People want simplicity, efficiency and facility in everything they do. Monitoring and maintaining their health is no exception. In fact, when they’re not feeling well and want answers, people tend to be more rather than less impatient.
iTriage LLC, is a Denver, Colorado–based global health care technology company that was founded in 2008 by two emergency medicine physicians. iTriage makes it easier for people to figure out what might be wrong with them, and where they should seek treatment. Consumers around the world have downloaded iTriage’s free mobile app to their iPhones and Androids, and health care providers use it to share with those consumers important health information. Read the full article »
SM: I’ll defer to you on this. This whole game is going to come under tremendous margin pressure. Everybody innovates. Everybody will continue to innovate. There will be new players that will apply more pricing pressure, but anytime it becomes a major telecom game, including cloud storage, these are all pricing games, and they’re going to come under tremendous margin pressure.
DG: Yes, I can say that about any technology. It does over time, but you have to continue to enhance, make new versions, bring new value to the users to justify price and upgrades, and that’s what we do. We recently released a new version of GlobalMeet that adds new features and functionalities that we believe brings value to our customers. Read the full article »
Aaron Block is the CEO of Bay.ru, the first cross-border e-commerce business in Russia and the fastest growing shopping site in Russia. Bay.ru’s growth has been powered by affiliate partnerships with eBay and Amazon which provides Bay.ru an integrated product catalog in a wide range of categories. Prior to Bay.ru he worked in management positions at the commercial real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield. He graduated from the University of Illinois after studying urban and regional planning.
Sramana: Aaron, let’s start with your personal story. Where are you from? What kind of background leads up to the Bay.ru story?
Aaron Block: I was born and raised in Chicago. I studied urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois. I started my career in commercial real estate with Cushman and Wakefield, the third largest global real estate firm in the world. Read the full article »
SM: Again, give me so use cases. Give me an example or a few examples of things that you are able to do with the kind of user experience work that you do that I wouldn’t be able to do in an off-the-shelf iPad application front ending an MRP system or CRM system.
PL: Sure. If you take SAP CRM, for instance, out of the box, if you’re trying to place an order, it’s not necessarily the most straightforward way to do it. But one of the things that we do is we skin it in a certain way. We make it much more easy to use. We align it based on a process or guided procedure or chevron so that at any point in time – you’ve faced it before when you’re checking out with a credit card. You know there’s a five-step process, and you might know from a chevron or something that you’re on step three of the five-step process, and you can navigate anywhere in between that. Well, that’s the idea that we bring to CRM or the online ordering experience with SAP software. Read the full article »
SM: I understand the motivation. I’m asking more for a state of the union in that market. Since you’re an insider in that marketplace, it sounds like one of your strategies is to sell through these telecom providers.
DG: Yes. It’s not our only strategy, but we believe it’s a great opportunity for the reasons I stated. We have a direct salesforce as well. We have SMB online sales. We go to market through lots of channels.
SM: I got that, but what is the state of the union on the telecom provider side? Is this a major trend? Are all telecom providers offering virtual conferencing services? Read the full article »
According to the recently released Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016, global mobile data traffic grew 2.3 times last year to 597 petabytes per month. The report estimates that the monthly global mobile data traffic will grow 78% annually over the period 2011 through 2016 to surpass 10 exabytes. Growth will be driven by Asia Pacific and Western Europe, which will account for more than half of global mobile traffic by 2016. The Middle East and Africa will record the highest CAGR of 104% during the term, and Asia Pacific will grow 21 times at a CAGR of 84%.
Sramana: In the pre-SaaS era, a lot of software got bought and sold that just stayed on the shelf. Siebel was notorious for being shelfware. As a category, is SaaS significantly better in terms of utilization rates?
Jon Kondo: The beauty of SaaS is that if a company is not using the software, then they are going to turn it off. It is a subscription service, which makes it easy to start and stop. We are very conscious of that, which is why we track usage so intently. If we see usage is low, we will interact with those clients. We want to maintain that revenue stream. Read the full article »
SM: What would be helpful would be to double click down on some of those and give me some use cases. How are researchers using it?
PL: Sure. Let’s say there’s a sales rep who needs to be connected with his inventory, and a particular life sciences company that makes medical devices needs to constantly replenish stock or know where its stock of medical devices is located. It could be with the sales rep; it could be in a distribution center; it could be at the hospital itself; or it could be at the metro center. But having built an iOS application that allows that rep to know at any given time, here’re all the surgeries that are happening for his clients or technicians who are using these medical devices and for that sales rep to be able to know his schedule based on these surgeries. He can go to the doctors and talk to the nurses, see which surgical procedures were performed, know what was used and then replenish that inventory all while standing in the doctor’s office and then reducing that inventory back with his ERP systems. That’s just an example of an iPad app that lets us keep track of inventory and makes it easier to create purchase orders and fulfillment and replenishment on the sales rep’s side. Read the full article »
