the Christmas quarter.

The numbers are big, there’s no question.

AT&T’s huge quarter undoubtedly helped Apple push above 50 percent market share for the first time ever in the U.S. market, as the massive mobile carrier was, of course, the first (and for years the only) iPhone-carrying telecom, giving it an advantage in high-end wireless customers that continues to this day. And, perhaps, something of a bias toward iPhone.

Humility is, of course, a key AT&T virtue, which explains the next part of de la Vega’s statement:

“Combine that with the nation’s largest 4G network and lightning-fast LTE network that now reaches more than 170 million people and you’ll understand why customers continue to choose AT&T in record numbers.”

AT&T’s full financial results for the quarter will be released the same day as Apple’s: January 24.

photo credit: GlennFleishman via photopin cc

Small business owners have enough on their plates, without having to worry about telecom services. Wiresurfer attempts to remove this annoyance from entrepreneurs’ stack of concerns by providing a comparison engine for business communications.

Whether it is a neighborhood Italian restaurant or a “big data” startup, businesses need phone and Internet services. Navigating the tricky waters of network providers is confusing and time-consuming. Packages are difficult to decipher and no consolidated place exists for small business owners to view all their options.

Wiresurfer functions similarly to Expedia or Kayak and compare deals and details side-by-side. You go to the website, pinpoint your location, and then see what plans are available and at what terms and prices.

According to a Gartner report, the average small business owner spends about 25 hours deciphering and procuring telecom services for their company.

Cofounder Jeff Kaufman spent years of his career in the telecom industry. Talking to customers, he realized that they often defaulted to the most familiar provider and were unaware of the full scope of their choices.

“Telecom carriers make it virtually impossible to do an apples to apples comparison of their deals with other deals,” he said. “There is also not a single place to find all the deals offered by all the carriers. On Wiresurfer, ou click on a map, browse deals, and order the right one through us.”

The site’s design should be very straightforward and user friendly. Twelve carriers have already signed on, and the team will continue to add more. Ultimately, they hope to offer the No. 1 resource for telecom services in the world.

Wiresurfer is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Blend Images, Shutterstock

Clearly, cloud platforms are not reality show contestants, so perhaps I should explain a little bit further.

This type of technology enables developers to integrate multiple methods of communication into their applications via application programming interfaces (APIs). Rather than relying on phones, external networks, hardware, and carriers, companies can bypass the middlemen by incorporating voice and messaging capabilities in to their products through a few simple lines of code.

It is a powerful tool for companies that require in-app communication to conduct business. Telecommunications hardware can be expensive to set up and difficult to maintain, and building it on the web saves money and provides more flexibility to scale the product.

The most well-known player in this space is Twilio. This crowd favorite has raised $33.7 million and has recently expanded its text-messaging platform into 150 countries.

In the arena of voice communication, however, a upstart competitor is zooming ahead.

Since its launch last month, Y Combinator startup Plivo has provided cloud-based local phone numbers in more than 50 countries worldwide, across the US, Europe, South, America, Africa and Asia. In contrast, Twilio’s  voice API — unlike its SMS product — is only available in 12 countries and has yet to make a dent in the Asian or African market.

This rapid progress is largely attributable to the Plivo founders’ combined 17 years of experience working in the international telecom industry. Furthermore, their technology operates independently from geography so it can easily be applied anywhere and everywhere.

The company, founded by Venkatesh B and Michael Ricordeau in 2010, is based in Walnut, Calif. and Bangalore, India, and employs six people.

In many countries, setting up a phone solution is challenging and involves negotiations with carriers, hardware, and network configuration. By focusing primarily on its international presence and leveraging its technology in places like Vietnam or Chile, Plivo hopes to dominate the global arena when it comes to voice communication.

Investors in Cable & Wireless Worldwide have finally given the thumbs-up to an acquisition offer from Vodafone. The deal values the 152-year-old telecom company at $1.6 billion.

Vodafone is currently the second largest mobile company globally, and the CWW acquisition will only add to its stature among the telecommunications giants of the world.

According to Reuters, one institutional investor in particular had been holding back a vote on the deal. When that party was in favor of the acquisition, that gave Vodafone 99 percent of the votes from voting shareholders to proceed with the acquisition.

CWW controls more than 12,000 miles of optical fiber, which means Vodafone will no longer have to rent landline from competing telecoms such as BT. In addition to its fixed line capacity, CWW provides managed voice and data services as well as IP-based services and applications. CWW targets large enterprises, governments, and carriers.

The $1.6 billion acquisition offer was first agreed to by both parties back in April 2012.

The company’s history hasn’t been without controversy. Since 2009, a series of strategic product missteps, scandals over lavish executive compensation, and a breakup into two separate entities have caused the company’s stock price to plummet, making it an obvious acquisition target for a hungry up-and-comer such as Vodafone.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Dubbed the “IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform” (creative Big Blue is not), the new platform is “a comprehensive set of hardware, software, and services” that will let CSPs deliver new cloud-based services to their customers. It could potentially let providers launch new partner services in six weeks, instead of six months, and offer partner applications and services like “unified communications, collaboration, field force management and sales tracking and customer relationship management applications.”

Service providers will be able to provision tens of thousands of virtual machines every hour, as well as run and manage millions of virtual machines concurrently. They could create “hundreds or even thousands of new services” quickly and cost-effectively with the platform, the company says.

The cloud platform is built on IBM’s Service Delivery Manager technology. IBM is also working with nine startups — including Corent, deCarta, and Broadsoft — that will provide technology to fuel the services available to public and private clouds. DeCarta, for example, offers a technology crucial to location-based services — it provides “the core functionality for mapping, navigation and local search and connecting base map data and content to the applications, service provider and ultimately the end-user.” DeCarta’s technology could be useful to CSPs for applications like mobile advertising.

The new platform allows IBM to become even more entrenched in the burgeoning cloud computing business.

Photo via mendhak on Flickr