Google Shuts Down Medical Records And Health Data Platform

Google is shutting down Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web. Google says the platform simply wasn’t having the ‘broad impact’ necessary to sustain the product.

From Google’s blog post: There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service.

Google says that it will continue to operate Google Health until January 1, 2012, will allow people to export their health data for an additional year beyond that. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point (January 2013) will be permanently deleted.

Google Health launched in 2008 as a central repository for all of your health information, including prescriptions, medical history, medical records, and more.

One of the key contributors to the overall success of Google Health were partnerships with insurance companies, hospitals and other medical institutions to make data more available to consumers. As last year, Google Health still needed to sign up hundreds of insurers in the U.S. Google announced some key deals (i.e. a partnership with CVS to import prescription data into the platform), but couldn’t gain traction elsewhere.

Google also started transitioning Health into an overall wellness platform, allowing users integrate data from FitBit and CardioTrainer, but clearly this didn’t get enough traction amongst users.

Microsoft’s competing product HealthVault looks to be still alive and kicking.

Opera Founder Jon S. von Tetzchner Resigns Over Differences With Board

Opera founder Jon S. von Tetzchner has resigned from the company.

In an email to Opera employees, von Tetzchner said that “It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me.” You can read the full email below.

Von Tetzchner co-founded Opera Software in 1995, and led the company up to 2010, when he resigned as CEO. He then became a full-time strategic advisor to the company.

As for what’s next, Opera says that von Tetzchner has “ideas about new projects, but is not ready to reveal any of his ideas as of right now.”

It’s unclear what values Opera’s founder and the board disagreed upon. The independent mobile and web browser tens of millions of users, and seems to be growing at a fast clip.

Dear All,

It is with a heavy heart that I send this message. Next week will be my
last at Opera. It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not
share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep
evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to
end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly
focused than me. I have always worked to build the company for the future.
I believe the foundation we have is very solid to build further upon.

I do believe strongly in Opera as a company, and in all of you working
here. Our products actually make a difference for a lot of people in the
world, and I wish you all the best of luck moving forward. I will be
following the company closely and rooting for you all.

Yours truly,
Jon.

Angry Yahoo Shareholder Confronts Bartz And Asks For Her Head (Audio Clip)

ahoo CEO Carol Bartz got an earful yesterday at the tail end of the company’s annual shareholder meeting. An angry shareholder, who identified himself as Steve Landry—an advisor to institutional investors with “millions of Yahoo shares”—stood up at the end of what was up until then a surprisingly feel-good affair, given the total underperformance of the stock for the past three years, and asked for her head. We’ve uploaded the audio clip below.

He goes through a list of issue and concerns, calling Yahoo a “debacle” and a “circus.” He starts out by addressing “the elephant in the room”: the search for Bartz’ successor.

“It came out earlier this week in a blog that the board is secretly talking to other CEO candidates,” he said. “I have heard similar details. I believe it is true. The last thing Yahoo needs right now is a lame duck CEO. The buyout talks over your contract need to start today.”

Hmm, I wonder which blog he’s talking about

Landry also brings up the Hulu acquisition rumor (which was wrong) and suggests Jason Kilar could be a good CEO candidate for Yahoo. But he thinks buying Hulu would be a bad idea.

He finishes by calling on the board to break up or sell the company. “The status quo is no longer working,” he says.

To all of which, Bartz responds: “You’re welcome, and thanks for your opinion, the bloggers’ opinions and the rumors. What else? Wonderful. That was certainly a downer.”

Listen to Landry’s entire diatribe below.

Inspired By Wikipedia, Quora Aims For Relevancy With Topic Groups And Reorganized Topic Pages

Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.

Now, instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic.

A Topic Page can also correspond to a Topic Group which will be focused on all the activity on the Topic Page and can roll up multiple topics into one, giving users a way to self-organize and share info. For example this Movies Group corresponds to this Movies Page.

Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo likens the difference between and Topic Page and a Topic Group to the difference between a Wikipedia article and a Wikipedia Talk page, where the Talk page features the activity of a group behind the page that is committed to the topic, moderates questions and features content. The page is just an outpost of the total sum of the group’s knowledge.

“If you’re someone who doesn’t know about a topic, now you can get a general overview of what the topic is about on a Topic Page,” D’Angelo tells me, saying that the Topic Groups will be the space for people who want to delve deeper.

Some Topic Groups will be official (you can see a list here) i.e. moderated by a group of admins with topical expertise, while others will simply consist of all incoming activity to a Topic Page.

D’Angelo writes, “We’ve had a lot of activity on Quora recently with screenwriters and other people in Hollywood. Now there’s a well-defined space for them to focus on movies without being distracted or interrupted with everything else that they’re interested in on Quora. In general, this structure will let us have deeper communities and topic areas.”

Says power Quora user Semil Shah, “[On Wikipedia] you have topics and you move from page to page, like nodes. Here, in Quora, the topics are organized in a way one can eventually drill down and explore, investigate. It’s genius.”

Despite having no user numbers to announce, D’Angelo tells me that the design and organizational changes were the result of having to look closely at what worked and what didn’t after Quora grew faster than expected last winter. The service’s eventual goal is to get more knowledge on to the Internet, get more questions and get more answers, D’Angelo said.

Also in the information discovery and relevancy vein but on the opposite end of the spectrum is the delightful newly launched Quora Shuffle Button, which lets users view random content on Quora a la StumbleUpon. You can find the unassuming Shuffle button at the bottom of each Quora page. Baby steps.

In-Stream Ads Are Coming To Twitter, Will A User Revolt Follow?

After nine months of testing in-stream Promoted Tweets on third party client Hootsuite, reports have surfaced today that Twitter’s head of monetization Adam Bain has been pushing a new in-timeline Promoted Tweets product during this week’s advertiser-heavy Canne Lions awards.

To the two of you that this comes to as a shock, one word: Inevitable. Twitter has made no secret of the fact that in-stream Promoted Tweets have been an eventual business model goal since April of 2010, when co-founder Biz Stone outlined a plan to launch them first on search on Twitter.com, later in 3rd party search and eventually in the user timeline.

“We’ve been talking about Promoted Tweets in the timeline since we launched Promoted Tweets …” Twitter’s Sean Garret tells me. “We have and will continue to take a measured and thoughtful approach to how we may display them.”

So while there should be little doubt that in-stream Twitter advertisements are imminently on the horizon, the question is whether users will take to them, or whether they’ll revolt a la #Dickbar, the controversial overlay to Twitter mobile that displayed Promoted Trends and eventually ended up being removed after much backlash.

A brief informal poll I conducted on, of course, Twitter revealed that despite the initial resistance many users were willing to support the in-stream ad model as long as Twitter gave them the opportunity to pay to get rid of it. Apparently people like having options.

Then again, actual user reaction will depend on the execution, look and feel of the final in-stream as product, which we know very little about. If the Promoted Tweets blink and take up your entire screen and look like crap then sure, users will be angry. However the guiding hand of an even partially returned Jack Dorsey leads me to believe that this will probably not be the case.

Twitter has also said that again that the Promoted Tweets will only be for brands that you follow or that are “relevant” to you based on whom you follow, but I really can’t see that philosophy being very profitable or holding up for very long, especially since I don’t really follow any brands and don’t know any one else who does.

The dilemma of Twitter advertising is a case of too much demand and not enough supply, which is why the prices on these things keep going up (Promoted Trends are now at $120K). From what I’m hearing advertisers are clamoring for Twitter to give them something to buy and the company has an ambitious and eager salesforce, tasked with selling the promise of one day being able to monetize most of its 300 million users.

But is charging brands $100K to have their tweets show up higher in the Twitter streams of consumers who are already their loyal followers the best solution?

Well Twitter’s got to start somewhere, and expand from there. As the Financial Times points out, Twitter is expecting a modest $100 million in revenue this year compared to Facebook’s awe inspiring $3.5 billion in projected display ad revenue. “They are going to get much more commercial,” one agency executive told the FT which also reports that the company is dabbling in Groupon-type deals, the final desperate frontier of monetization for many.

And will this inevitable thrust toward commercialization interfere with user experience to the point where users will be turned off from Twitter? Said one person familiar with the matter, “Users already have such a high tolerance for bugs, errors and latency on Twitter.com, they’re going to live with Promoted Tweets too.”

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