Vuru: “Take your vitamins” made easy…
Posted on 10. Nov, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
For anyone that in serious about nutrition there’s no such thing as “one a day”. There’s multivitamins, omega 3, extra B12, acidophilus and who knows what else. All that unscrewing the cap and screwing it back on, wrestling with cotton balls, running out or having too much once you decide to try something else.
Well Miami-based Vuru has the solution. The website offers members the same supplements and vitamins as a high-end natural food store but delivered in personalized, daily supplement packs instead of troublesome bottles. You can create your daily pack and then place the number of packs to order. Start with 4 weeks (28 packs), select 8 weeks get a 3% discount, 5% for 12 weeks and 10% for 16 weeks.
Vuru is also great for health professionals. Doctors and nutritionist can create custom packs for patients and have it sent directly to their home. Professionals then are linked to that customer so any new orders or if the customer orders directly they receive a commission.
I think this is a great answer to a regular everyday need. So what other personal concierge services can the Internet provide?
Mobile Internet Chaos
Posted on 04. Nov, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
If anyone is paying attention to what’s going on in mobile its obvious that we are headed toward some serious transformation and the media and communications industries are in chaos. Traditional operators are fighting disintermediation with convergence, while traditional media companies search for profitable and relevant business models in this new, mobile medium. Meanwhile a completely new generation of services and end-user applications are emerging.
Network operators and service providers of all kinds are competing to serve the next major frontier in computing — the Mobile Internet user. The Mobile Internet user will have ubiquitous access to computing and the Internet. 
Wireless technologies such as 3G, WiMAX and LTE have emerged as alternatives to support the Mobile Internet with ubiquitous connectivity. In addition, IP architectures are becoming critical elements in the delivery of ubiquitous mobile broadband services. As these technologies migrate toward the 4G vision, mobile Internet services will be delivered with increased performance capabilities, improved economics, high levels of security and accurate way of measuring end-user activity. (more…)
Twitter Poster
Posted on 01. Nov, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Twitter Poster is an interesting project that uses the Twitter API to provide a visual representation of the degree of influence of the Twitter users. The poster is constructed of thumbnail images from user profiles in 3 sizes (24 x 24 pixels, 48 x 48 pixels and 72 x 72 pixels). The image are arranged by the number of followers the user has, from most to least starting on the left.
This is an interesting composite application that can provide some interesting insight into the Twitter community and influencers in the social media realm. I’d like the hear what other think of Twitter Poster.
Social Networking in Plain English
Posted on 26. Oct, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Great video from Common Craft explaining what social networks are. I hope the make one to explain how to get angel financing.
Social Networking Site for Licensed Physicians
Posted on 23. Oct, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Social networking has been popularized by teens and geeks on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Many more niche social networking sites have come along and more recently business 
focused social networks have emerged. Professionals turn to sites like LindedIn and Jobster to share and find career, recruiting, and industry information.
Sermo provides a social network for physicians that not only provides a networking tools but allows them to collaborate and apply that collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for their patients. Additionally it provide free access for members to news from medical journals.
Twitter “Track”
Posted on 19. Oct, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
One of the cool things about Twitter is the ability to keep in touch when away from the computer. You can set up your phone or IM to follow your friends and family, post tweats and keep everyone updated on what everyone is doing.
You can follow friends on your phone through Twitter, but what about concepts? What if you wanted an update anytime anyone mentioned a specific name, band, city or concept like “global warming,” or “apple sauce?” In real-time? What if you were attending an event and wanted to know who else was there?
Twitter recently released a new feature called “Track.” With Track you can send a command from your found such as “track Chevy”. When any tweats mention “Chevy,” you’ll get it on your phone. From there you can send “whois username” to get the users information, or “follow username” to follow updates. Don’t want to follow the term “Chevy” anymore? Toggle it off with “untrack Chevy.”
There’s no limit to how many topics you can track. Type “track” alone (or “stats”) and get a list of everything you are tracking. Turn them all off by sending “track off”.
What will you track?
Scrum – Web Development 2.0
Posted on 18. Sep, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Scrum is not an acronym – it actually comes from Rugby. A scrum or scrummage is way of restarting the game after the ball has gone out of play. Scrum was 
first mentioned in “The New Product Development Game” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986). Today some of the world’s leading companies are using Scrum development process including Yahoo, Google and (don’t tell Bill Gates) Microsoft.
How it works
Scrum as a development process is simple. Its been clear over time the the best results come from small cross-functional teams. Its also been clear that customers and stakeholders never know what they want really until they see the software in action. (more…)
Web 2.0 meets online advertising
Posted on 04. Sep, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
“Get the Katie Gadget on your personalized homepage”… I’m not sure that statement would have much meaning a few years ago. As Web 2.0 goes mainstream marketers are finding clever ways to leverage Web 2.0 concepts such as consumer generated media, widgets and communities into online advertising. 
The CBS Power of 10 Web site today featured and ad from CBS Evening News for the Katie Gadget for your iGoogle start page. This is a good indicator that having widgets and start pages is being seen as more mainstream. Ironically Katie reports on how Internet addiction affects 10% of the population.
Facebook – A Software Platform?
Posted on 31. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Facebook is the second most popular social network next to MySpace. Since Facebook released it’s api its quickly evolved into a software platform and developers are building businesses around it. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads.
Read the full Business 2.0 article “The Facebook Economy”.
Ok, maybe Twitter is useful…
Posted on 30. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized and has 0 Comments
Twitter is a micro blogging site where generating huge amounts of buzz among the web’s early adopters thanks to a simple concept. All twitter.com does is ask: “What are you doing?”
The idea is that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and contacts. And, crucially, it delivers those updates across a variety of different media – either through its website, over instant messaging or by SMS to your mobile phone.
I’ve been talking about Twitter for some time now. I wasn’t sure why – but it seemed pretty clear by its popularity that it could be useful. I’ve had different ideas for campaigns but its becoming clear that Twitter provides a valuable service in the most distributed Web 2.0 fashion. Twitter allows people to follow information how they want and when they want. A certain population has embraced it. Now we can see how marketers and media is embracing Twitter.
In April 2007 ZDNet created a ZDNetBlogs Twitter page and ‘walla’, instant cool Web 2.0 functionality. Viral, distributed, accessible by mobile, email, widgets, IM etc. You can follow ZDNet blog post via your Twitter account.
Bravo to ZDNet for this experiment. So far there’s only 340 followers but Twitter growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down soon so I think there’s plenty of time for the subscribers to pick-up.
MTV is also using Twitter to promote the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA). A prominent link on the main navigation reads ‘Twitter’, I’d say that is in indication that Twitter is engrained in pop culture. This MTV Twitter account is written as updates from Moonman, MTV’s iconic and mischievous mascot and the name sake of the VMA award, MTV’s equivalent to the Oscar. The site uses the Twitter API to display the tweats (a single Twitter post) also on the site.
Chillin’ with Baby from Cash Money in the MTV photo studio. Guy’s got so much bling I feel like I’m looking at the sun. -mtvmoonman 01:57 PM August 22, 2007 from web.
You can also simply text “Text FOLLOW VMA to 40404” and receive updates via SMS. MTV started this experiment in July and has 570 followers and has made 23 posts so far.
There’s many ways to use Twitter to engage people. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
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