Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc…

Bio is the new Social (ish)

Posted on July 2, 2012. Filed under: startups, venture capital |

Bio is the new Social (maybe not quite…but a wise man once told me, say something is and it becomes)…the Billguard thing has nothing to do with Bio, I just want it. But the other two are areas of focus for me these days and if you are building them, I’d be interested in speaking/investing/helping push things forward:

1)   Billguard for healthcare/insurance claims: I can’t think of anything more annoying than letting my doctor’s office or hospital and health insurance company turn me into a human ping pong ball…the back and forth, he said she said, administrative nightmare that is determining weather or not I owe $32 for some incomprehensible invoice due 3 days before the fucking thing arrives in the mail is just so painful…I know there must be a better way..and e billing…and blah blah blah, but in the meantime, any form of scaled services business, or ideally a heavily software enabled services business that says “yo, all those ridiculous invoices and bullshit that you have to deal with, scan em’ or drop em’ in an envelope and we’ll watch your back” is all I really want…I just want to know that I’m not getting raked…and just because the hospital submitted to the wrong address, and I get a bill, doesn’t mean I should have to spend an hour on the phone trying to figure out who’s fault it is or if I really owe this money…even better, I’d love to know what care is going to cost me on the way in…this not knowing and then you get slapped with a bill for hundreds of dollars that you weren’t planning for is absurd…fine, ambulences cost money and your plan doesn’t cover it all…just give me a heads up so I don’t go buy a new tennis racquet this month before the bill comes…I don’t think we need to go for the hail marry here and try to change the way healthcare runs…but the HR Blocks of the world did it really simple: “everyone hates taxes, they are so confusing, nobody knows what they need to pay and what they don’t…so we’re gonna market the crap out of our cheap services that let’s you not worry about it”…people don’t pay HR Block to save them a ton of money…they pay HR Block for the piece of mind that it was done right without a ton of hassle…I think you could do the same and save people from the worry of the healthcare/insurance ecosystem.

2)   Wearable sensors for biodata: who’s measuring my endorphin levels, or my perspiration, or my heart rate, blood pressure, pupil dialation, sugar levels, or really any other biological dataset…who is taking information usually collected in the doctors office and productizing hardware and microhardware meant to enable consumer monitoring and tracking?  Withings is pushing on this in some regards…but I want lighter weight…more biology…less machinery…I don’t care if your using existent sensors in devices with penetration or brand new stuff…I just want novel bioinformatics capture. Thanks

3)   Innovation at the interface layer between hardware/software and human physiology/users: Who is thinking beyond billions of people stupidly tapping away on the glass screens on our phones…how do we interact with out devices with less friction…I see folks reducing the contact points with devices through mechanisms like push, background processing/ux, etc…but who’s using the microphone in interesting ways? Who is viewing an engaged user’s physical body as the interface to a new user? Who is pushing on Google Goggles without billions in R&D behind them? Who is  creating an IFTTT that says, “if my blood pressure rises above the norm, play that meditation podcast I downloaded last week.”  I love interfaceless UX, but what I really want is more deeply integrated interface between myself and my device and my software…and the interface goes both ways, I don’t just want better consumptive experience, I want to push data to hardware/software without disrupting my offline experience…who is building hardware that is meant to live inside my physiological system, not distinct from it, or even attached to it, I want to know who is connecting my biological systems to software/hardware systems (especially for non-medical applications)…I realize how far off we are from brain system to software system, but there are many less complex physiological systems in the body that have direct application when communicating with software applications…

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