Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Since the latter half of the 90’s, the handwriting has been on the wall for newspaper companies that media’s future was digital. Heck, the newspapers’ own business sections reported on this trend. Despite this, the majority of the industry focused on traditional strategies such as taking on debt to acquire other newspapers or investing in new printing presses, leading to disastrous consequences.

To be fair, there were some digital investments made, including hiring top-drawer talent. However, over time, the digital teams were marginalized and ultimately the talent that had the capability to transform these organizations left for opportunities where their hands weren’t tied. In other words, the commitment wasn’t deep enough to effect a true transformation.

Now consider healthcare in the U.S.: There’s a clear understanding that the industry must shift its focus towards outcomes from “do more, bill more” orientation. If ever there was an industry that should understand that it’s more effective to address underlying conditions than treating the symptom, it should be healthcare. Or, as a famous early newspaper publisher stated, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Prevention-focused countries such as Denmark have dramatically lowered the need for hospitals. Once at 155 hospitals, they are at less than a third of that today. I find this easily-known fact is news to healthcare providers I speak with.

Whether they don’t know these facts or are ignoring them, the fact is there are incredibly large capital investment projects on the docket for many health systems. Since 62% of hospitals are mission-based, non-profit organizations, it’s astonishing that they are more focused on capital projects than addressing the overall health of their communities. No one has made the case, for instance, that chronic conditions that consume 75% of the $2.6 trillion tab in the U.S. is best addressed by building more buildings. Some make the case that there’s a growing healthcare real estate bubble while costs of chronic conditions continue to expand.

In healthcare, it’s as though we are building better firehouses and investing in more firefighting equipment while we do the equivalent of leaving oily rags around, letting kids play with fireworks on dry hillsides, and building structures with one exit. We may have the best “firefighting” tools and talent in the world but we’d be much better off if we prevented those “fires” from starting in the first place.

Dr. Ted Epperly recently finished his term as the head of the American Academy of Family Physicians and runs the Family Medicine Residency of Idaho program, which includes 80 physicians serving over 20,000 patients. On a tour of his facility, he stopped to comment on the scene in the waiting room of their biggest clinic, something that’s typical of the many doctor’s office waiting rooms we’ve all experienced. He described the scene as a failure compared to the vision of what he’s planning on implementing.

In Epperly’s vision, he describes a dashboard that pulls from the registry of all of their patients. Rather than reactively waiting for someone to present himself or herself in the clinic, he envisions a system that proactively is monitoring the array of conditions his patient population experiences. For example, it will ensure diabetics are having regular foot and eye exams and blood glucose levels are being consistently monitored. If someone hasn’t scheduled an appointment already, it will proactively reach out to him or her rather than waiting for some health crisis.

Epperly has been a leading proponent of a concept in healthcare called the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH), akin to the philosophy that Denmark has adopted so successfully. In many respects, the PCMH is simply an updated version of the Marcus Welby model of medicine with more of a team-based model coupled with technology.

While some may have noticed that there’s several PCMH pilots that were included in the federal health reform law, there’s a little-noticed facet of the law the CTO for the United States, Aneesh Chopra, points out in this video segment. That is, if the payment models that reward positive health outcomes over activity proves out in the eyes of the Actuary for Medicare and Medicaid program to be cost savings, there is carte blanche authority to expand these models broadly to entire Medicare population. This could rapidly expand the deployment of the PCMH concept and accelerate the need for the associated HealthTech. The video below explains this in more detail and explicitly speaks to the opportunity for startups.

Another healthcare provider plans to send home patients with an array of personal biometric devices. The output of these devices will be a more complete view of an individual’s health. There’s an explosion of personal biometric devices ranging from personal blood pressure monitors to some being built into clothing and widely deployed in places such as Denmark.

For the cost of a small wing of one of these new Taj Mahal structures, healthcare providers could have a team of innovators working on scenarios such as those described above and many others. Those that avoid sticking to the old tried and true methods of differentiation that worked in the past will be light years ahead as the transformation of healthcare takes hold. If they don’t, employers who are paying the bulk of healthcare costs are taking matters into their own hands and building their own onsite clinics.

Whether the innovation comes from within or from non-obvious competition such as employers or pharma companies, there’s a distinct advantage in having a blank slate where cost effective systems and models of delivering care can be delivered. For the providers, they’d be well advised to develop their own innovation teams unfettered by the current model so they can develop models that will ensure the provider’s long-term survival.

If you missed the first parts of the series, you can find them at the links below:

• Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing (Part I of III)
• Healthcare Disruption: Providers Will Use HealthTech to Differentiate and Produce Better Outcomes (Part II of III)

‘”Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”‘ – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I know, I know. I’m old. Worse than that, I’m nostalgic. In the past few months, I’ve written about my love for fountain pens, and traditional publishers, and paper books, and handwritten letters, and live theater, and downtown Las Vegas. Those who follow me on Twitter will have read about my enthusiasm for the New York Times Crossword, and hotel writing paper, and socializing with friends sans mobile phones.

It’s cute to be the token Luddite at TechCrunch — but it’s also hugely disingenuous. I’m writing this stuff on Twitter, and on a hugely popular technology blog. You could cut the irony with a knife.

The truth is, I love technology. It’s rare that I dismiss or disparage a new gadget, app or company without trying it out at least once; and I certainly believe that – on balance – the more technologically advanced we become as a society, the better the world becomes.

And yet increasingly I wonder whether, for the sake of humanity, it might not be a bad thing if the earthquake comes and tips all of web 2.0 into the sea.

I should possibly explain.

The Internet — particularly “web 2.0″, with its communities and tagging and reuniting and friending and liking — was supposed to civilize us all. The idea was that by connecting the whole world through a variety of social networks and crowd-sourced standards of behavior (from reputation scores on eBay to Yelp reviews for dog walkers) – people would be driven to greater empathy for, and responsibility towards their fellow man. When Randi Zuckerberg sat on stage at DLD ’08 and told us the story of the Palestinian and Israeli children brought together through their joint membership of a Facebook group about soccer, we all shed a tear. Web 2.0 is working — it’s really working!

In the early days, the entrepreneurs behind these services really seemed to believe the gospel they were preaching. Anyone who has met Craig Newmark will testify that he lives and breathes customer service — turning down acquisition offers and obsessing over how his eponymous List can help connect communities in ways that enrich society. When they invented Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin really did dream about making the world’s data easier to access. Jimmy Wales, for all of his fixation with personal celebrity, really is passionate about a free and open encyclopedia, and has turned down a large amount of personal profit to realize that dream.

At first, Web 2.0 seemed like a perfect two-way street. Brilliant entrepreneurs who genuinely wanted to change the world built services that we all wanted to use. They became rich, and our lives became better connected. We were all in it together.

Fast forward just a handful of years, though, and something has gone very, very wrong with that particular social contract. We users have kept our side of the bargain — dutifully tagging our friends in artificially-aged photos, and checking in at bars, and writing reviews of restaurants. We’ve canceled our newspaper subscriptions, and instead spend our days clicking on slideshows of “celebrities who look like their cats” or obsessively tracking trending topics on Twitter. We’ve stopped buying books published by professional houses and instead reward authors who write, edit and distribute their own electronic works through self-publishing platforms. We’ve even handed the keys to our cars and our homes to strangers.

On the face of it, the entrepreneurs have continued down the same track too: inventing ever more Disruptive companies to further improve the world, and in doing so enjoying multi-billion dollar valuations and all the trappings of fame and fortune. Even richer have grown the angels, super-angels and VCs who carefully nurture young entrepreneurs, molding them into the next breed of Mark Zuckerbergs and Sean Parkers, reminding their charges that “what’s cool” is a billion dollars — and that every new user acquired is another dollar added to their eventual high score.

And yet. AND YET. You only have to look at a couple of mini-outrages that bubbled up in the past few days to realize just how misaligned the interests of some entrepreneurs have become with those of the human beings they rely on for their success.

This time last week, the musical world mourned the death of Amy Winehouse. Almost immediately, the Huffington Post approved a post by unpaid contributor, Tricia Fox, entitled “Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners“. We were all shocked, of course, by the callousness and cynicism of the headline — but we weren’t really surprised. We take it for granted now that the most popular online publications rely on search engine traffic for their survival. We know that, in many cases, “content” sites don’t employ editors to monitor what appears on their pages — and that those editors who are employed are encouraged to blindly approve any headline that name-checks a trending topic or two. Arianna Huffington talks a good talk about the democratization of journalism — but every so often we are reminded of the grimy truth: making money with online content is a question of attracting millions of eyeballs, whatever the moral cost.

An even more grotesque example of this was this week’s Airbnb scandal — the so-called #ransackgate (ugh).

Having been convinced by the company’s mantra of throwing open our doors to the world for monetary reward, a user by the name of “EJ” was shocked when a stranger comprehensively trashed her home. We’ll have to await the outcome of the police investigation to understand what really happened to EJ’s apartment, but what we know for sure is that Airbnb’s immediate, and subsequent, reaction was grotesque in its inhumanity. I’m not talking about the company’s initial apparent unwillingness to pay compensation — I’m talking about the behavior of the (unnamed) co-founder who wrote to EJ and asked her to remove her blog post about the incident, lest it affect the company’s ability to raise millions more dollars. From EJ’s blog…

‘I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases with me, as the investigation was ongoing. He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist” of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”’.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!

The question of whether Airbnb is run by nice guys is irrelevant. For all I know CEO Brian Chesky is a modern day Mother Theresa who had to break off his important work curing kitten cancer to deal with this growing PR nightmare. What’s relevant — and all too obvious — is that good old Brian and his co-founders stand to make millions, if not billions, of dollars from the success of Airbnb. His investors stand to make even more. That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users like EJ become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monitized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.

And therein lies the real problem of web 2.0 — whether it takes the form of SEO-driven “news” or crowd-sourced accommodation. To make money — real money — at this game you have to attract millions, or tens of millions, of users. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, it’s literally impossible not to treat your users as pieces of data. It’s ironic, but depressingly unsurprising, that web 2.0 is using faux socialization and democratization to create a world where everyone is reduced to a number on a spreadsheet.

Sarah Lacy has written about how many of the current breed of silicon valley wunderkinds have been conditioned to behave like the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg, eschewing humanity and decency for personal profit and glory. Nothing either she nor I can write will reverse the trend — there’s simply too much money and power at stake. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t loudly call bullshit on those who use words like “disruption” and “revolution” and “democratization” as cynical marketing buzzwords simply to line their own pockets, only to retreat behind the barricades when the going gets rough. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t mourn a not-too-distant past where technology entrepreneurs created things to make the world a better or more interesting place, not just because they wanted to make a billion dollars.

And above all, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remind the current breed of entrepreneurs and investors that, in the final analysis, a billion dollars isn’t actually all that cool. What’s cool is keeping your soul, whatever the financial cost.

We had a blast yesterday at our Mobile First CrunchUp and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital. At our CrunchUp, we had some amazing speakers and special guests. Even Chamillionaire managed to make a certain speaker sweat and started a debate on why Android doesn’t have a decent phone.

Later in the day, the drinks were flowing at August Capital and even Ron Conway was spotted enjoying a margarita or two. Our summer party was a huge success and we want to thank everyone who came. We hope you had as much fun as we did.

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Mike Isaac

Annnnd Chamillionaire takes the mic at #crunchup.

July 29, 2011 4:11 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

Follow @Shirls@Shirls
Shirley Hornstein

+10 to @tristanwalker for making sure his kicks match the orange #crunchup after-party bracelets perfectly. Inside information?

July 29, 2011 3:47 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

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Harry McCracken

Kevin Systrom of Instagram says that an Android version is "absolutely" going to happen. #crunchup

July 29, 2011 3:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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Oren Jacob

"Get a room guys." @erickschonfeld to @chchien and guy from U of Florida. #crunchup . #QOTD

July 29, 2011 4:04 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

Here’s a deeper look at the CrunchUp:

• MG Siegler sits down with HTML5 developer Joe Hewitt
• Erick Schonfeld talks with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Churn Labs founder Omar Hamoui
• Jason Kincaid with Bump’s Jake Mintz, Soundtracking’s Steve Jang, and Google’s Matias Duarte
• Blockboard, a neighborhood app
• Next Jump’s mobile app, Ella
• Chamillionaire on Android
• Android’s Matias Duarte

A huge thank you to our sponsors who made this all possible. We couldn’t have done it without you. For more pictures, please check out our Flickr page.

Startups love to point to big growth numbers, and the press loves to publish them. We are as guilty as anyone else in this regard: one million downloads, 10 million registered users, 200 million tweets per day. These growth metrics can often be signs of traction (which is why we report them), but just as often they are not. It is important to distinguish between real metrics and what Lean Startup guru Eric Ries calls vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are things like registered users, downloads, and raw pageviews. They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter: active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits. The latter are more actionable metrics. As First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman recently advised on Founder Office Hours, “The real data is retention and repeat usage.” Startups that focus on the real metrics can make their products better, attract more customers, and make them happier.

It is important for startups to properly instrument the data they track so that they can get a handle on the true health of their business. If they track only the vanity metrics, they can get a false sense of success. Just because a startup can produce a chart that is up and to the right does not mean it has a great business. A mobile apps could have millions of downloads but only a few hundred thousand active users, or a freemium website might see exploding traffic growth but barely any conversions to paying users.

Many startups, of course, track one set of numbers internally and selectively share another set of vanity numbers externally with the press. The worst is when startups try to pitch us with raw growth numbers (we are up 400%), but without any context (400% from what, 1,000 users or 100,000?). We always ask for more meaningful numbers, but those are not always forthcoming.

The vanity metrics aren’t completely useless, just don’t be fooled by them. There are ways to back into real numbers from the vanity metrics. VC Fred Wilson blogged today about his 30/10/10 rule: 30 percent of downloads or registered users are active once a month, 10 percent are active once a day, and 10 percent of the daily users will be the maximum number of concurrent users. These are the patterns he is seeing in his portfolio companies and the startups pitching him.

Startups would be better off, however, reporting real metrics from the start. Vanity metrics can catch up to them, especially if those numbers do not correspond to the real numbers. Facebook is a great example of a company that focuses on the right numbers. Even in its college-only days, it would always talk about daily active users (the users who come back every day) and how fast it took them to take over a particular campus. If more startups would measure and share the right metrics from the start, the rest of us would focus on them too.

Photo credit: Skye Suicide

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — covered the gamut between Google+ and well, Google+. The new social platform continues to delight and confound the early adopters in record numbers. @scobleizer remains optimistic that the search giant will roll out filtering features to cut down on the noise of squids, kittens, and well, Scoble comment farms.

@dannysullivan would prefer Google unleash the hounds of celebrity and brands, surprised as he and we are that the Plus team was caught flatfooted by the viral adoption of the field trial, or whatever Danny calls it. When we (Danny and I) started complaining about the lack of iPad support and Robert about the perils of high speed Scoble flow via the iPhone, @kevinmarks pointed out the ANdroid support sucked for tablets in general. All in all, much to look forward to and little or no competition from Facebook for Google to worry about.

Oh, how embarrassing. Earlier this week, Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada’s Green Party, took to her Twitter account and declared war on Wi-Fi. To think I very nearly voted for these clowns in our recent election. Lesson for my American friends: just because you find all the major parties unpalatable doesn’t mean that the fringe parties aren’t even worse. Meanwhile, can someone please get an environmental movement going that isn’t anti-science and anti-technology?

Give her credit: she did manage, with rare ability, to hit not just one but all of the “idiot politician talking about science/technology” notes: 1. Moral panic: “It is very disturbing how quickly WiFi has moved into schools as it is children who are the most vulnerable.” 2. Deluded citation of long-disproven theories: “It is one prevailing theory re disappearance of pollinating insects.” 3. Misleading deception that comes this close to outright lying: “The World Health Org lists EMF as a possible human carcinogen.”

Wait, what, the WHO called Wi-Fi possibly carcinogenic? Other so-called environmentalists seem to think so too. But no: it turns out that what they actually said (PDF) is: “The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1, associated with wireless phone use.”

The WHO was worried about phones, folks. Not Wi-Fi. And that was in May. Recently, a major study of the subject concluded: Regular users of mobile phones were not statistically significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with brain tumors compared with nonusers … The absence of an exposure–response relationship either in terms of the amount of mobile phone use or by localization of the brain tumor argues against a causal association.

But instead of backing away from her claims, Ms. May went ahead and doubled down on them. Hey, why let irrelevant things like facts and science get in the way of important stuff, like outrage and luddite paranoia?

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Jon Evans

I hereby coin Evans's Law: Technology + Politics = Facepalm.

July 28, 2011 7:55 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

See also: “internets“; “series of tubes“; and the recent trend of Twitter protests, such as #fuckyouwashington and #OpPayPal. To be fair, Jeff Jarvis, who spurred the former, has a thoughtful, nuanced, and to my mind accurate perspective on the subject. But at the same time, it strikes me as exactly the kind of meaningless and inconsequential thing that Malcolm Gladwell was talking about when he pooh-poohed the role of social media in political change.

Now, I ultimately strongly disagree with Gladwell, but protests only matter if they grow into movements. Movements might use hashtags, but a hashtag is not a movement. Did any of the #fuckyouwashington or #OpPayPal tweeters start following each other? Was there any coordination? Or was it just a random and meaningless eruption, telling no one anything they didn’t know already? (“What? Many Americans are angry at Washington? Stop the presses!“) Anonymous claims that #OpPayPal resulted in the closing of 35,000 PayPal accounts. Even assuming that’s true, and that those were all active accounts (which seems unlikely) then their big protest has brought down less than 0.035 of 1% of PayPal’s total accounts. Big whoop.

That equation above cuts both ways, I’m afraid: politicians tend to be idiots about technology, and most techies aren’t very bright about politics. Which is really too bad—because each is thoroughly disrupting and transforming the other, whether they like it or not.

Image credit: Joe Mott, Flickr.

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SpaceX To Launch ISS-Bound Supply Ship In November
Head-To-Head Review: Canon T3i Vs. Nikon D5100
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The Isostick Makes A Mockery Of Optical Disk Hegemony
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You’ve doubtless heard about the Airbnb fiasco – being dubbed #ransackgate by some – that’s been exploding the last couple of days. If you’re not familiar with the story, we first covered it here, and there’s some terrific source material from the woman who’s home was ransacked and robbed here and here.

Today Y Combinator founder (and Airbnb investor) Paul Graham wrote this:

I’ve just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted.

The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.
I’ve talked to the Airbnb guys and they are already doing everything they could be doing to help this woman.

Even if you don’t believe they are nice guys (which they are, among the nicest of all the people we’ve funded), do you really think they are so dumb that they don’t realize it’s not worth the bad PR to save money and effort in this situation?

A few thoughts:

1. What the hell?

2. Airbnb’s Christopher Lukezic told me on Wednesday that the company was not responsible for EJ’s losses, that they would be paying anything for her losses, that they are just a service to match people and that they were helping the police find the people who did this. This was on the record, and it was a call we emailed about first. I didn’t take him by surprise. And I read this back to him before I posted.

3. Paul Graham says instead “The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.

That’s a lie. What he said is what I wrote in no. 2 above, and what was in the original post.

4. Following publication of that Post, Airbnb Brian Chesky called me and I updated that post with his comments, mentioning that there was some miscommunication. I retweeted that there was an important update, and added a bold header at the top of the post mentioning the update.

5. I then added another update, an email from Lukezic. And another update pointing to a guest post by Chesky on the issue. It is absurd to think that I made up the statements that Lukezic made to me in our first interview. It wasn’t even really relevant to the story.

6. Chesky repeatedly thanked me for the updates by email and on the phone. If Lukezic wants to publicly call me a liar, he should do so directly.

7. I’ve seen this exact behavior before with the Scamville stuff a couple of years ago.

The real problem here isn’t some mixup in communication with me. The real problem is that the victim wrote that follow up post yesterday calling Airbnb out and making new allegations of an attempted cover up.

It kind of feels to me that what Airbnb really wants to do is call the victim, EJ, a liar. But they’re certainly not going to do that (although if they have evidence that she’s lying, they should be talking about that). Instead, they focus on us, call me dishonest and suggesting that the whole story is “bullshit.”

One thing I love about our readers is that they’re independent thinkers. Often they don’t agree with my opinions, and say so loudly. But this goes too far. I’m not the person who grossly mishandled a PR crisis. I’m not the person who made factually inaccurate statements on the record. I’m not the person who tried to convince a woman who’s life has been shattered to remove a blog post.

At least have the decency to stand up and say you’re wrong, Airbnb, and apologize for the lies. Because hiding behind investors, and attacking the press, is both dishonorable and stupid. That’s no way to gain customer trust.

PS – If you review our historical coverage of Airbnb, it’s hard to say there’s anything but a pattern of cheerleading the company on since it launched in 2008. And we’ve been massive, unquestioning supporters of Y Combinator over the years as well. I don’t know what Paul Graham means by “typical Arrington fashion,” but I do know this. It’s not my job to fix it when companies do stupid things.

Last November, TechCrunch’s own Sarah Lacy sat down with Vineet Devaiah from “social streetview” startup, Phototour.in, which, at the time, had just received term sheets from a number of high-profile U.S. investors and had recently been awarded the “Top Emerging Technology Company of 2010″ by Nvidia. The startup was the first international, non-funded, under-20-member company to win the award, according to Devaiah.

Since then, Phototour added Academy Award certificate-winner and entrepreneur Bala S. Manian as an advisor (who was honored for “technical achievement” for his contributions to optical technologies used in films, including Star Wars) and has gained more than 47,000 users for the alpha version of its image and panorama crowdsourcing app, “360″, on Android. Users have logged more than 75,000 panoramas in a relatively short period of time, so, considering the rumors that the iPhone 5 will have a native panorama app, sources tell us that 360 might be a candidate for a potential partnership with Android, so that it can remain neck-in-neck with Apple.

What’s more, Today the startup is officially announcing that it is rebranding as TeliportMe and is bringing 360 out of alpha and into the public sphere in ready-to-wear form. For free. Granted, 360-degree panorama apps for smartphones are nothing new. There are quite a few cool apps and gadgets that have these capabilities on the market, like “You Gotta See This!”, Occipital’s 360 Panorama, and Microsoft’s Photosynth, to name a few.

In light of this competition, TeliportMe wants to distinguish itself from the field by building a high quality Android app, that works across OEMs. According to Devaiah, panoramic apps tend to be very hardware centric because of their reliance on a smartphone’s camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, RAM, and so on. Because Android relies on so many different OEMs, it becomes a tricky proposition to build a good 360-degree app for Android and is the reason why most panorama apps are built on iOS (thanks to the vertical integration it has with its hardware).

Another obstacle for Android is that only about 20 percent of its smartphones have the processing capability of the iPhone, and as panoramic apps require a lot of image processing during photo stitching, many Android phones don’t have enough RAM to make this possible (at least at speed). Devaiah cited the example of a phone like the HTC wildfire, which has the processing capability lesser than that of an iPhone 2G.

This is where the technology that won the startup the “best emerging tech” award comes into play. TeliportMe brought its photo stitching technology to the Android phone, which to a large extent negates the issues caused due to multiple hardware configurations, allowing it to function smoothly over 200 models of android phones. (The startup has also built a version of its photostitching app that works on the browser, which it will be launching soon.)

So, 360 allows its users to quickly take high quality panoramas, which they can then view on the apps 3D viewer. Users can share panoramas via Facebook and Twitter, as well as view, comment, and “like” photos taken by people all over the world on 360′s public realtime feed. The app also taps into the phone’s location to allow users to discover other people using 360 in close proximity, using its “Around Me” option.

Check out 360 in the Android Marketplace here, and for the 360′s humorous take on “the Google+ guy” dissing other photo apps, check out this video. For more on 360, look out, video below:

Today at Aol West Headquarters, a number of entrepreneurs, VCs, and executives gathered to discuss the state of the mobile industry and mobile technology. After a series of individual panels, the day concluded with the crowd of panelists gathering together for a lively discussion about the future of mobile, current mobile trends gaining legs, as well as what’s missing. Chi-Hua Chien, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, stepped in to give an example of what’s missing in the industry by sharing three particular business models that he’d like to see make their way into the space.

In a prior panel, Chien, Skype investor Howard Hartenbaum, and Tango founder Eric Setton, spoke about how closing the “redemption loop” is becoming one of the most important goals in the daily deals space, specifically on mobile. (Something TC’s Erick Schonfeld talked about in a post earlier this week.) Chien pointed out that one of the big goals is to forge a future where a customer can walk into a store, and the merchant will immediately know who they are and what they want — and that someday soon Twitter and Foursquare will be acting in a way akin to a CRM platform for businesses to help make that happen.

But, as to the three companies that Chien wants to see, and invest in, for starters, he envisions a killer mobile company offering a completely automated personal assistant — something he said really wasn’t possible to do well “before mobile”. He cited the example of one having dinner reservations with a friend who lives, say, 30 minutes away. The user’s mobile device, thanks to location awareness, knows exactly where they are and how far away they are from the restaurant. What’s more, thanks to the fact they made their reservation on OpenTable, the automated assistant will know exactly what time they planned to meet.

But, based on the fact that you’re 30 minutes away from where you’re having dinner, and tapping into a traffic app, they know that there’s congestion on the way. It then might send out an alert to the person you’re having dinner with, or can, in an automated way, message both people to confirm that they’d like to push the reservation back by 30 minutes, make that change, and close that loop with no effort.

Part of what’s making that possible now, he says, is the very existence of mobile, but it’s also thanks to the maturity of the platforms that are now being accessed by maturing APIs. The automated personal assistant addresses a need set that couldn’t be solved in an asychronous environment on a desktop.

(For those who immediately thought of Siri’s Personal Assistant when reading this, check out the video below.)

Secondly, education is a trillion dollar market “that’s completely screwed up”, because it involves millions of children going to sit in a classroom for 7 hours, and it combines three different businesses for the state: the real estate business, the union labor management business, and certification business.

When, in reality, education should be delivered in a realtime basis to students who are learning at their own pace, who don’t have to sit in a room full of 30 people in an antiquated environment — a realtime, mobile solution that’s learning based as opposed to curriculum based. This second idea is a bit more nebulous, but Chien is hitting on an important theme here: How badly American education is in need of disruption and innovation, especially as that would relate to mobile.

The third model Chien alluded to was health and fitness. “We all wish that we could lose ten pounds”, he said, and now there’s a device in your pocket that can seamlessly manage its owner (personal assistant theme again), encourage the user to exercise, eat healthier, whatever the case may be. It can truly manage the pace at which you are paying attention to your health, your exercise regimen, and helping you to lead a healthier lifestyle.

There’s a huge need here, Chien said, something that never could have been tackled in a PC environment, simply because the overhead of checking a website every day (as opposed to a mobile device that’s portable and always with you) is just unsustainable. It knows what you’re eating, what the caloric intake of that food might be, can advise you against consuming that third ice cream cone, and can tell your heart rate after a 5 mile run. When one combines that with display information designs and notifications optimized for a mobile setting — well, it’s enough to make an entrepreneur water at the mouth.

Afterwards, Schonfeld asked Chien if these were actually three stealth startups that Kleiner Perkins had recently invested in, to which Chien laughed and said, no, but if there are companies out there making these products, Kleiner may very well be interested.

“And those aren’t just dinky features … those are companies”, Chien said. “Those are companies attacking trillion dollar markets.”

I also kept hearing a theme of automation in what Chien talked about, and clearly, at least in his mind, (though I think it’s in the minds of many others as well), that automated processes, whether they be customer service, healthy living, or retail processes, are going to be big not just because we’re lazy, but because they help us focus on doing the things we love.