In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says.

“The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital.

Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD.

While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours.

For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs).

For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records.

For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up.

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Tech Cocktail was cofounded in 2006 by former blogger and AOL product strategist Frank Gruber and former Feedburner employee Eric Olson. The site, which has its headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, said it will use the funding to hire more employees, including VegasTech organize Gabriel Shephard and DC Tech organizer Justin Thorp.

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That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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For technology to make meaningful improvements in health care, it has to penetrate communities across the country — so it’s a positive sign that digital health hubs are popping up nationwide (even though it could intensify the much-discussed “Series A crunch.”)

In total, April was an off-the-charts month for health technology funding, according to data from Startup Health. The sector raised a total of $322.72 million, which is an increase of 404 percent over the same period last year.

Here’s a quick look at last month’s activity:

• Sensors again attracted a great deal of investor interest. In addition to the funding raised by Watermark, a company behind sleep monitoring technology, companies including MC10, which is working with Reebok on skullcap-like head impact monitor, and fetal monitoring system Sense4Baby raised funding.
• While it wasn’t among the top three sub-sectors to receive investments, telehealth also had a strong month in April, with companies like HealthSpot, PresenceLearning and Remote Medicine receiving healthy amounts of capital. That tracks with recent research indicating that the market is expected to grow 53 percent this year and six-fold by 2017.

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At the NewSchools Summit on Wednesday, social gaming giant Zynga and NewSchools Venture Fund said they are partnering up for an entrepreneurship program to support startups developing learning games and apps.

Zynga will host the startups at its San Francisco office, where they’ll be able to interact with game designers and product managers, and Zynga.org, the company’s nonprofit arm, has committed $1 million for the first year.

“Through the efforts of Zynga.org, we’ve shown that social games can impact peoples’ lives for the better,” said Ken Weber, executive director of Zynga.org. “[With NewSchools], we want to help entrepreneurs create high quality, scalable learning games that will enhance learning experiences for all 21st century students.”

The announcement comes during something of a boom time in ed tech. Since the start of the year, a handful of other accelerators have also launched targeting education startups. And, according to CB Insights, education technology companies raised $1.1 billion in 2012.

The first cohort of the Zynga- and NewSchools-backed program will start this summer and include learning gaming apps Kidaptive, LocoMotiveLabs and Motion Math. Education social network Edmodo will join the cohort as a charter partner.

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Google bought an old paper mill in Hamina several years ago, and converted it into a data center that is, interestingly, cooled by seawater. Now, the company is extending the facility at a cost of €150 million ($196 million) — design nerds should note that this is being done by converting a machine hall originally designed by the architect Alvar Aalto. And now Google has also struck a deal with Aalto University and regional development agency Cursor.

According to a Google blog post, Google’s backing will allow Aalto University to better support local startup accelerators, and help “improve the use of the internet” by small businesses in the region. The university is already a backer of the Startup Sauna program and various other entrepreneurial initiatives, so we can now expect to see more in this vein.

Google’s push is supposed to “show the way from our industrial past to our digital future,” according to the post, and indeed both the Belgian and Finnish data centers are sited in areas left somewhat depressed after the death of older industries – mining in the case of the St Ghislain facility and paper milling in the case of Hamina.

It’s good PR for Google, of course, but there is validity to the conceit — and it’s also quite a clever way to keep an eye on  ideas that local developers and engineers are coming up with.

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But then you start noticing some differences. There’s no option to find your friends, and certainly no mechanism for following them. You can interact with anyone who “drops” into your location, but you’re most likely dealing with a complete stranger. If you ask a question or make a positive or critical comment, you’re just as likely to get a response from the venue’s owner as you are from one of its patrons. And once you’ve left a location, you’ll still be able to see all of the activity going on there, but you’ll find your ability to interact with the locale much more limited.

Evzdrop CEO David Rush said he and fellow co-founder Eric Brown were inspired to start Evzdrop in 2012 because of the difficulty of sorting useful information about a bar, restaurant or event from social networks.

“There’s a fire hose of information coming out of Facebook and Twitter,” Rush said. “Check-ins are more about showing where you are to friends, which is what Foursquare has become today. … We wanted to create an app that allows you to share a common interest in place — one that lets you get the perspective of people who, along with you, are actually at an event.”

To that end, Evzdrop has created a kind of geofenced social network, allowing only people who are actually at a location to engage with one another and the business itself. Everyone else is just a voyeur. They can follow all of the drop posts going at location, but they can’t participate themselves except to comment on other people’s drops.

From my experiences fiddling with the app, many of the drops aren’t terribly useful — “Dude, this band rocks!” — but as more people use the app, more useful information rises to the top through a “props” system that allows other people at vote up the most entertaining or informative posts.

The idea, Rush said, is to create not just a repository of immediate information — older drops disappear from the site — but a real-time dialogue between all of the people sharing the same space. That differentiates it from Yelp and other reviews sites, Rush said.

If Evzdrop can reach critical mass it should be able to tell if the Hamachi at the local sushi bar is particularly fresh or foul on any particular hour. Sports bar owners will be able to alert you to which games they’re showing in playoffs, or respond to requests from customers on the premise to switch to a different game. Concert attendees can demand a band play a particular song.

Do we really need another check-in app?

Of course, to get this kind of depth out of the service, Evzdrop really needs to scale. Right now it’s still a tiny operation. It has six employees and $500,000 in angel funding, and its Android and iPhone app only has a miniscule 11,000 downloads. Growing that base is going to be difficult to say the least. Not only are there numerous competing apps promoting their own take on the check-in, every major social network, review app and location-based service — from Facebook to Yelp to Google Latitude — have added check-in capabilities. The last thing most consumers want to do is download and register an account with another check-in app.

Building a business around social-location is also proving to be a difficult even if you 3.5 billion check-ins like Foursquare. New York’s check-in pioneer just raised another $41 million in financing, but it’s under intense pressure to prove it has viable business model.

Rush said that Evzdrop hopes to gain traction by targeting business owners and event planners, getting them to promote the app to their customers. Rush thinks the app would be particularly appealing for helping track customer sentiment and complaints at big events like concerts or benefits, where organizers can communicate with a lot of people en masse.

To that end Evzdrop is making venue owners a key part of the network, rather than just peripheral participants. They don’t get control their local social networks like, say, moderators on a discussion board. But they can communicate privately with their patrons, Evzdrop provides them with real-time data about the sentiment of their clientele. Rush said Evzdrop considers itself just as much a customer relations management (CRM) platform as it does a social networking app.

That business focus is also key to its business model. While any business owner can register their place with Evzdrop, gaining access to its customer communications tools, Evzdrop hopes to build a premium platform that would allow businesses to market promotions to their most frequent customers as well as give them more control over the interaction within the walls of their social networks.

Rush said one tool Evzdrop plans to implement is a means to flag negative sentiment, allowing a proprietor to intercept a critical drop before it goes live giving them a chance to address the complaint immediately. Rush said Evzdrop would never allow businesses to censor posts — every drop would still go live – just create a kind of early warning system for negative feedback.

It seems Evzdrop is trying to walk a fine line. It’s admirable that Evzdrop is trying to develop its business model at the get go, as opposed to Twitter and Foursquare, which built their social networks and then tried to figure out how to make money. But if patrons start perceiving Evzdrop as just a promotional pulpit for businesses, they won’t use it as a social network. And if Evzdrop can’t build up a social network, it doesn’t have a business.

Concert image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

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Troy Henikoff, the program’s managing director, said the 10 startups were selected from an applicant pool of 904, which was double the size of the applicant pool last year. The 10 companies not only reflect a range of industries, he said, the new cohort is geographically diverse, with just three startups from Chicago and a couple from outside the U.S.

Launched three years ago, Excelerate Labs was led by a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Henikoff (founder of SurePayroll), OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, Sandbox Industries’ Nick Rosa and New World Ventures’ Adam Koopersmith. Its 30 companies have raised a total of $30 million, the group said. But teaming up with TechStars elevates the program and gives startups access to a national network of mentors and investors.

Here are the program’s 10 new startups:

CaptureProof – Currently in beta, CaptureProof gives patients a secure site for tracking their health with photos and video and then sharing them with their doctors. Through the site, doctors can monitor patients’ health trends and progress remotely.

HIPOM – For parents who want to limit their kids’ access to the internet, HIPOM provides a cloud-based solution for controlling any individual device in the home.

Nexercise - Nexercise is an iPhone and Android app that helps people lose weight and improve their fitness through competitions with friends, alerts and rewards.

Pathful – A web analytics service, Pathful says it tracks all kinds of visitor interactions and doesn’t require tagging.

Peoplematics – Peoplematics is a service that enables employees to find and share information across their personal cloud.

Project Fixup – A matchmaking service, Project Fixup pairs up people for one-on-one dates based on their schedules and interests.

SimpleRelevance – An email marketing platform, SimpleRelevance says its analytics-driven approach can improve revenue per message by 30-300 percent.

SocialCrunch – SocialCrunch says it builds a “behavior graph” of internet users to help marketers learn about and reach a target audience.

Sqord – A “Fitbit for kids” (see disclosure), Sqord’s watch-like fitness tracking device promotes activity through friendly competition.

TradingView – An online community of investors and traders, TradingView aggregates web stock charts and enables investors to share their ideas.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Instead of receiving $20,000 upon acceptance into ImagineK12, startups will now receive $100,000 each, thanks to a new Start Fund, the accelerator said. The newly-created Start Fund is funded by big name Silicon Valley types, including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, as well as the NewSchools Venture Fund and GSV Asset Management. Startups will receive up to $20,000 from ImagineK12 and a convertible note for $80,000 from the Start Fund.

Since launching in early 2011, the accelerator said its 39 startups have raised more than $30 million in funding and it claims that its products are used by more than 10 percent of U.S. teachers.

Tim Brady, a co-founder of Imagine K12, said their goal is to not only give accepted ed tech startups a longer runway for adoption, but to make education more welcoming to entrepreneurs.

“It has a reputation as a difficult sector,” he said. “One of our over-arching goals is to make entrepreneurship in education as attractive as it is in other sectors.”

While $100,000 would certainly be difficult to turn down, other ed tech accelerators offering less capital aren’t without their selling points for aspiring education entrepreneurs. For obvious reasons, Silicon Valley is a great place to build a company, but education startups could also be well-served by building networks in other parts of the country.

Socratic Labs and Kaplan’s new TechStars-powered ed tech accelerator, both of which are based in New York City, offer education entrepreneurs the chance to experiment within the country’s largest K-12 school district and in the backyard of major content companies. And Boston-based LearnLaunchX is in close proximity to plenty of publishers, colleges and universities.

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“We have not been technologists and now we can be,” said founder and CEO Derek Flanzraich. “Now we can figure out how to get people from not just reading and talking about our content to actually doing something about it — which is ultimately our whole purpose.”

First launched a couple of years ago, Sportaneous is a small four-person startup that offers an app for finding fitness classes nearby. But like other recently acquired health startups MassiveHealth (sold to Jawbone) and 100Plus (sold to Practice Fusion), Flanzraich said Sportaneous was strong in design and technology, but was having trouble building traction.

“It’s hard to get noticed in the App Store. It’s hard to get that attention unless you’ve got some other way to drive people to that product,” Flanzraich said. “We solved that problem [by going] the other way around and building the brand first.”

With the Sportaneous team’s tech chops, Flanzraich said he plans to build a new product that puts a social layer around people’s fitness tracking activities. Now, Nike Fuelband users can socialize with other Fuelband users and Fitbit (see disclosure) users can communicate with other Fitbit users. But Flanzraich wants Greatist to provide a social hub that pulls in data from a range of tracking services so that people can motivate and encourage (and maybe trash talk…) friends using all kinds of devices.

Another health app, Fitocracy, enables health enthusiasts to interact with others trying to achieve similar goals (for example, people trying to keep a paleo diet or run a marathon can encourage and get motivation from others in the same camp) and it integrates with running app Runkeeper. But Greatist, which has raised a little more than $1.1 million, wants to reach a broader audience of people and integrate with a wider range of tracking services.

As part of the acqui-hire, Flanzraich said Sportaneous co-founder Omar Haroun will become Greatist’s chief product officer and co-founder Reuben Doetsch will be the chief technology officer. The other members of the team will join as developers.

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