Did your vibrating fitness bracelet wake you up on time? Good, because Jawbone has not one, but two pieces of news to share this morning. First off, getting the corporate news out of the way, the company's buying BodyMedia, perhaps best known for its wearable fitness trackers (yep, similar to what Jawbone's already making). In fact, though, BodyMedia's been in the health-data business since 1999, with a particularly strong foothold in the medical industry -- a market Jawbone hasn't reached yet, but would like to. As you can imagine, once the deal is finalized and Jawbone brings on BodyMedia's 60-odd employees, the plan will be to improve Jawbone's existing apps, and maybe even break into healthcare. In the meantime, we're told Jawbone will continue to sell BodyMedia's fitness monitors, but it's making no promises to keep them around indefinitely.
Speaking of improving the current Jawbone apps, the company is also opening up its API to developers so that they can use Jawbone stats in their applications, as well as share their own data back with Jawbone. For now, the Up platform is open only for iOS, though a company rep told us an Android version is in the works too. (No exact ETA there, sorry.) At launch, there will be 10 apps on board, including notables like RunKeeper, Withings and MapMyFitness. What's neat is that users can manually disable a connection with these apps anytime they want, and when they do, these third-party developers are required to delete user data from their servers. Again, no word on when this will be available for Android, but for now, at least, the iOS platform is open to developers worldwide. Hit the break for more info, along with a full list of the apps you can sync with your Up band right away.
Filed under: Wearables
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Paidpiper launched at Disrupt NY today, aiming to make your physical wallet, and presence, less necessary -- in a good way. Paidpiper aims to solve that problem with its consumer-facing app, Ok?d. Using Ok?d, you can walk into a store, snap a picture of a product, and send it to a friend, parent, employer, etc. and ask them to pay for it.
Editor?s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals.
SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care. The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce, online-to-offline commerce, education tech, the sharing economy and the “Internet of things.” Now they’re adding “health informatics” to that list. By that, SV Angel is looking for startups that “use software, IT and data science to help diagnose, treat, reduce and cure disease – at the physical, mental and emotional levels.” It’s a broader definition than just bioinformatics, because it encompasses medical records and other types of patient data. Managing director David Lee, who is a cancer survivor, said that the firm finally feels comfortable with the idea that software is about to eat?healthcare. “I’m not a biologist. I don’t invest in biotech companies. We’re software investors first and foremost,” he said. “But the more I learned about bioinformatics and health records, the more I felt that the timing was ripe.” A couple things are feeding into this. For one, the costs of genome sequencing are falling dramatically. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has gone from $100 million in 2001 to $8,000 today — even faster than Moore’s Law. Secondly, there are meaningful governmental and financial incentives to move toward electronic medical records. (It’s also just common sense to move away from paper records.) He pointed to investments in companies like Counsyl (which I profiled earlier this week), Benchling and medical records startups like Elation EMR and Practice Fusion. There are also younger startups like Medisas, which is building software to help with patient hand-offs and transfers. A few other firms like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Felicis Ventures have carved out reputations over the past few years for aggressively investing in health tech. Note that no one here is backing companies that require an expensive, 10-year drug testing cycle overseen by the FDA. All of these firms tend to look for companies that have less regulatory risk, like in the medical devices space or with diagnostics and bioinformatics. SV Angel has been one of the most prolific backers of social networking, real-time, mobile (and yes, even SoLoMo) startups over the past few years. So are they eating their words? “People
