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Moreover, the headset can now provide contextual information to applications such as the mobile call state, mobile Caller ID, proximity, presence and wearing state. One of the more compelling new apps that uses this interface is Popcorn from ThreeWill; it integrates with a PC/laptop, Chatter, Salesforce.com and mobile devices while monitoring incoming phone calls. When one comes in, it pops a screen based on caller information in corporate databases. The problem being solved is mobile workers have work calls coming to their cell phones which don’t necessarily provide complete details regarding the caller.
How this differs from a traditional screen pop, in this case, is the call is coming over the mobile network so the enterprise PBX is out of the loop. Instead, the caller ID information is transmitted over Bluetooth to the Spokes software by Plantronics, which gives other applications access and these apps can in-turn query corporate databases in the cloud and in the data center.
Moreover, Popcorn allows the user to quickly type in notes, which are automatically placed in the appropriate customer record saving time and effort.
Another company using the Plantronics APIs is Datahug, they have solution that looks at a person you are in contact with at a company and ascertains via social networks and emails which other people in the company has contacts in your organization. Until now, Datahug could not sift through telephony data but it now can, thanks to the middleware-nature of the new Spokes APIs.
Continue reading on the Cloud Computing Magazine website. Free registration may be required for new readers.
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TMC even gave the company an award for awesome customer service some years back. How serious is the company’s commitment to customers? At the front of the store there is a 6,000 pound piece of granite with this carving:
Here are some stats from an article I wrote about the company in March of 2000 – the exact month of the internet bubble burst which isn’t related to this entry but puts some perspective on the timing.
Apparently the buzz I overheard in the store had to do with Stew Leonard JR. (pictured above) the charismatic son of the founder of the grocery store who came to work and saw a line. He hates lines it seems. So a worker had to determine whether to serve him or the people in line. I’ve been fortunate enough to be out to dinner at a restaurant where a few tables away Stew Junior was having a meeting with his workers and getting them revved up. He is really good at motivating based on my 30-45 minutes of listening to the man pitch the company and why it’s a great place to work.
But getting back to the workers – there was a discussion about what you do in this situation… Do you serve the owner or do you serve the customers in line. One person said you serve the customers while another said you ALWAYS serve Stew first.
And this got me thinking – obviously the reason Stew and in fact every other company is in business is because of customers. Rarely do companies deem they have too many people purchasing from them – especially in this economy. So the correct answer to me is you serve the customers first, clear out the line and then get to founder’s son.
For a company which is as customer-focused as Stew’s this seems like a no-brainer.
And more importantly this discussion reminds us of the value of our customers – the importance of servicing them quickly and the need to ensure they are always treated so well they want to come back for more.
As more business moves online, we have to remember that sometimes the intangibles like having a stone in front of your store which makes customers feel good don’t easily translate to the web. This is why we need to be sure to come up with new and innovative ways to ensure customers know we care about them – even as more interactions are automated.
So maybe now is a good time to reexamine your CRM strategy and how you interact with customers in your contact center, on Twitter and Facebook. After all, when the customer feels welcome and they are treated like royalty, Stew Leonard’s amazing success reminds us they have no problem emptying their wallets to purchase loyally from you.
]]>But in many cases a reactive carrier can reduce churn due to customer dissatisfaction. And this is one of the goals of Aito Technologies a company in the customer experience analytics (CEA) space. In a meeting with CEO Anssi Tauriainen I learned the company combines business and technology allowing operators to see a comprehensive picture of customers which include devices, faults and revenue. Moreover they deliver results quickly with integration times in weeks not months.
The company touts its products as being able to help carriers increase revenue. For example, by actively targeting customer groups, a customer has seen 30% better response rates. Moreover, data mining requests have dropped as much as 95% at some carriers and churn has dropped by 1% in another example.
Recently the company added Device Insight, which includes a database of 2,200 devices with their capabilities; for example OS, screen resolution, memory and connectivity. Moreover there is also Dynamic Segmentation allowing a carrier to quickly determine top data customers facing a degraded experience or VIP customers who frequently use data.
Another new addition is social network analysis allowing carriers to see changing sentiment on major social networks. This data in turn can be linked to customer acquisition and churn to determine correlations.
Additionally there is an increased focus on profitability and revenue allowing you to see gross margin by customer and lifetime customer value. This information in turn can be compared to acquisition cost which is about 150 euros in Europe. There is also the ability to link with Google maps allowing carriers to see user behavior by geographic region.
As I wrote about in my recent Acme Packet University post, communications is becoming more complicated whether we like it or not. And this complication manifests itself as myriad and ever-expanding log files which eventually turn into databases. Aito Technology can help mine these databases for treasure.
]]>But while it is understood by many web-savvy companies that social is important – how many of them are embracing social CRM? My informal analysis shows the numbers are very low meaning there could be huge room for growth.
That is of course if you don’t ascribe to the idea that it is important for companies to help shape the dialogue about themselves online. More importantly, you don’t believe that tying social media into CRM systems can boost sales and service levels and perhaps even increase productivity.
One person who believes in the power of social CRM is Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara. Around 1991 or so he told me at a dinner that his new company contact management/CRM company Goldmine has lots of potential because, “There is no Lotus in the market.” Ironically, Goldmine did in fact become a major player in the space while Lotus faded from the scene.
Last year Nimble rolled out its initial cloud-based social CRM solution and there are now 30,000 users and 3,000 of them spend almost half their day on the platform. The newly released Nimble 2.0 aims to increase the first if not both of these numbers. In Ferrara’s own words, “Nimble is an integration of social listening and engagement platform, internal collaboration with sales and marketing capabilities of traditional CRM and elegance and simplicity of contact manager rolled into one easy to use system.”
He contrasts the look of Nimble – which is similar to a Facebook page to Salesforce which he says looks like a mainframe screen. Additionally, he believes that while Hootsuite is useful it’s limited because it doesn’t allow you to drill down on specific contacts.
Successful salespeople have always known that information related to a certain prospect could help increase the chance of a sale. In other words, if you know where a potential customer went to college, that information could be helpful in relationship-building which in turn could give you the edge in a competitive sales situation. Although people like to believe they purchase based on objective facts, likeability and/or trust of a salesperson is a major factor in pulling the purchasing trigger.
And one of Nimble’s objectives is to boost relationships by enabling companies to get a better overall picture of their prospective customers.
Ferrara likens Nimble 2.0 to fishing in the social river where salespeople can find a needle in a haystack. By tying in traditional CRM data, a company can ascertain which people on social networks have also downloaded documents from the corporate website. Moreover, companies can also determine who in the social stream is interested in which products.
For a few years now I have swept all my Twitter follow emails into a special folder and I’m frankly amazed at the quality of the follows on this network. Not only do I find numerous related companies I never heard of and are worthy of coverage. Often these follows turn into prospects and sometimes become new customers of TMC.
Tying these follows into a CRM system makes infinite sense if for no other reason than to justify the spend companies are making on social media.
In other words if you are to put aside the passion that Jon and I share for the future of commerce being closely aligned with social CRM, then at least you should be onboard with using an integrated Social CRM tool to evaluate the ROI of the effort your company is putting into social networks.
In using the platform I am happy to report it has proper hooks into a number of social networks including Google+. A number of other social aggregation platforms don’t yet connect to Google+ for some reason. Moreover, although I am a Nimble dabbler, not a frequent user, I find its daily email digest of job changes from my social networks very useful.
Jon also feels his company’s integrated solution is better suited to the world of social-CRM than a CRM system with social bolted on. While this is a logical statement, I wouldn’t count out Oracle, Salesforce or any other CRM vendors as social integration should be straightforward. Sure, some will always do it better and Nimble is a pioneer but that doesn’t mean the CRM world won’t be watching like a hawk and emulating like a cheetah.
Nimble is free for standalone personal users and business and multi-users can sign up for $15 per user per month. At that price it is certainly worth trying.
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The trends below are at times augmented or enhanced with my thoughts.
1) Mobility raises the expectation of availability
Voice is morphing in the enterprise and becoming more consumer-driven and as a result everyone is connected at all times and moreover everyone wants immediate action. Consumers want to know right away if that widget on the website is compatible with European power or if the red color of the lamp online is closer to burgundy, beet or pomegranate.
Consumers are walking around with smartphones today that are the computing equivalent of supercomputers of a few decades back. This means we not only can do anything anywhere from a voice and data perspective, we will need to in order to maintain our customers and jobs. This is certainly not a new trend – a huge jump in being able to work around the clock took place in the nineties when voicemail allowed executives, salespeople and others to check messages without being in the office. BlackBerrys continued this trend and the web and e-mail turbocharged it and today’s powerful devices, WiFi and 3G/4G networks have supercharged the trend.
2) Contact centers test the value of voice
More companies will calculate where voice communications fit into their value stream, from pure cost to revenue generation. This is straight from Avaya - I didn’t get into this one as I thought some of the other bullets were more interesting.
3) Contextual data spans the last mile of personal productivity
For those of you were around during the 1980s in the call center space, you may recall the call centers who could invest millions of dollars were able to connect their Rockwell ACDs to their IBM mainframes to allow a database dip when the phone call information appeared via ANI and this in turn allowed a screen pop on the agents desk when they answered a phone call. What could be “popped” depended upon what was in the database but the idea here is we can do “screen pops squared” today because a call can come in and we can leverage CRM repositories, enterprise search tools, social networks, blogs, wikis and you name it. It is really just a matter of organizing it all. The idea is the more information agents have, the better they can serve their customers and in turn the more loyal the customers will be, resulting in higher ARPU and stickiness to borrow some terms from the wireless space.
4) Businesses advance from social media to social business
The idea here is we are about to cross the chasm of social adoption in companies – the social company or social enterprise is around the corner which in tech adoption turns will likely take 5-10 years. Interestingly at a recent conference I attended one vendor told me about a financial company which installed a state-of-the-art social platform for their company to use. Problem was the majority of the company was made up stock brokers who were – let me put this delicately, closer to retirement than college. Basically the old folks couldn’t figure out the newfangled pokes, circles and the like. Who says I have to be diplomatic all the time? :-)
Point being once again, this will be a journey, not a destination we reach in the next few years. Are we there yet? No. Quit your whining and be patient. :-)
5) Social media and customer care enter into an arranged marriage
My family came to this country from one in which arranged marriages were the norm. Let’s just say you didn’t necessarily fall in love you were I suppose “told” to love. Keep that in mind when you integrate your contact center and social strategies as customers have to feel like the two are seamless and agents need to be able to navigate the Venus of the Contact center and the Mars of social with aplomb. Just keep in mind, you really need to get it right the first time as there is no prenup I am aware of.
The rest of these are straight from Avaya – stay tuned for more comments from me after number 12:
6) The SIP is raised again
early adopters have completed implementation of, and captured initial ROI from, SIP-enabled infrastructure; now they’ll begin deploying SIP-enabled applications to gain the next level of value.
7) Social interactions expose customer care’s flaws
Businesses can’t fake who they are in a “social” setting, because social interactions ultimately expose “the real you.” Some businesses will discover they aren’t portraying an image they prefer, so they’ll be compelled to reinvent what customer centricity is all about.
8) IT support staffs converge, part two
In many companies, voice and data support teams converged with the advent of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony; with the deployment of unified communications applications, more companies will blend their applications teams as well.
9) Continuous connectivity drives communications support services
Communications support services increasingly will involve proactive problem resolution via secure access links and live interaction when necessary via innovative Web environments.
10) “True” UC apps proliferate
IT departments will be compelled by business units and enterprise users to adopt more user-centric applications and devices.
11) UC managed services/outsourcing facilitates alignment between IT and business units
As business unit demands increase at an even faster clip, more IT departments will adopt managed services/outsourcing business models to keep pace. IT groups that resist will continue to struggle.
12) Clients take control of managed services
As IT departments better understand industry best practices around infrastructure management, they will become more discriminating about the services they purchase, their expectations for transparency into those services, and how they hold service providers accountable.
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A few important points - on number eight, the company believes there also needs to be an evolution in IT meaning the director of infotech for the call center needs to understand data, UC, UC apps and be more savvy about MSP-based solutions. And on number ten, the concept here isn’t CEBP or Communications Enabled Business Processes it is more about BYOD – so think mobility.
I also asked the company how these trends are or aren’t manifesting themselves into sales and the response was more clients are seeing true value in UC and app-centric communications. Moreover, they are looking to more creative ways to procure solutions meaning the manufacturer becomes the systems integrator and moreover they are looking for more MSP-based delivery models.
I also asked about Avaya’s Flare collaboration environment which the company rolled out a short while back and they said it is available on the iPad – I downloaded it and it is pretty slick. In the future we can expect it to become video-enabled on this platform and Flare for Android and PC are coming in the spring of 2012.
I also asked about the company’s A175 tablet and didn’t get the sense this device is lighting the world on fire. Let’s put it this way – I knew it was tough to compete with the iPad at $500 when the A175 costs about $2,000. Now there is an Amazon Kindle Fire priced at $200. Believe me there is no comparison between the capabilities of the A175 and these other devices as it is multimedia-enabled and is really a super-powerful device for road warriors. It’s just that Avaya doesn’t have the appeal or consumer electronics name of an Apple or Amazon and this presents a challenge.
Another interesting point is that customers have seen cloud advertised so often they are interested in these types of solutions but they don’t necessarily need their system to be in the cloud. In other words it can be a solution which is MSP-based and OPEX oriented. In other words Avaya is trying to listen to customer needs and cut through the catchy cloud computing and cloud communications buzzwords to determine how they can solve their customer’s needs.
You can also see Avaya’s original thoughts on these trends if you are interested in seeing them without my added perspective.
You can see Avaya live as part of TMC’s ITEXPO where they have consistently been running their Technology on Tap events. It will take place Tuesday, January 31, 2012 from 5-10 pm EST in Miami Florida at the Miami Beach Convention Center (not the typical hotel setting you may be used to). Moreover the keynote will be given by the Author of Cloud Computing for Dummies, Judith Hurwitz. The company kindly requests you register in advance, thank you.
]]>Marc Benioff having worked at Oracle realizes how successful the model of owning a software ecosystem is. Sure there is AppExchange but Salesforce realizes owning much of the ecosystem is even better as you have more control. Moreover, not all the successful apps live on AppExchange.
Today the company has extended its ecosystem of cloud-based solutions with its purchase of cloud-based HR company Rypple for what they say is the first step toward human capital management for the social enterprise.
And how’s this for a marque customer – Facebook reviews its employees using Rypple.
The new HCM business unit, including Successforce, will be led by John Wookey, salesforce.com's executive vice president of advanced applications. Wookey came to Salesforce.com with more than 20 years of experience in senior leadership at Oracle and SAP.
This follows recent news that the acquisition of social listening company Radian6 has resulted in creating the company’s social marketing cloud offering.
At this rate it is worth noting the company will butt heads with Google who also wants to be a major player in the cloud-based application space. I would be surprised if Google isn’t considering purchasing Salesforce… Then again they have collaborated closely for years, it is unclear to me other than recent Salesforce momentum from what the M&A catalyst would be.
Then again there has been tremendous Java-related legal pressure on Google’s Android after Oracle acquired SUN. So how's this for killing two birds with one stone? You get cloud-based software and customers as well and what can be described as a "cloud-based Oracle." What better way to compete against Oracle?
Of course Google may need to digest Motorola Mobility first.
]]>The idea of cloud is not new – think mainfraimes, ADP for payroll and the ASP market of over a decade ago. This time though the investors are behind the move and it seems potentially for good. I say “potentially” because I launched a magazine to educate the market on the cloud revolution called Communications ASP in 2001 and it was a mega-success for a few issues until almost all our advertisers told us at once that their investors no longer allowed them to use the term ASP.
Poof. And just like that the market disappeared – bankrupting the majority of these players except for a few like Salesforce.com who scraped by.
This weekend the news broke that cloud-based SuccessFactors was purchased at a 50% premium to their Friday closing price by SAP and Oracle was rumored to have been in the bidding as well.
We have a slow economy – a record 46 million Americans on stamps, Europe in major trouble and a boom in the values of cloud companies. It is incredible actually. Irrational exuberance? I’m not sure – could be but it does seem that every company needs some sort of cloud play and purchasing is faster than building. Anyone remember the term “Internet time?” Should we rename it “cloud time?” Perhaps.
Another thing that set off my déjà vu meter was a report which Tom Keating sent over to me via email… IP addresses are now being sold for a record $12 a pop. The reason is the move to IPV6 and the lack of IPV4 addresses. Still, this isn’t much of a premium over the $11.25 paid in March of this year by Microsoft per 666,624 address they purchased but any dollar amount is more than you would have paid a year or so ago so that’s real appreciation.
Back in the day – 1999 when everyone in your tech company – including the people in the cafeteria and janitorial were paper millionaires we expected anything in the Internet space to have insane valuations and domain names were selling for many millions apiece. Well it seems those days may be returning. In fact, remember last June when I wrote that domain name values were increasing in price again? It seems in some ways the glory days are back but let’s hope this time for the sake of investors, employees and customers that we put more of a focus on earnings, profit and long-term business sustainability.
Speaking of the good old days – TMC will be debuting Cloud Computing Magazine next year. Here are the details and a subscription form. Let’s just hope investors will still be OK with the term “cloud” after issue # 3. 
What happens when you merge social CRM, location based marketing, mobile marketing, loyalty rewards and targeted social marketing? The answer is Rockit – a new company whose goal is to prove to the world that managing customers in the new multichannel, multimedia world is far from “rocket science” (get it?).
The company provides a loyalty-enabled platform allowing customers to sign up for offers in categories of interest or by company and these companies can use the platform to track customer loyalty, communicate and push out special offers and incentives.
Lest you get this concept confused with daily deal type solutions which give deep discounts, the idea here is the exact opposite… It is to create a VIP program which appeals to your best customers and to get more people to become VIPs.
Once a customer is connected to a company they are able to instantly communicate with the organization regarding anything. Let’s say they had a burnt pizza come to their table – they can immediately launch the mobile app and send a verbal complaint to the company. The company can see immediately that a very loyal customer just had a poor experience and can respond with an offer, apology or whatever they need to do to keep this customer happy.
Founder and CEO of Rockit, Roger Toennis explained the platform is like a closed-loop Yelp with multimedia. He also told me it's like a modern social PBX. I met Roger a decade or so ago at a TMC conference – possibly ITEXPO or Planet PDA and soon thereafter he showed me a mobile VoIP app which worked with the Avaya PBX. He was working for the company at the time. It was really ahead of its time and Rockit seems to be as well.
Part of the goal of Rockit is to reduce the "too much information" problem customers are faced with today
Another interesting thing the app allows is the ability for customers to see how they rank in terms of their loyalty. It even lets them compete for the next tier. This is exactly what American Airlines did over the last few decades to engender massive amounts of loyalty with its customers and I can tell you from experience that customers will compete with each other and are proud to be Platinum or Gold members of their respective airline, hotel or rent-a-car company.
You can further use the system to send promotions to a subset of customers. Let’s say your top 20 most loyal or the 50 people who haven’t come into a retail location or visited the website this month.
Business consultants will tell you it costs eight times more to get a new customer than it does to keep one – and this is the sort of solution which is designed to keep customers loyal. Moreover, you can use it to encourage your most loyal customers to encourage their friends to become customers as well. To get their assistance, you can offer them something in return and as Roger says, there is a high likelihood the new customer will have similar age and demographics and could also end up becoming a loyal customer.
As Toennis explains, this solution is different than daily deal offers which erode prices by giving current customers the ability to pay less than they currently do. He goes on to say this gets customers used to paying less and they could soon start shopping for lower prices when they are ready to purchase again. He also doesn’t see location-based punch card services like Foursquare as serious solutions as he explains the intersection of people checking in and loyal customers is not that great.
He told me about all sorts of loyalty offers for top customers such as potentially allowing free voice and video calls as well as giving access to free music from local bands.
He also sees this solution as real social CRM – he equates companies who try to market via Twitter and Facebook as the equivalent of walking around with a sandwich board promoting their products while two potential customers are sitting and having lunch.
This doesn’t mean the platform doesn’t integrate with email, Twitter and Facebook – it does. The company doesn’t however provide a listening and analytics platform like Hootsuite.
We all know most small businesses don’t make it – he thinks this is the exact sort of differentiator they need to increase their chance at being successful. Moreover, it meets the expectations of today’s customer who wants to have online conversations, be social and get rewarded for their loyalty.
I downloaded the company’s app at rockit.me and after registering was able to get access to a variety of companies in Colorado (where the company is based.) The only challenge is if you register with Facebook on the web, you can’t login on your mobile device. I registered once through Facebook and again with a Rockit specific password so I could get my phone to login to my account. Once I selected the cities and companies I was interested in the iPhone app gave me different options and associated rewards/offers. But in this case the offers were points – not deep discounts.
The service is free for up to 50 loyal customers per year per location and premium services for more loyalty lists start at $199/month and max at $2,499 per month. Other paid features include a multi-location dashboard, advanced data analytics and custom social media integrations.
Will companies want to be associated on the same loyalty platform as their competition? The answer here is probably most companies won’t mind but a few paranoid entrepreneurs will avoid it. I believe they will do this at their own peril, especially if Rockit goes mainstream.
The company does have some big companies in Colorado backing them it is a huge world and going from regional to national is always a challenge.
The biggest problem the company has is the breadth of a solution it is providing. It is indeed an immense challenge merging social CRM, location based marketing, mobile marketing, loyalty rewards and targeted social marketing. But it does make sense as it brings the tried and true model of the American Airlines frequent flyer program to every business and moreover allows many small companies to leverage an extremely sophisticated, state-of-the art, social media integrated-marketing platform.
Although many separate disciplines have been integrated into Rockit the result is a clever and relatively simple interface. This solution has the potential to change the way many companies think about customer interactions.
I have invited Roger to speak at TMC’s Social CRM Expo Feb 1-3, 2012 in Miami, FL so be sure to visit him there.
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which “gamifies” performance allowing agents to see how their performance ranks among others at the company. By utilizing KPIs set by the company, a worker can see their progress or lack thereof and can react accordingly. The company says its system will reduce turnover and it even has a widget which agents can look at to see progress.
Agents can also communicate with their supervisor and receive awards based on achievement. There is also e-learning integration which means there is now an additional motivation to learn and do well on the associated quizzes. The goal here is to get competition going among the team and as a byproduct boost productivity of the whole operation.
PLAYCALL is new and the company has high expectations. they are further looking for funding, a VP of Marketing, VP of Sales and VP of engineering. There is potential here – some of these features are contained in other workforce management solutions of course but the pure-play focus will likely attract the attention of call center decision-makers looking to boost productivity by trying something new and innovative.
While I have a meeting later today at UCONN which I am very excited about, a good portion of my team is on the way to the following shows – I’ll share just the editorial talent at each one with you.
Interactive Intelligence Partner Conference: This company has been one of the constant innovators in communications and tech, most likely becoming one of the key contact center in the cloud providers. To cover this event, we are sending one of our most experienced editors, Peter Bernstein. It should be a great event – I was fortunate enough to be offered a keynote speaking opportunity a few years back at this very conference.
4G World – Formerly WiMAX World, the event is in Chicago and we are sending our editorial chief Erik Linask and Carl Ford of Crossfire Media will be there representing our partnered properties in the mobility, 4G and M2M spaces.
Astricon: Mark Spencer is the Linux Torvalds of the communications space – and he is responsible for single-handedly changing the market into something more open and flexible. At this event, you can meet Tom Keating, a TMC veteran of about two decades and the famous VoIP and Gadget Blogger as well as Chris Dimarco – another veteran TMC editor who will be on video doing interviews.
In a way, these events which represent open-source, mobility and the cloud also represent the major trends in tech and telecom and I just can’t wait to see what news breaks this week. If you are interested as well, come back to this blog at Tehrani.com and of course keep an eye on TMCnet.
]]>Even more impressive, so many of these successful businesspeople seem to reach a point in their career where they don’t feel satisfied helping society through their inventions and hiring, they want to focus on problems with society and fix them directly.
Such is the case with Gary and Mary West – two legends in the call 
center space as founders of West Corp. As you may know,in 1982 TMC launched the first magazine in the world in the call center space and at the time we called it Telemarketing (now Customer Interaction Solutions). Believe it or not, The term call center wasn't coined until the late eighties. And one of our areas of focus was on the outsourcing space – which at that time was virtually all done domestically in places like Iowa and Nebraska.
For decades, West Corp constantly placed high on lists of contact center outsourcing companies TMC ranked and currently employs around 35,000 people. This past decade the company evolved by promoting home-agent outsourcing allowing US workers to be more cost-competitive with their international competition from countries like India.
Today, Gary and Mary have announced the formation of West Health Investment Fund, LLC a $100M fund to provide risk capital to lower health care costs and invigorate low cost health care innovation. Specifically, the company explains that the rising healthcare cots are an unsustainable burden on our economy and moreover that the fund will help bring disruptive solutions to market to help solve the problem.
The initial portfolio of the fund is as follows:
Biological Dynamics, whose next-generation diagnostics technology may enable physicians to detect cancer from a simple blood draw and rapidly intervene, increasing patient survivability while driving down the cost of care;
Change Healthcare, whose web-based decision support tool Transparency Messenger™ provides consumers with personalized views of pricing information and alerts on where to save money on routine healthcare services including medical, dental and prescriptions;
goBalto, whose new generation web-based solutions simplify pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device clinical research;
Healthsense, whose in-home monitoring sensors and solutions alert family members and providers of potential health problems before they become acute, enabling seniors to remain healthy and independent;
Humedica, a clinical informatics company whose cutting-edge analytics for health care organizations delivers a truly longitudinal and comprehensive view of patient care; and,
Sotera Wireless, whose new generation of continuous vital signs monitoring improves the safety of patients on the general floor of hospitals, while at the same time reducing costs.
And this announcement comes at an interesting time as there seems to be intense media exposure for a group of a few thousand “occupy” protesters and union members who seem to think that wealthy people and corporations are not contributing enough to society. And when I hear such comments I wonder why the press never asks them – What about the company which invented life-saving cancer treatments or medicines to combat AIDS? What about the company which invented better fertilizers or seeds to help reduce world hunger? Or the technology companies which helped third-world companies rife with poverty more quickly evolve into first world powerhouses? Brazil comes to mind.
So hats off the Gary and Mary – they have been held in the highest esteem here at TMC for many decades and although I didn’t think it possible, they just topped themselves.
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