Inside a data center in San Jose, California, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction. In other words, Dropbox is indicative of the web’s leading services.
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Apple (AAPL) put on a fun show yesterday, revealing a bunch of slick new products and updates and generally getting its fans hot and bothered about what’s coming next. And Apple also went out of its way to take shots at rivals Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Samsung. The [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The slow death of the American dream for middle class families gained steam in the last couple years in the wake of the financial crisis. A new survey by the Federal Reserve shows a shocking decline in the average net worth of U.S. households from 2007 to 2010. According [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The sovereign debt crisis in Europe has crippled economies, nations and financial institutions and is threatening to destabilize global markets. Yet one woman may hold Europe’s — and the world’s — fate in her hands: German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel’s stark vision of austerity has come under intense scrutiny [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Yields on Spanish and Italian debt were rising again Tuesday, Fitch warned Spain won’t meet its budget-deficit targets and Morgan Stanley raised its odds of a euro breakup to 35%. Welcome to the second trading day since the weekend bailout of Spanish banks! While questions are still being asked [...]
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Cellscope sell a microscope that connects to your smartphone and can be used to diagnose ear infections and they just announced a $1m funding round from Khosla Ventures. This is an example of a sensor connected to a smartphone being used to provide a healthcare service. Their idea is that parents will email images from their children’s ears to their doctors for remote diagnosis removing the need for up to 30m physical visits to the doctor each year in the US.
That’s a big opportunity in its own right but more interesting to me is the potential for using services like this to bypass doctors altogether – either via machine automated services (in this case image recognition) or human systems designed to operate at scale (in this case maybe by micro-tasking for doctors). I would happily pay a small amount out of my own pocket for a service like this to get a quick result and avoid having to deal with the bureaucracy of the NHS or my health insurance company and I think there are lots of others like me. There are already small markets (which include me and my family) for remote diagnostic services like tests for vitamin D deficiency and the products are currently expensive, complicated to use and slow to deliver results. My thesis is that smartphone and sensor based services will drive down the costs and improve the quality and the markets will explode.
I’ve been writing about this for a couple of years now (see here) and it is good to see some top tier venture capital validating the idea. $1m is a very small investment for Khosla though, which is a sign that this market is still early in its development.
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