Launched by the former head of Nokia’s App Studios after a frustrating personal run-in with the health care system, the startup provides easy access to a searchable database of about 600,000 doctors nationwide.  It launched on the web and with a mobile optimized last fall but on Thursday released its first mobile app for the iPhone.

“What we focus on is the discovery problem – it’s not always about needing to find a doctor today,” said founder and CEO Ari Tulla, referencing ZocDoc. And, he added, that when it comes to mobile, “If I learned anything [at Nokia], it’s that mobile has to be very simple – there has to be one thing that it does well.”

For BetterDoctor, he hopes that one thing is helping people find a good doctor in as little time as possible.

To streamline the process, the service only helps people search for a general practitioners, dentists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs and optometrists (as opposed to the endless array of specialists available on ZocDoc and other sites).  And it only lets people search by location and insurance company. The service is free to consumers but earns revenue through lead generation.

Similar to ZodDoc, the app then returns a list of relevant doctors, with biographical and contact information, specialties, affiliations and reviews (supplied by Yelp). But Tulla said the company pays special attention to evaluating doctor quality. While other doctor discovery marketplaces may give prime real estate to those willing to pay for it regardless of how good they are, he said BetterDoctor uses big data and machine learning algorithms to attempt to validate each doctor.

In addition to the basics – a doctor’s education, board certification and experience – the startup looks at patient reviews, malpractice history and referral data that can indicate whom other doctors hold in high esteem.  Doctors that meet all of its criteria surface most visibly in searches and get a special designation as a validated physician; doctors that have don’t pass malpractice screenings or have other issues end up closer to the bottom of the list.

BetterDoctor is definitely not without competition – besides ZocDoc, companies like HealthTap, PokitDok, HealthInReach and others fall somewhere on the spectrum in the doctor discovery space. But I like their data-driven approach to validating doctors (HealthTap also attempts to rank doctors by quality although it uses slightly different variables), and I appreciate their stance on reviews. Tulla said patient reviews are only a part of how doctors are ranked because “consumer reviews are tricky in healthcare.”  Studies have shown that on most doctor review sites, there aren’t enough reviews for them to be reliable and that they tend to skew positive.

Unlike many doctor discovery sites, BetterDoctor doesn’t let patients leave reviews and comments of their own because Tulla said they don’t yet have a way to verify that a patient actually met with the doctor.  But he indicated that it’s something they could roll out in the future.

Tulla declined to share too many details on user activity or revenue, but said the company, which has raised about $525,000 in seed funding so far, has been used by hundreds of thousands of people.

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The filing, first spotted by the Washington Business Journal, indicates that the funding is part of a larger $45 million round and that the first sale took place in April.

Founded in 2010 by 23-year-old Grant Verstandig, the Washington, DC-based company works with insurance companies, such as Cigna, to offer a social, personalized platform that helps consumers make healthy living decisions while competing with others and earning rewards. After meeting Verstandig, Sculley reportedly become his mentor in addition to investing and serving as an Audax board member. According to a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek story, Sculley said Verstandig could be “the Steve Jobs of consumer health services.”

In addition to Sculley, other board members include Richard Klausner, a managing partner at The Column Group venture firm and former executive director of the Global Health Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Roger Ferguson, president and CEO of TIAA-CREF and John Wallis Rowe, a professor of health policy at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. The filing, dated Thursday, comes on the heels of news that the company added four new executives, including former LivingSocial VP Camille Watson and former Meebo VP Tom Perrault.

Audax did not reply to a request for comment but we’ll update when we learn more.

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On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based startup said it had raised $670,000 in seed funding and opened up its site to users nationwide. The funding came from 500 Startups, Box Group, Start Fund, Y Combinator, and several angel investors.

The company initially launched in August 2011 with a site that compared car insurance quotes from top agencies and quickly gained traction among users. But it was forced to go offline and back to the drawing board after insurance companies sent it cease and desist letters because the startup was scraping data from the insurance companies’ web sites.

Leaky (as in “we keep your wallet from leaking”) relaunched in March of this year, but only in California, after finding a way to reverse engineer insurance estimates based on publicly-available data and insurance documentation.

“Innovation in insurance has always been sparse,” said co-founder and CEO Jason Traff. “There are very few people who are doing impartial comparisons that are beneficial to the user.”

Several services help car owners get online quotes, including Progressive, which lets people see a comparison of price estimates, and Insurance.com and CarInsurance.com, which include samplings of actual prices. Bu Traff said the latter two sites are limited by their ability to only show prices for insurers who have partnered with them, which won’t include prices from most of the largest insurers.

On Leaky, users take about 2 to 3 minutes to complete a questionnaire asking about their location, demographics and car-related questions, and then the site returns estimates from an average of 10 to 11 insurance companies, the company said.  Additionally, the service monitors users’ insurance profiles and alerts them when they may be able to save more by switching plans.

For now, the company is focused on auto insurance but Traff said Leaky, which is actually a licensed insurance agency, plans to expand into other kinds of insurance. The service will always remain free for users, he said, but as Leaky expands it intends to make money from sponsorships.

At the moment, not too many startups are taking on the insurance industry. But Leaky isn’t completely alone in its mission. CoverHound, a 2011 graduate of the AngelPad incubator raised $750,000 to similarly help car owners compare insurance quotes.

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Ford and State Farm are working together to use Sync, the automaker’s connected-car platform, to feed driver-behavior information directly to the insurance company, which in turn would use that data to adjust the premiums it charges. The logic goes that if you drive less than the average long-distance commuter or drag racer, there’s less chance you will get in an accident and therefore should catch a break on your insurance rates.

The concept isn’t exactly new. Major insurers have all launched programs that allow safe drivers — or demonstrably unsafe drivers who claim to have changed their ways — to install devices in their cars to track their driving habits and thus qualify for discounts. Judging by the amount of times they slam on the brakes or exceed 85 mph, insurers can determine if these drivers are really as safe as they claim to be. And if Grandma is really only driving that candy-apple-red Hummer to and from church each Sunday, she can catch a break as well.

What’s unique about Ford and State Farm’s partnership is its implementation. Instead of sending out specialty GPS devices or M2M modules that have to be physically connected to the car’s onboard computer, Ford is shipping vehicle data directly from the dash to State Farm’s databases.

Sync is built on a “bring your own connectivity” premise, utilizing in-dash apps that link via Bluetooth to their counterparts within your phone and ultimately to the Internet over the driver’s 3G or 4G smartphone. For instance, Sync supports a dashboard version of Pandora, which loads the service’s settings into its onboard entertainment system and allows drivers to take advantage of Sync’s voice command functions to switch between stations and songs.

For State Farm’s Drive Safe & Save program, a customer gives the insurer access to Ford’s Vehicle Health Report, a free service that draws key metrics directly from the car’s onboard computer. State Farm customers register their car’s vehicle identification number on State Farm’s website, which allows the company to periodically pull data from the report via Sync’s smartphone link.

An insurance policy tailored just for you

So far State Farm is tracking mileage, but the savings it’s offering are quite extensive. By simply registering for the program Ford owners get a 5 percent discount on their premiums. Additionally, at the end of each six-month coverage renewal cycle, Ford uses mileage data to adjust those rates. Those driving the national average of 1,000 miles per month qualify for a 10 percent discount. Customers who let their cars sit in their driveways most of the week can get as much as a 40 percent discount. The service is launching initially in Utah, but State Farm plans to expand it to other states.

Whether State Farm moves beyond simple odometer readings to tracking the full range of driver behavior remains to be seen. Insurers collecting detailed info on where we go, when we speed, and how often we blow stop signs raises some significant privacy concerns, but the programs are all entirely opt-in. And this kind of pay-as-you-drive model seems to be the direction the industry is heading.

It might not be too long before insurance companies start tailoring individual policies for drivers in real time. Imagine having a meter on your dash that tracks your accrued insurance premium as you drive. Like a taxi meter, the meter ticks up a few cents for every mile driven, but it might jump a few nickels every time you exceed the speed limit or slam on your brakes — or when it recognizes your 16-year-old son getting behind the driver’s seat.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Andrei Shumskiy

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One of the biggest issues in healthcare is the proliferation of patient data that is kept siloed in multiple systems. If there were a way to bring that information together so it could be searched, filtered and viewed securely, there is value to insurance companies, medical researchers and potentially to patients. AgeTak’s web site sums up the problem and the opportunity:

We asked ourselves why aren’t researchers using data being collected already on 254M Americans who receive healthcare to improve human health and reduce the $2.6T a year healthcare spending? It’s because this data is spread out over many different organizations and there are concerns about privacy when you combine it to create Big Data for healthcare.

AgeTak, headquartered in Hopkins, Minn., with an office in Indore, India and a new facility in Menlo Park, Calif.,  may be a startup, but it already has software addressing this issue and has logged $3 million in sales. It also has a blue-chip partner: UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer. AgeTak is helping UnitedHealthcare combine data from multiple carriers for comparative effectiveness research.

One application that takes advantage of AgeTak’s backend service is OptumHealth’s TrendView which collects the data from multiple repositories, and aggregates it into a graphical display that lets customers see where costs are out of hand, as well as other key datapoints. Employers can run their own reports, pulling information about the most common conditions covered for employees, for example. Or they can highlight key factors in employee prescription drug costs.  Or they can cut the data to show most commonly used outpatient services used by employees and how much was paid out by which service type.

“You pull the proprietary data into one repository [an IBM Netezza appliance] — our part of the puzzle is the technology that lets you combine databases from multiple places while implementing privacy protection — that’s the big problem,” Verma said in an interview Wednesday.

“United has 36 million people’s data  – what we do is help fold that together so they can use that information to gain additional insight,” Verma said. The company works deep in the database protocols to create what he calls “cross-border middleware technology” that combines multiple the databases.

The original data stays just where it is — in those multiple systems — which is what health organizations want. AgeTak provides capabilities similar to Informatica’s ETL products with an added security component, he said. Other customers include one of the nation’s biggest retailers and a state in the northeast.

AgeTak has a poignant back-story. The company was founded in 2005 by the Verma family and has grown organically since then to 20 employees. Pratik’s father, Rakesh Verma, passed away in 2010. Quickly finishing his Ph.D. in computational chemistry at Stanford, Pratik returned to AgeTak.

Of course, AgeTak is not alone attacking this problem. Astrazenica and WellPointare also taking on this issue. There’s a lot of money at stake and competition will be fierce, but it looks like AgeTak is well on its way to building a sustainable business.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user StartAgain.

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Being the resident “extreme” iPhone case enthusiast (and also the klutz who drops his phone most often), I was intrigued by the new cellhelmet Kickstarter project. This $44.99 case combines svelte design with protection against drops, but bundles it with an actual insurance policy that replaces your iPhone if damaged while in the case.

The case in and of itself isn’t magical, and according to David Artuso of cellhelmet creator cellpig.com, the case isn’t “superman.” The design has angled edges to protect against drops, and a choice of six different colored backplate shields to protect the glass, providing great protection without the bloat of other solutions.

What sets the cellhelmet apart is the bundled insurance policy, administered by Global Warranty Group. Should the iPhone break while in the case, a $50 handling fee covers any repairs required, or complete replacement if necessary. I’ve written about iPhone insurance before,  this case including the insurance for the $44.99 purchase price is what makes it interesting.

The plan does not cover water damage, nor does the case protect the water sensors, but according to gadget insurance provider SquareTrade, glass breakage accounts for 82 percent of its claims. The cellhelmet is competitive with SquareTrade’s own insurance program, but is slightly less expensive, applies even to used iPhones, and of course, comes with a case. Your iPhone has to be in the cellhelmet for its policy to apply, however.

Coverage lasts for one year from the time you purchase your cellhelmet, and should you ever have to claim a total device replacement, you’ll have to buy another cellhelmet, but that’s consistent with other third-party insurance programs. If all your device requires is a screen replacement after an accident, you get unlimited repairs.

For slightly more money than a stylish iPhone case, and slightly less than a third-party insurance program, you can get both by backing the Pittsburgh-based company’s project on Kickstarter. Not a bad deal, especially if you can’t seem to keep a firm grip on Apple’s beautiful but somewhat slippery smartphone designs.

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1. Take a picture of your products and serial numbers

Whether you want to inventory your items or need a handy reference when there’s a problem, taking a picture of the product as well as its serial number means you won’t be in the awkward position of trying to talk on the phone while on the floor with a flashlight trying to read those teeny tiny numbers.

Plus, if you should have a theft or disaster, having a visual record of your items makes it easier for your insurance company to settle your claim.

2. Schedule your items with insurance

Speaking of insurance, I suggest contacting your homeowners, renters, or business insurance provider to see about separate insurance for your most expensive technology items. While insurance providers and policies vary, typically scheduling an item provides it extra protection and covers it separate from your regular deductible. If your computer is scheduled, many times it will even cover data recovery should your computer be dropped or damaged.

3. Track key information in your Address Book and iCal

If only you’d contacted tech support before the warranty expired, the broken gadget would have been repaired at no charge! There’s an easy way to make sure you have all your info on hand when you need it.

As you take pictures of your items in step 1, put the serial number and warranty expiration date in your Address Book along with tech support’s phone number (create custom fields for Serial Number and Tech Support if you wish). Attach the picture of the item to the address book entry.

Then put the warranty expiration in your iCal Now you’ve got all the info you need in one place and won’t miss that warranty expiration date.

A bonus outcome of this tip is that if you are at the electronics store and you have questions about compatibility or which model you own, the information will be handy so long as you sync your address book info manually or through iCloud.

While these tips won’t prevent problems from occurring, they’ll help protect you from further cost and inconvenience when they do.

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Consider the situation with AWS. April’s four-day outage and last week’s hours-long outage had entirely different causes. In the first instance, properly architected applications stayed up and running throughout or suffered only minimal downtime. AWS’s post-mortem of last week’s incident tells a story of root electrical-infrastructure problems that didn’t discriminate in who it affected. If the hardware that powers the cloud isn’t running, even certain high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies might be rendered ineffective.

In both cases, the compensation for affected customers was the same: 10-day service credits equal to 100 percent of their usage. That’s fantastic in terms of getting paid back — and then some — for the actual downtime, but what about the opportunity costs of going down? In the case of a prolonged outage, what about the costs of having to stand up alternative resources in order to get an application back online? Standard contracts from commodity cloud providers like AWS don’t provide for compensation beyond service credits, and for good reason.

Cloud providers also stand to benefit from an insurance system. Not only will the availability of policies allay some cautious potential customers’ concerns about moving to the cloud, but insurance policies for providers will help offset the cost of dealing with an outage. Those service credits cost money, after all, as do steps taken to investigate and resolve outages and implement improvements to prevent future incidents.

This doesn’t even touch upon the damages that can arise from a security breach that results in the exposure of sensitive data. State and (possibly soon) federal statutes might require both cloud providers and their customers to notify affected users of the data breaches and take other steps toward remediation. Lawsuits, fines and other legal issues might start piling up. As it stands right now, everyone’s costs are their own, which probably is fair, but for some, it might appear like a lot of risk to assume.

Cloud insurance to the rescue?

Thankfully, it looks like cloud computing insurance might actually be a reality in the near future. As I detailed in a recent GigaOM Pro piece (sub req’d), both the IEEE and private companies have recognized the importance of developing an insurance model custom-built for the cloud.

One particular company, CloudInsure, appears to have the right idea. At a high level, its approach involves vetting cloud providers, cloud customers and the value of the data, and then determining premiums accordingly. In practice (the company is still in its developmental phase), it should work a lot like auto insurance. Just like make, model, safety features, geographic location, miles driven and other factors affect car insurance premiums, so too will various factors around provider- and customer-side security and availability procedures, as well as the potential costs to resolve an incident, affect cloud insurance premiums.

However, anyone attempting to create an insurance model around the cloud really has to understand where risk lies and how the business model works. There aren’t yet any real standards in place for how to build secure, reliable, multi-tenant clouds that span geographic boundaries, or to build applications that run atop them. It might be easy to make draw inspiration from traditional outsourcing arrangements, but cloud computing with its standard contracts and on-demand resources aren’t traditional outsourcing.

For its part, CloudInsure already is working with a number of cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. That should help it better understand the unique aspects of cloud computing and its various models, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service.

Ultimately, cloud insurance isn’t about acknowledging that cloud computing isn’t safe or reliable as much as it is about acknowledging that cloud computing is fallible like anything else. AWS, Microsoft and their customers can do everything right, then, BAM!, lightning strikes and everyone’s left counting their losses. It might be comforting to know that someone else will help foot the bill.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Laineys Repertoire.

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Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky

It has been a tough week for peer-to-peer home rental service Airbnb. The media picked up on the account of an Airbnb user whose home was ransacked and burglarized in late June, and the company has come under fire for what many say was a sluggish and inconsistent response to the situation.

In a contrite blog post published Monday, Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky apologized for his company’s handling of the matter, writing:

“We felt paralyzed, and over the last four weeks, we have really screwed things up… We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure [the victim] felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball.”

As part of an effort to make things right, Airbnb has debuted a new safety section of its website and a series of new policies aimed at security, customer service and insurance. The major initiatives the company has unveiled are:

• A $50,000 Airbnb guarantee. Starting August 15, any host whose property is booked on Airbnb will be covered for loss or damage due to vandalism or theft cause by an Airbnb for up to $50,000. The program also applies retroactively to any hosts who reported such damage prior to August 1.

• 24-hour customer support hotline: Starting next week, Airbnb will have operators and staff working at all times to provide support. In addition, since last month the company has doubled its customer support team to a staff of 88 people.

• Verified profiles: Airbnb has updated its user profiles to chronicle people’s public history on Airbnb. It will now be visible if a user’s profile has a verified phone number, is connected to a Facebook account, and whether the majority of their reviews are positive or negative.

Airbnb plans to unveil more product updates in the coming days, Chesky wrote, and the company is open to suggestions on more safety products it should implement.

Whether these changes can really repair Airbnb’s now-sullied reputation remains to be seen. But clearly Airbnb, which recently closed on $112 million in new venture capital, is willing to invest its money — and energy — to get back in the public’s good graces.

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