A storm of personal data is coming to healthcare, are you ready?

[Expanded from my Jan 14, 2014 post for ePharma Summit, where I spoke on Feb 12th, 2014.]

At CES 2014, 40 percent more floor space has been dedicated to digital health exhibitors this year than in 2013. This includes many sensor tech companies that are acquiring data that describes our digital selves. For example, LG Electronics is introducing a fitness band, Reebok is showcasing a skullcap with sensors, and startups like Lively and ZamZee are releasing solutions for the elderly and for children respectively. This quantified-self movement has been heavily funded but is really still in its infancy.

As the technology has moved toward commoditization, it will be increasingly included in devices that we already own. For example, both Apple and Samsung have included technology into their latest phones that includes advanced motion sensing technology, including a custom app by Samsung “S Health”. Apple even has a new patent on an integrated heart rate sensor (read more here). Apple’s M7 co-processor allows efficient motion detection and is now integrated with the FitBit mobile app removing the need for a special purpose device – a smart move. Why?

Because the future won’t necessarily be about winning on the device side, it will be about how you use the enormous amount of data that is being generated by people to describe themselves in new ways.

Individuals will want help managing the data, providing access to their data and using it for custom applications that align to their specific needs. This is where healthcare industry players should focus their energy. How are you planning to plug in to this ecosystem? What data will you help your customers acquire or will you ask them for access to their data as it is generated so that you can provide them a valuable service?

For pharma, I’m enthusiastic about both the creation of mobile services that utilize these new data acquisition technologies, and also about the use of this aggregate data to unlock new knowledge that aligns R&D and marketing goals. For care providers, new data sources give physicians a new view into cause and effect, and for insurers and employers there can be tremendous gains in enhancing wellness programs and aligning incentives to healthier behaviors.

On my end, I’m excited to be involved with two great businesses that are taking advantage of this opportunity today. Mana Health is a rapidly growing company that is taking as inputs these many new data points and making sense of it all to patients and care providers. OysterLabs is a mobile technology company whose AQUA platform is enabling marketers to use the data generated by mobile app users at the edge to improve audience engagement. In short, I for one am incredibly excited for this storm of data to be here and for all the opportunity it creates, and luckily I brought my umbrella.

Written by Raj Amin, CEO of OysterLabs

Keep up with Raj on his blog. 

How messaging apps like Whatsapp are changing the Mobile Marketing Landscape

Since Facebook’s $19B acquisition of Whatsapp last week there has been increased speculation about the role of messaging services in allowing brands to expand their marketing reach. Shortly after Facebook announced the deal, the Japanese online retailer, Rakuten, said that it would be buying Viber — an internet calling service similar to Skype that reports close to 300 million users — for $900M. Meanwhile, WeChat, a Chinese-based messaging service, is also said to be closing in on 300 million users and may become the next major acquisition target. 

Deals such as these signal the potential for messaging apps to evolve into platforms with continuously monetizable users. Whatsapp serves some 500 million users, mostly in emerging markets, roughly 70% of whom use the app on a daily basis. A recent report from Deloitte predicts that in 2014 an average of 50 billion messages will be delivered each day across these types of messaging services. For many brands, such numbers indicate the opportunity to reach a global audience with immediacy and precision.

For Facebook, the Whatsapp deal will help to cement the company’s involvement with messaging and voice calling. But it may also help Facebook attract interest from advertisers looking to make inroads with consumers in emerging markets. Facebook has struggled to gain traction in Asia against a lineup of competitor networks, but with the acquisition of a half billion active users there it can now focus on boosting mobile user activity in Asian markets, which may enable the company to start charging advertisers more aggressive rates without stifling demand. Plus, with the unique demographic-targeting options that Facebook offers, the company may be primed to gain a competitive advantage as a distribution platform. 

The gain in users may also allow Facebook to start bringing revenue into line with investor expectations. Since its 2012 public debut the social networking giant’s price-earnings ratio has hovered above 100, indicating a discrepancy between the company’s perceived worth and current earnings. But such an influx of users in high-interest markets may help to boost advertiser interest and earnings.  

The rise of Whatsapp and other messaging apps may also underscore a key feature of the new marketing landscape: with the explosion of smartphone and tablet usage across the globe, brands need tools that provide both precision and reach on mobile. Marketers increasingly gauge ROI in terms of the ability to reach mobile audiences with strategic timing and differentiated messaging, both of which Facebook is now better equipped to provide. OysterLabs’ AQUA – a combined mobile CRM+Analytics platform – offers such capabilities at highly competitive rates, and is a critical tool in the arsenal of any mobile marketer.

The Domino’s Pizza App

Let’s face it: picking up the phone and ordering a pizza is just too energy consuming. We want a way to order food that’s easy…and calling a restaurant is just too damn hard. Mary wrote about the On-Demand Delivery trend earlier this week - and now I share one of my favorite examples, the Domino’s Pizza app, which makes ordering effortless. 

That’s a lot of Pizza

As of January 2014, the Domino’s Pizza app has over ten million downloads with 2013 digital sales amounting to $1.3 billion. In Q3 last year, digital sales were 40% of Domino’s revenue. 

It’s just so simple. The quick process lets you choose your location, customize your order, and checkout. With the addition of “pizza profiles,” you can store your information and recent food order, which makes the process even shorter. If you’re a returning customer, you don’t need more than 30 seconds to order your food. And then there’s the Domino’s tracker, which lets you track the order through the entire delivery process. Pretty cool stuff!

Similar to Starbucks, the Domino’s app is a call-to-action for innovation across the industry. Restaurants need to see the success of the Domino’s app and adapt to the changing tide. Mobile is here; embrace it. 

Download the Domino’s App

I Want It Now: Delivery in the On-Demand Age

As much as we may scowl at the likes of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we live in an instant-gratification society - specifically if you live in a highly-populated urban environment (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles). You’re probably familiar with this way of living - you want it now, and you’ll pay for instant convenience. 

I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite companies in the On-Demand Delivery space - which will continue to explode in 2014. Tweet to me @MaryEliseChavez and share yours!

@uber | Uber.com

Everyone’s Private Driver™

My name is Mary, and I’m an Uber Addict. I used Uber 7 times this past weekend - and loved every ride. Friendly, well-mannered and streetwise drivers made my city-hopping a breeze. 

Uber uses Twilio to keep riders informed throughout the customer experience, serving up real-time text message updates. 

With $258MM of funding from Google Ventures, many have said Uber is the early winner in the on-demand transport space. However, this space is hot and quickly evolving, check out some other companies entering at different angles. 

• Sidecar - Select the vehicle, driver and price
• Lyft - On-demand ridesharing
• Hailo - The Taxi Magnet
• Zipcar - Rent a car for a few minutes or hours (an old favorite)
  
  

@seamless | Seamless.com

My use of Seamless hit a low when I ordered a cupcake from a shop… beneath my apartment. You see, I was in a House of Cards binge-fest and couldn’t be bothered to walk downstairs. 15 minutes later I was enjoying my Chai cupcake while gasping at the cunning of The Underwoods. 

But I’m not the only one, friends have shared their stories of delivery indulgence - like my friend that orders from her local french bistro before dinner parties and plays it off as “culinary talent.”

The convenience of any-time, anything food delivery is a luxury many urbanites rely on. 

The merger of Grubhub and Seamless in 2013 has enabled Seamless to file an IPO - expected to happen in the early half of 2014. Grubhub’s portfolio includes Seamless, Grubhub, MenuPages and AllMenus and boasts 150,000+ daily orders through the combined properties.

An honorable mention in the on-demand food space goes to Instacart, which deliveries groceries in 1 hour- my cousin lives in San Francisco and loves this service - can’t wait for it to come to New York!

Postmates

Need delivery in under 1 hour for anything - from food to cosmetics, books to an errand you don’t have time for - check out Postmates. With real-time tracking you can see the status of your delivery. Pricing starts at $5 and is based on distance of delivery. 

Postmates wildly popular ice cream promotion from last summer.

WunWun

Finally available in Brooklyn, WunWun (what you need, when you need it) is a similar concept to Postmates - delivery of anything at anytime. WunWun has partnerships with a sampling of brands (e.g. a 2013 promotion with men’s skincare brand Anthony for Men), the retailer absorbs the cost of delivery, to enhance the customer experience.

Interesting Marketing Gets You Noticed
Their Oct 2013 campaign to use the app and get Free Halloween Candy delivery (from the best candy shop in New York, Economy Candy!) was similar to Uber’s Kitten delivery campaign for National Cat Day in 2013.

Brands Joining In

Lifestyle-oriented brands are experimenting with this trend too, like Kate Spade’s Saturday. Last summer, the brand opened a shoppable, interactive storefront - complete with free 1 hour delivery. I love seeing native retail-brands experiment with digital applications to evolve their brands. 

Mega-retailers Amazon and Ebay Now (encourages shopping locally but has partnered with Best Buy and Target and is $5/per order) offer select merchandise for delivery. They have their own strategies and operations in place for on-demand and time sensitive deliveries - stay tuned for who comes out on top. 

Final Thoughts:
The winners will out perform with gold-star customer service. 

Written by Mary Elise Chavez, Creative Director of OysterLabs

My 7 Essential Apps when working on the go

Whether traveling, commuting or lounging on my couch, these are a few of my go-to apps when working from my phone. Tweet to me at @MaryEliseChavez and share yours!

@asana | Asana.com

Do Great Things.™

Nearly my entire life (personally and professionally) is organized with help from this brilliant tool. Its easy-to-use interface - both on desktop and mobile helps tackle large projects by breaking them down into a task-by-task approach - eliminating the overwhelming feeling of “there’s-so-much-to-do-where-do-i-start” conundrum!

As a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Asana has helped me increase focus and productivity. I've evangelized the benefits of Asana for years to friends and colleagues - I love seeing how Asana helps them achieve their goals. Great for teams too - both as a collaborative tool and a roadmap planning tool.

@tempoai | Tempo.ai

A smart calendar app that brings together your contacts, appointments, directions, documents and recommendations to streamline your schedule. Tempo helps me be better informed prior to meetings, coffee meetups, events and dinner dates - reminding me on everything from directions to recommendations on where to go (also birthday reminders, thank you Tempo!).

It skims my contact list to pull in details about my appointment - for example, say I’m having “Dinner w/ Jen at DBGB”, it will recommend the Jen’s I know and give me directions to DBGB - this is particularly helpful when meeting up with clients - as related emails, documents and their LinkedIn profiles are pulled in (awesome!). 

@Pocket | GetPocket.com

In any given day we see 100’s (sometimes 1000’s) of media messages - from that hilarious Buzzfeed listicle that’s all over Facebook, to the latest staggering startup valuation that raised eyebrows (I’m talking to you Snapchat & What’s App) - digesting so much media can be daunting. 

Enter Pocket. With a handy browser plugin and smart recognition of links (right click on a link and you can ‘Save to Pocket’), I can collect inspiration and news as articles, videos, photo tutorials and blogs to a central place with easy tagging - that way, I can read content when I’m ready, rather than disrupting my workflow or hanging with friends.

During my commute I dig around in my Pocket app, and typically read 8-10 articles in 30 minutes, which is a great way to get in my daily dosage of reading. 

@8x8 | 8x8 Mobile Apps

8x8 offers a great virtual office setup - working seamlessly between desktop phone > computer > mobile. OysterLabs is HQ'ed in New York, with international offices in Moscow and Ukraine - 8x8 is super helpful with conference calls, shared-screen meetings and messaging for our teams around the world.   

@hootsuite | Hootsuite Mobile Apps

A great tool for streamlining social publishing efforts, interacting in tweet chats and webinars, and managing multiple twitter accounts at once. 

@instagram | Instagram.com

OysterLabs works with global brands that have audiences all over the world. Instagram is a powerful tool for businesses to visualize the culture and lifestyle of their brand. On any given day, I’m tracking efforts and social content to see trends and steer my clients down the right track. 

It’s also a guilty pleasure during #NYFW, #LFW and #SXSW. :)

@songza | Songza.com

Music is proven to improve productivity, stimulate creativity and make us overall better people. Songza is my go-to music app whether getting ready in the morning, working deep on a design project or getting my fitness on. 

With a scenario-based music concierge, Songza serves up curated playlists from their music experts (you can create your own too), to align with your Mood, Time of Day or Activity. 

My latest guilty pleasure playlists - “Girls: Marnie” and “70’s Pool Party”

Written by Mary Elise Chavez, Creative Director of OysterLabs

How to Choose a Platform for your Mobile App 

Whether you’re a Fortune-100 brand or a one-person business, choosing which platforms your mobile app will support can be a confusing process. The past few years have seen the rise of Windows and Blackberry app markets, but for most businesses looking to build a mobile presence the choice comes down to the two major platforms: Android and iOS. 

This morning I had a Twitter exchange with Charles Nutter after he tweeted:

“Am I crazy, or is it madness to release mobile apps with no support for Android devices now? And to have no plans to ever support them?”

The question is a good one since many businesses out there are wondering the same thing. My reply was: “Yes it’s madness.” 

To clarify: if you are just breaking into mobile, it may not be madness to begin by only supporting iOS even though it controls just 15% of the global market as compared to Android’s 78%. But to rule out Android support completely is to ignore a huge potential source of users and revenue. 

The key question to ask yourself is how much you plan to charge for your app. Despite Android’s huge lead in global market share, Apple pulls in an estimated $5.1M a day in App Store revenue, compared to Google’s daily $1.1M from Google Play. That means that the average iOS user spends roughly 25x as much on apps (and in-app purchases) as the average Android user. So if you plan to release a paid app, it may make sense to start by allocating your development resources to a quality iOS release rather than splitting your budget between parallel iOS and Android builds.

At OysterLabs we’ve worked with many clients who went that route and then re-invested a portion of their iOS app earnings into a follow-up Android release. For cash-strapped businesses and startups in particular, this is a time-tested approach that may not yield huge revenue right off the bat but almost certainly won’t break the bank. 

Not everyone is interested in the paid app model, though. Businesses whose apps rely on in-app purchases, ads, and/or incentivized downloads for revenue may see Android as the priority platform given its much larger user base. If your app’s revenue model relies on many users downloading and using your app – what industry insiders sometimes call “eyeball potential” – then it makes sense to prioritize support for the platform with more users.  

But that raises a secondary question about how to get those eyeballs focused on your app. Big brands can rely on their marketing budgets to drive installs and impressions, but less well-endowed developers often must resort to clever usage of social media and paid distribution channels. Google Play offers an advantage to the small guys here with its superior search capabilities that enable users to find apps even when they misspell keywords.

Final Thoughts

Your decision-making about mobile platform support should be driven by your app’s revenue model and available budget for development and distribution. The ideal scenario is to support both iOS and Android, but that may not be a reality for every business at the start.

If you’re thinking about developing an app, give us a shout at Hello@OysterLabs.com and we’ll help you develop a mobile strategy that meets your business’ goals and requirements.

View the full infographic at Beutler Ink