Looking for an appointment with doctor? Check out eMedWorld

Hyderabad based healthcare solutions company, Medigrity Innovations Private Limited has launched eMedWorld.com, a healthcare information portal. The free to join portal is for both medical practitioners and people seeking medical services. It provides automated “Free Online Appointment” system for booking appointments with authenticated medical practitioners. Recently Practo, which offers similar appointment services, raised series A funding of $4.6m.

eMedWorld is integrated with DocLynk.com, Medigrity’s free-to-use professional and private networking platform designed for medical practitioners like physicians, surgeons, dentists, and medical students in India and abroad.

One can search and find service providers (doctors, dentists, etc.) after which an online appointment can be taken. However, if the doctor has a prior appointment and has not marked it on eMedWorld, they can choose to change the same to their convenience. This is then conveyed to the patient over email and SMS. Apart from practitioners, eMedWorld also provides contact information about medical hospitals, medical colleges, pharma companies, blood banks, pathology laboratories, diagnostic services and wellness centres.

Though currently focused on Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the company is planning to expand to other states soon. The portal also provides comprehensive information and discussion forums on health related issues and solutions.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Shashi Mamidibathula, mentions that “online appointment is probably only 20 per cent of the services we offer. We are working in a big way towards medical tourism”.

Positioned as the “yellow pages” of medical practitioners (doctors and dentists), the platform aims to connect patients and doctors from across the world as medical tourism picks up. “We facilitate communication between International and Indian doctors, so that they can share views, insights and handle cases in a better way,” added Mamidibathula.

The company’s revenues are not dependent on appointment scheduling, he said. “Our sources are different and value is placed on service. We can easily earn about Rs 3-4 crore per annum from organic mediums like advertisements from hospitals-pharmaceutical companies, our partners, job postings, services like sponsored growth and physician surveys,” he added.

Future plans of the company include expanding to other cities by adding contact information about hospitals, diagnostic services etc. Also in the later stages of operation the company might look into storing healthcare records including X-rays, files, prescriptions and billing, but nothing has been thought on those lines as yet, mentions Mamidibathula.

If you are in Andhra Pradesh or Karnataka, do give eMedWorld a spin and share your comment. The company is also launching SurgiKart.com, which will help healthcare providers and other medical related businesses and consumers in procuring their Medical and Surgical equipments / components in the most cost-effective manner.

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Survey Says Nearly 1 in 5 Japanese are Heavy Users of News Aggregators

Naver Matome

Dentsu Public Relations has conducted a survey into the usage of news aggregators in Japan (such as Naver Matome or 2 Channel Matome), and has come up with some interesting findings.

When the company asked 10,000 individuals if they had ever used news aggregators, 36.5 percent of respondents said that they had. Furthermore, 18.5 percent were found to be heavy users, or that is to say that they used such sites on a regular/daily basis.

Dentsu notes that men in their twenties showed the highest usage at about 90 percent, while just 10 percent of men in their 50s were heavy users. Looking back at a report last year from ComScore on how different demographics kept informed after the tragic earthquake, we can also see this tendency of younger segments towards new internet media.

The use of aggregator sites been much debated, not only in Japan but in the West as well. 2 Channel has recently had issues with summary sites and blogs that collected and presented its content in the past. But it’s hard to deny that such sites, whether in blog form or otherwise, are useful in that they bring together and collect information from a wide range of sources into one convenient place.

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Want to fake it till you make it? Hoiio Main Line gives you an auto-attendant on the cheap

The catchphrase “Fake it till you make it” has become a common refrain among entrepreneurs who have yet to make their first million bucks. It describes an attitude of thinking you’re a champion even though you’re not, and making your company seem bigger and more successful than it really is.

The hope is that this power-posing will create measurable impact and real returns.

Hoiio, a Singapore-based mobile communications startup, has a new product that promises to do just that: Make your business seem larger than it is. It’s new webapp, Main Line, lets you easily set up an auto-attendant — a luxury usually reserved for larger companies — at a low monthly subscription rate.

An auto-attendant, also known as a virtual receptionist, is a commonly-used system that automatically directs callers to the right department when they call a company’s main line. In the past, setting up a virtual receptionist is costly since it requires them to purchase and set up actual hardware.

Like many existing technologies however, the trend is that auto-attendants are also moving to the cloud, lowering the barrier to entry and making it affordable for more companies to implement the system.

Hoiio Main Line aims to bring the cost all the way down — such that even a startup with restrained finances might be able to afford them. As an introductory offer, Hoiio is offering Main Line to users at a discounted price of S$5 (US$4) per month, compared to the normal price of S$14.99.

The package includes a local number, up to ten extensions, personalized greeting, missed call notification via email, and the ability to block unwanted numbers. Upcoming features include uploading .mp3 files as a personalized greeting and voice mail.

I find setting up an automated assistant to be a cinch; I was up and running in ten minutes. The default virtual voice was quite pleasant, and the user interface was decent.

One improvement I can suggest though is that whenever I receive a call from the Main Line, I would like to have the ability to see the caller’s number on my mobile phone. Currently, I can only see my Hoiio account phone number. I’m not sure what the technical limitations are to implement this, but that’s for the Hoiio team to figure out.

Signing up for a Hoiio account gives you access to all of the startup’s consumer and enterprise services. That includes Phonebook, Phone (which is somewhat similar to Skype’s SMS and call functions), Conference, Fax, and SIP Trunk.

Fax is another app worth mentioning. With it, users can set up a fax number with Hoiio, and then receive as well as send faxes using the service. Soon, Hoiio will update the app to enable users to receive faxes from their email accounts.

Hoiio is shaping up to be a comprehensive, cloud-based, enterprise solutions suite that offers companies communication capabilities at low cost — a vision that its co-founder Junda Ong articulated to me sometime ago.

While comparisons have been made between Twilio and Hoiio, it has become obvious that Hoiio is moving in a vastly different direction by building enterprise and consumer apps that are useful right out of the box.

I have sought clarification from Hoiio regarding Main Line and the company in general. I will update the article once they respond.

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Weico, the Funkiest App For Weibo, Lands on Windows Phone

Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS will soon get a spoonful of sugar courtesy of a cute new app by a Beijing startup. Now in public beta but not yet uploaded to the WP Marketplace, the app is Weico, which allows you to use the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo service without having to go via Sina’s own app.

Weico for WP (pictured above) will be the third variant of the popular, kooky-looking Weibo client after earlier versions for iPhone, iPad, and Android. Last year I recommended those iterations as the best alternative way to use Weibo.

The new Weico for WP beta is being distributed via the app’s Weibo page – where it has 1.7 million followers – and the ‘.xap’ app file has been uploaded here if you fancy trying it. According to the makers, the WP version features a choice of four themes and a whole bunch of bug fixes over its previous private beta.

The Beijing-based startup behind the Weico series of apps is Eico Design (pictured below), a web design studio that has made some sweet-looking apps for clients such as BMW, Huawei, and local Pinterest clone Mogujie.

Though some of our team members like the official Sina Weibo app, personally I cannot stand it, and am always happy to see alternative apps emerge. Weibo-ers on an iPhone could also check out this Tweetbot clone for your mobile microblogging needs.

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Facebook E-Commerce Platform LakuBgt Has Big Plans

Indonesian startup LakuBgt.com, whose name stands for “Laku Banget” (meaning “really sells a lot” in English), essentially helps online sellers set up better-looking shops with online payment systems on Facebook. The e-payments are supported by iPayMu, which also supports Deal Going’s Discount Mall payment system. Here is a screenshot of the LakuBgt online shop:

LakuBgt’s service is free for the first year and for up to 50 product lists. To extend the membership, users need to pay from IDR 100,000 ($10.5) to IDR 5,000,000 ($528) every year, depending on the type of membership purchased.

Besides a membership fee, LakuBgt makes money from selling banner spots located below its Facebook online stores (pictured below). It costs from IDR 2,000,000 ($211) to place an advertisement there. Interestingly, LakuBgt also sells $50 Facebook ad vouchers for IDR 100,000 ($10.5) [1].

The LakuBgt team also believes that e-commerce products aren’t only about merchandise, but also tourism. They want to spread that message by also providing help to online tourism services with LakuBgt’s other feature, which is “Facebook Travel,” as seen in these pictures:

LakuBgt believes that its search engine friendly feature makes them stand out compared to the other Facebook e-commerce platforms. The team added that LakuBgt combines a social media algorithm and Google crawler to achieve that. The team itself consists of four people with backgrounds in programming, SEO, social media strategies, and information systems.

They then told us that the website has only been published onto Google and social media in the past three months, but hasn’t officially reached the launch stage yet. For a new comer, LakuBgt already has promising statistics with 1,200 active stores, accumulating more than 500,000 visits every month.

LakuBgt’s big vision is to create 1,000,000 new netpreneurs in Indonesia to increase the country’s economic activities. The Bali-based company plans to connect to more than five giant marketplaces in Indonesia in the future.

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1. The price above is based on LakuBgt’s email to us, which is different to that on its website that says the starting price for Facebook ad vouchers is IDR 110,000 ($11.6), cheaper if bought in bulk.  ↩

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The who’s who of Singapore’s business analytics at the 19th Infocomm and Media Horizons

The 19th Infocomm and Media Horizons (ICM Horizons) offers an exciting two-day program in Singapore with internationally known, high profile analytics pioneers and practitioners. ICM Horizons presents the who’s who of Singapore’s business analytics industry, and brings together industry thought leaders from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Revolution Analytics, SAP, SAS along with analytics practitioners from application verticals such as transportation, logistics, finance, and energy management. Our expert speakers will discuss key aspects of analytics including contemporary challenges, application case studies, pivotal technology trends, the emerging analytics landscape in Singapore, and visionary projections of the future.

ICM Horizons 2012 offers hot-topics tutorials ranging from real-time stream analytics, to Analytics Tool for Big Data, and High Performance Cloud Analytics. ICM Horizons will be co-located with the annual TechFest 2012 of the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). TechFest 2012 will showcase live demos of latest technologies from I2R and includes free admission.

The theme is “Leveraging Analytics to Drive Business”. There will also be a set of tutorials running on the 16th of August at the conference on topics such as the state of the art in Big Data, Real-Time Analytics and so on.

Event Details
When: Wednesday-Thursday 15-16th August 2012
Where: Genexis Theatre, Level 5 Fusionopolis, 1 Fusionopolis Way, Singapore 138632
REGISTER HERE.

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Ashoke Sen gets $3 million in Fundamental Physics Prize for Research on String Theory

If you read about Uddhab Bharali earlier on Pluggd.in, and were excited by him being conferred with the NASA Technology Award, Ashoke Sen brings you more reason to rejoice. For his pioneering contributions to the String Theory, theoretical physicist Sen has been awarded with the Fundamental Physics Prize started by Yuri Milner, the russian billionaire entrepreneur and investor. At $3 million, the award comes with the highest academic prize money in the world, 2.5 times that of the Nobel Prize at about $1.2 million (8 million Swedish Krona).

Ashoke Sen receives this award for uncovering striking evidence of strong-weak duality in certain supersymmetric string theories and gauge theories, opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory.

String theory is currently the most viable candidate for a unified theory of physics which describes all forces of nature, encompassing the physics of gravity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. If successful, this could complete the Theory of Everything, or final theory, that is a theory of Physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, describes all fundamental forces and forms of matter, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.

Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality (aka strong-weak duality), which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory, a formalism in string theory in which the dynamics of relativistic strings is reformulated in the language of quantum field theory.

A professor of Physics at the rather unknown but exclusive Harish Chandra Reseach Institute, Allahabad, Sen earlier worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. Sen, 55, did his graduation from Presidency College Calcutta, Masters from IIT Kanpur, and Doctorate from Stony Brook University New York, before doing post-doctoral research at Fermilab, Batavia and SLAC, Stanford, after which he returned to India for good in 1988.

Ashoke Sen was also awarded the Padma Shri in 2001.

Ashoke Sen at Harvard

The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation is a non-profit organization “dedicated to advancing our [sic] knowledge of the Universe at the deepest level” by awarding physicists involved in fundamental research, and was founded in July this year by Yuri Milner, a physicist himself, and founder of Digital Sky Technologies, under which he funded successful internet companies like Spotify, Groupon, Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter. Milner, in an earlier avatar, studied for an advanced degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University and later conducted research at the Institute of Physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Fundamental Physics Prize was commemorated to nine Physicists across the world including Sen, out of which seven are based in the US, and one in France. Yuri Milner personally nominated the inaugural group, but all 9 recipients have agreed to form a Selection Committee to award future prizes, annually.

Not all scientists are convinced about String Theory, but if the theory is proven, Sen would have helped us understand the universe better than ever before. This could be the next big thing after Higgs Boson.

Image credit: 1/2.

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