CommerceNet portfolio company, PatientsLikeMe, is featured in a New York Times Magazine article, "Practicing Patients," by Thomas Goetz.

"At first glance, [PatientsLikeMe] looks like just any other online community, a kind of MySpace for the afflicted. Members have user names, post pictures of themselves and post updates and encouragements. As such, it's related to the chat rooms and online communities that have inhabited the Internet for more than a decade.

But PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don't just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it's all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience."

>Read the full article

CollabRx, one of CommerceNet's latest portfolio companies, applies collaborative science to slash the time, cost, and risk of therapy development for neglected diseases.

CollabRx builds and operates virtual biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. The CollabRx research platform connects researches to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale.

Learn more

The video of Marty Tenenbaum's presentation Healthcare 3.0: Transforming Medicine through Collective Intelligence can now be downloaded as well as viewed online. This particular presentation was given at the Biomedin 200 Collaquia at Stanford University in May.

Here's the abstract:

All of healthcare is an experiment, but we measure only a small portion of the outcomes, i.e., in clinical trials. We're also not very good at collaboratively analyzing the data, interpreting the results, and disseminating them in a timely and meaningful manner. In this talk we will present a vision and technological approach for addressing these problems by using the Web to tap the collective intelligence of patients, physicians and medical researchers, ultimately bringing the world's knowledge and resources to bear on curing diseases one patient at a time.

The New York Times reports on a study authored by CN Fellow Rachna Dhamija. The study, conducted with colleagues at Harvard and MIT, tested a website authentication system currently in use by Bank of America, ING Direct and Vanguard. In this system, online banking customers are asked to select an image that they will see every time they log in to their account. If customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent, or "phishing" Web site, and should not enter their passwords. However, in a usability test, the researchers found that most online banking customers did not notice when the images were absent and provided their passwords.

Public radio's FutureTense program interviewed Rachna about the study and released a short MP3 of the interview.

More details can be found in the draft paper [PDF], which will be published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May.

In collaboration with CommerceNet and ChipIn (a CommerceNet portfolio company), the University of California, Berkeley launched an online marketplace to help students raise funds to support their projects to change the world. The Big Ideas @ Berkeley marketplace (http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/) promotes student projects aimed at addressing some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century, such as clean energy, safe drinking water, global poverty reduction, technology-based entrepreneurship, and health care for the uninsured.Development of the marketplace was supported by CommerceNet; the technology for the site was developed by ChipIn (www.chipin.com), an online service that provides a quick, easy and secure way of collecting money from groups of people.CommerceNet encourages you to learn more about and support these bold projects!Read more at: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/12/13_ideas.shtml

 

 

Check your inbox for an invitation to the 2006 Holiday Open House at our offices in Palo Alto, at 169 University Avenue. Cocktails, conversations, and connections after work on a Tuesday evening - who could ask for more? Another jumbo chocolate fountain, like the last two years? Well, stay tuned...

If we've overlooked you, please don't hesitate to drop us a line!

Back in May, CommerceNet participated in several events at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh. The conference organizers commissioned series of podcasts interviewing WWW2006 participants professionally recorded and produced by Bright Indigo's Peter Croasdale.

On their fourth and final installment, "Business and Society" (program notes, full transcript coming in September), released on August 15th, they interviewed CommerceNet Labs director Rohit Khare about the nature of innovation in Web 2.0, and how to unlock value with 'mash-ups' (MP3). In particular, about 20% in, he discussed FlySpy and the kind of disruption its user interface represents by reusing the flight reservations booking infrastructure.