Alternative Health and The Net: Parallels in Growth

Now having plunged into complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) at the local level, I find interesting parallels between the state of CAM today and that of online services in the pre-Netscape days of the Internet in the early 1990’s. These comparisons feel a little sketchy, but the more I think about them, the more telling they appear. (CAM, also referred to as integrative medicine, includes therapies like Chinese and Indian (Ayurvedic) medicines, acupuncture reiki, reflexology, bio-feedback and others that are the focal point of our LifePages business.)

As the net has reshaped the assumptions central to the information and communications industries, this far more amorphous collection of healing therapies and modalities has the potential to have a similar effect on healthcare. In some places it already has.

Consider these similarities:

1. An experienced consumer base, hungry for “more and better” and willing to pay for it:

Blending Local Verticals

Peter Krasilovsky in his Local Onliner notes a fundamental shift in local focus within the Gannett newspaper chain, reported by Wired magazine:

“The original prototype, CincyMOMs, from The Cincinatti Enquirer, brought in $386,000 in its first six months and gets 40,000 page views a day. Half of the CincyMOMS advertisers are new to the paper….Wired also notes that Gannett’s 110 papers are being reorganized by interest group. Instead of being seen as single, top-down metro paper, The Enquirer is now envisioned as 270 niche publications, including its suburban papers, neighborhoods WebSites and regional magazines.

“Reorganized by interest group…270 niches”? I can only say: Bingo. Good for Gannett. Now lets see if the corresponding blended revenue streams can fund a robust news operation.

Peter’s complete article is here.

Local vertical health care

MetroHealth Media, Inc.

• Publisher

Currently serving a piece of the local consumer health care market through a print (!) directory called LifePages that serves the DC metro region. A small band of investors made possible the acquisition of this property which will get a desperately needed and robust web site this summer. It is also getting an injection of serious ad sales.

LifePages serves a sub-set of the local consumer health care vertical: complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), holistic and natural health therapies and practices. This is a rapidly growing part of the wellness sector, as people step aside from mainstream medicine to test supplements, massage, meditation and other therapies. Acupuncture is perhaps the best known “non-traditional” (unless you live in Asia) treatment to evolve into acceptance. Meditation, herbal remedies and “energy” work are on the same path.

Since the time and dollars spent in pursuit and practice are almost entirely local, it fits the local/vertical formula I’ve focused on the last couple of years.

Old News, Good Comment

I often find myself wondering if I really read what I just read in commentary on what’s to happen to the news industry, the media industry, the advertising industry. So I delight when finding something I agree with, even if it is six months since posting. In his review of Google’s flirtations with newspapers and the offline movement of digital advertising, Richard Waters of the Financial Times’ ft.com summed up the central task:

“…Assembling a large body of like-minded consumers will involve tapping into a variety of small-scale markets.”

This is particularly true in local markets. We all hop from our positions in one small-scale market to another at our own whim, entwined with a corresponding variety of like-minded folks. I don’t think it is any more difficult than that, is it?

For the full context, check out Waters’ ft.com story:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4e057d1e-eac2-11da-9566-0000779e2340.html

Filed under: Advertising, News Industry

Local Media: Healthcare (06)

• Consultant, Business Development

From January thru May: retained by a small group to evaluate the potential for a healthcare media company (print, web, email) that would use a local filter to examine the people, issues, services and prognoses for the all-consuming changes sweeping across the traditional health, fitness and wellness landscape.

I conducted interviews with senior management at major regional healthcare providers, insurers, and other service providers. Wrote the business plan, produced a place-holding web site, and enlisted production service companies. Partnered in this process with my colleague Peter Krasilovsky at Krasilovsky Consulting.

Local Media: SportsParent (03 - )

• Founder, Publisher

In 2002 my daughter tore an ACL playing summer league basketball. I proceeded to research the injury, the local docs, the rehab, the prognosis. In this process I thought: “I’m not the only one doing this.” Parents have not had a resource that informs their experience hauling kids from games and parks to schools and fields and gyms. “We need one,” I thought. sportsparentpotomac.com is a start on it, and is a model for how media services will evolve in local markets.

I assembled the site with the able assistance of my colleagues at Sinapse Consulting. (SportsParentPotomac is offline at present.)

WTRI 1520 AM - Exurban Radio (04-05)

Tricaster Communications LLC
WTRI 1520 AM, Brunswick, MD

• Partner, Vice President

In 2004 I worked with two partners to acquire a day-time AM station in Brunswick, MD, about 45 miles northwest of Washington, along the Potomac River in Frederick County. This area continues to experience amazing growth in population and business development. I managed arrangements with and requirements for an SBA lender; I was primary liaison with our attorneys on transaction details; I arranged for a new market valuation that increased loan proceeds by 35%. (I also provided short-term financing to round out the financing package.)

In the first six months of operation, we all threw in to bring the station to life, and, after putting away the SawzAll and paintbrushes, was involved in sales, writing ad copy, and managing business services.

In other words, a not unknown experience for a startup.

Filed under:Broadcast

Before the Web: Collecting History Online (02-03)

• Founder, Project Director

By 2002 people were already describing the “history of the Internet,” and leaving out the essential embers on which the Net rose so quickly. Having been part of the nascient online service industry that grew through the 1980’s, I thought its omission was an oversight.

We had by some miracle (did you ever use a modem at 300 baud?) devised ways to get some 10 million paying subscribers online before Mosaic and Netscape appeared: a handy beta test population that essentially meant everything to the rapid adoption of the net.
I proposed a small project to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which at the time was interested in how the Internet might be used as a complement to collecting oral histories from the scientists and engineers that most of its programs supported. I had the good luck to partner with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and to have access to the unique collection of online services industry materials and memorabilia and newsletters published in those years by my good friend Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications.

The web site was created, entreaties went out to old colleagues, and personal accounts soon started arriving to be organized by several categories. The problem with oral histories, which motivated the Sloan Foundation to try the net, is the excessive time it takes to record, transcribe and then make public such recollections; sometimes years.

In the brief project period (about five months), action at the web site showed that personal accounts could be collected and presented extremely quickly (each entry was reviewed). Many score of industry practitioners came to the site, many left commentary, and those that refrained said that the online history of the 80’s was indeed important to capture.

The process also showed that the open online capture and presentation of personal accounts we employed was not a replacement for oral histories, by any means, but could serve to expedite and to clarify any oral recordings. It was precisely what the Foundation was looking for.

The project also illustrated the important fact that many of us were still at work, creating businesses, ecommerce sites, Web ventures or “normal” employment of our own, and that it was perhaps a little too soon to stop in mid-sales call to record the businesses of the 80’s.

(The project site is offline.)

Networking & World Information (86-88)

Networking & World Information, (NWI), East Hartford, CONN

• Director, Information Services

NWI jumped into the national and global online services business to capitalize on the services provided by its parent company, North American Investment Corp. (NAICO), and the experience of our management team, of which I was part, in particular our experience in online information services and computer conferencing applications (i.e.: online community).

I managed the the information service as well as a business relationship with MCI International, MCI’s global telex business.  NWI prepared a custom news service that was delivered to MCII’s telex customers.  The larger plan was to enable computer conferencing and stock trading (a business of NAICO) through telex. Neither of those two far more radical and ambitious extensions could be implemented.  The NWI business was abandoned after two years.

US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)

US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)
Washington,DC

• Consulting Analyst

Regrettably terminated in 1995, the OTA was the US Congress’s primary advisor on all manner of technologies, their evolution, potential and impact. In the early 1990’s, as the Internet and its precursor, the National Research and Education Network, began to emerge from the nation’s federal, university, and corporate research labs, the OTA began a series of studies examining the impact of this new national network (dubbed by certain senators from Tennessee as the “Information Superhighway”).

I took an assignment at the OTA to research and write an analysis of the then-current uses of the network and its potential expansion in public and commercial settings. By 1991 the commercial telecommunications companies, whose circuits provided the raw backbone for these research networks, began a transition process that eventually led to the “commercialization of the Internet.” The report studied the impact of this evolution, which many people thought might prevent the universal, low-cost access to the net that had already been experienced by many hundreds of thousands at that time.