An article in the Vancouver Sun, ‘One-size-fits-all no more‘ provides an interesting overview on the topic of personalized medicine, explaining the topic everyday language, and decoding some of the terminology used in this area.

Scott Duke Harris, writing in the Mercury News, includes personalized medicine as a ‘Tech trend to watch in 2009‘ and summarises some of the examples that have made the most progress towards widespread usage.

In addition to technological developments, the increasing affordability of current personalized medicine technologies such as genomic sequencing will advance their use in the healthcare market, which John Carroll describes in the Fierce Biotech blog.

Personalized medicine is frequently concerned with diagnosis – analyzing whether a particular existing treatment is compatible with an individual patient’s genetic makeup. The New York Times looked in detail at this area in a recent article titled ‘Patient’s DNA may be a Signal to Tailor Medication‘, focusing in particular on changes to the U.S. legislative environment to reflect advances in science. It also raises the question as to whether major drug companies will be enthusiastic about personalized medicine technologies that may reduce the sales of existing drugs, by identifying patients for whom they are likely to be ineffective.

It should be borne in mind that the current trends in personalized medicine are mostly concerned with the development of more effective diagnostic techniques, something which is evidenced by all the articles referenced here. It is likely to be many more years before personalized treatments, that combat diseases with unique solutions based on individual patient genetics, become a reality.

The DK travel customized travel guide website

They are similar in concept to Offbeat Guides, which were covered on this site recently.

The Inventorspot article considers the DK Travel customized travel guide to be a superior offering to the Offbeat Guide, although it should be pointed out that the Offbeat Guide is still in a ‘beta’ stage, to allow it to be evaluated by customers before launch, a method more commonly used with computer software.

Gartner claims that “Financial Institutions Must Focus on IT Innovation or Hibernate to Weather the Economic Downturn.” The press release quotes Alistair Newton, research vice president at Gartner, who makes a number of recommendations aimed at financial institutions. Two of the recommendations cite examples that may be of interest to readers of this site:

“Extreme but not complex innovation – Use technology to deliver a new level of personalisation for the customer. For example, one Spanish bank allows its customers to calculate exactly how much the bank profits from their custom and enables them to donate a portion of those profits to a designated charity.”

While the option to donate a share of the profit to charity is admirable, this example is interesting for a different reason – it introduces a measure of personalized transparency to the relationship between the bank and the customer. There is still a dependency on the bank to be truthful in relation to the profit figure which it derives from the customer, but this might trigger an expectation among bank customers for of a higher level of information on how profitable they are to the bank.

“Treat customers as innovators via social networks – Customers can answer most of what organisations want to know about them, whether it’s where they shop, how they feel and what and when they want to purchase. Some new financial services entrants such as the social networking start-ups, are trying to leverage customers more effectively using this technology and customers’ increasing acceptance and use of it. The next innovation step will be to bridge the gap between pure social networks and financial social networks (FSNs). FSNs are leveraging social networks to initiate a new form of financial transaction, allowing members to not only share information but to actually start lending and borrowing to each other, cutting out the middle man – in this case the bank.”

It should be remembered that customers of every bank already lend to and borrow from one another – one customer’s deposit savings are provided to another customer in the form of a loan – but this proposal suggests that the bank might become a simply an intermediary between the parties, which implies that the bank itself would not be a contracting party. Whether any bank would be willing to take this step is a subject for debate!

Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts.  The Offbeat Guides website states that their guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about each destination.  Customers can personalize the information they want, based on their travel dates, preferences, and destination.  The guides come with local maps, festivals and events going on during the customer’s period of visiting, exchange rates, key phrases in the city’s language, weather forecasts and other relevant information.

The key selling point of Offbeat Guides is that standard guidebooks are often 12 to 18 months out of date as soon as they are available on bookshelves.  Offbeat Guides claims that its content is the most up-to-date because they have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information out on the internet, and combine it with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live.

Offbeat Guides is also a strong believer in Creative Commons, in which users can share, create and build information that is available for mixing and remixing into unique new applications. As well as Creative Commons licensed information, it also use proprietary content and professional authors, which it says makes for accurate and authoritative information in our guides. The customer can get their guide in electronic format for printing at home, or Offbeat Guides can create and ship a printed guide before the time of the customer’s trip, with all the latest information packed inside.

According to David Sifry, the company is run by obsessive technologists who happen to travel a lot, rather than being drawn from the travel industry. In order to create a personalized travel guide, they ask the customer just five questions:

• Where are you going?
  When will you be there? – So that they can include information about local festivals, events, club meetings, sports teams, concerts, and other timely information
  Where are you coming from? – With this information, Offbeat Guides will give the customer contextual information, like timezone differences, embassies and consulates for their home country, language guides, exchange rates, electrical adapters needed, and so on.
  Where are you staying? – Offbeat Guides uses this to localize the maps that go into the personalized guide, and put the customer’s hotel right at the centre of things.
  The Traveler’s Name: – They can put the customer’s name ron the book cover, and this can be used for gift purposes.

The website indicates that the pdf version (for downloading and printing at home) of an Offbeat Guide costs US$9.95, and the print edition costs US$24.95 plus packaging and delivery.

In his blog post, David Sifry notes:

You get full control over your guide – so if you already know where you’re staying, you can click to deselect all of the information about hotels, for example. You can add customized chapters and fill them with information that you gather from your friends, or from around the internet.

This reflects an interesting point – that mass customization of products can also refer to the omission of elements that are not needed by the customer.  Mass customization is often described only in the context of a customer adding features or elements to a basic product.  However, there may also be the potential to develop opportunities in the area of allowing customers to omit elements or features from even the basic specification of a product, if these are not needed by the customer.  However, in the case of Offbeat Guides, it does not appear that omitting a chapter results in a lower price.

The personalization of information, whether on travel or any other topic, is normally viewed only in the context of delivery over the web.  If the Offbeat Guides proposal is successful, it will possibly generate a new level of interest in personalized book publishing.  Personalization in this context refers to the content of the book, rather than the more cosmetic types of personalization (such as putting someone’s name on the cover or at various places in the content).

I think that the Offbeat Guides idea could become a success, as there is still a lot to be said for a printed travel guide that is not dependent on an internet connection, or a suitable power supply to recharge a PDA.  Printed documents can be carried around a city stuffed in a jacket or backpack, do not need batteries, can be generally thrown about, and will still work afterwards.

One critical issue for Offbeat Guides is delivery times for printed versions – the company will need to carefully analyse actual delivery times, rather than the claimed delivery times of the various providers.  This will ensure that customers are correctly informed as to whether there is sufficient time to deliver a printed version of their Offbeat Guide before their planned departure date.  Getting this right could prevent a great deal of hassle for the company from disgruntled future customers.  The worst thing for the company would be having to deal with irate customers who do not receive their personalized printed travel guide on time.  Perhaps delivery times, though outside the direct control of Offbeat Guides, could form a useful part of the beta testing.

It quotes Jane McCann, director of Smart Clothes and Wearable Technology at the University of Wales, who predicts that, in the next 10 years, clothes will have all kinds of functionality.

“A garment might have devices on it to help you find your way somewhere, or to tell you how fit you are. It could tell you where someone is to help you meet them, or tell you what’s on at a museum or club.”

Other new developments referred to include the use of thermochromic inks, that change colour when you touch or breathe on them, and a shape-memory alloy called Nitinol, produced by Montreal’s XS Labs, that can alter the shape of clothes while they are being worn.

So, here goes:

The website of Colby College in Maine, USA, carries a profile of Marybeth Luber, CEO of Archetype Solutions, a San Francisco company that offers consumers customized clothing based on their body sizes and preferred styles.

The Internet Retailer website reports that Personalized gifts e-retailer Personal Creations has implemented personalization technology on its website, including product recommendations, to improve the customer experience and meet its goals. The article states that the company has found that average order value is 45% higher for customers who click on product recommendations versus those who do not, and items per order is 68% higher. The article appears to be derived from a press release by Certona, which provided the technology to implement site personalization for Personal Creations.

A new startup based in New York called Proper Cloth offers high-end, customizable men’s dress shirts. The company has been founded by Seph Skerritt, an electrical engineer and recent graduate from MIT. In addition to the many design options, the Proper Cloth configurator appears to offer a very high level of flexibility regarding the size measurements for shirts.

The makers of the Flip Video family of camcorders have teamed up with online marketplace Cafepress.com to offer personalized Flip Mino camcorders on a purpose-designed website called TheFlip.com. Consumers can add their creations to the open marketplace and earn commissions for each camcorder sold using their designs. Users can also elect to have their designs earn commissions for non-profit causes.

That’s it for today!

‘The Daily Me’ is a term used to describe the risks attached to personalized news services.  In everyday terms, a newspaper or online news aggregator tailored to the personal tastes of a person on a given day will lead to too much positive feedback in that direction, in other words, the person’s existing outlook and views would be re-inforced by their choice of reading.  The Daily Me theory postulates that, in the absence of exposure to viewpoints that are not in line with their own, the person is actually likely to become more extreme in their viewpoint on a particular issue.
A recent edition of UK Financial newspaper The Financial Times reported on a 2005 study in the United States suggests that the theory is true, not in individuals as might be expected, but in groups.  The article reports that, as part of the study:

“About 60 US citizens were put into 10 groups. They deliberated on controversial issues, such as whether the US should sign an inter-national treaty to combat global warming and whether states should allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.  The groups consisted of predominantly either leftwing or rightwing members.  The groups, not mixed, were screened to ensure members conformed to stereotypes. People were asked to state their opinions anonymously before and after the group discussion.”

The study found that, in almost every group, people ended up with more extreme positions. The largely leftwing groups favoured an inter-national treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favoured it far more strongly afterwards. In the rightwing group, people were neutral on that treaty before discussion; discussion led them to oppose it strongly. Same-sex unions became much more popular in the leftwing group and less so in the rightwing group.

The Financial Times report continued:

“Aside from increasing extremism, discussion had another effect: it squelched diversity. Before members talked, many groups displayed internal disagreement. These were greatly reduced: discussion widened the rift.”

Three reasons are given for the findings.  First is the exchange of information. The members of the predominantly rightwing group offered many justifications for not signing a climate treaty and a lot fewer for doing so. Since people listened to one another, they became more sceptical.

The second reason given is that when people find their views corroborated, they become more confident and so are more willing to be extreme.

The third reason involves social comparison. People who favour a position think of themselves in a certain way and if they are with people who agree with them, they shift slightly to hold on to their preferred self-conception.

The full Financial Times article, which suggests that this trend holds significant challenges for democracy, can be read here.  The article was written by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago in the United States, who analyzed the implications of the Daily Me in his book, Republic.com.

My personal view is that the most effective way of combatting the risk of the ‘Daily Me’ phenomenon is that any medium used to disseminate personalized news should have a ‘window’ through which the reader can easily access alternative viewpoints on the topic under discussion, especially where it is the subject of conflicting views.  In the case of online news aggregators, this could consist of a small sub-section of the page which could be called the ‘counterpoint window’ or some similar term to identify it as the source of viewpoints likely to be at odds with the reader’s own.  In a printed publication which is personalized, the corresponding outlet would be a ‘counterpoint page’.
In the case of groups, however, penetrating the shared viewpoint is more difficult – the viewpoint is likely to be what brought the group together in the first place.  It is far more difficult for the alternative viewpoint to penetrate the shared group outlook.  Maybe the solution is to actually encourage the growth of personalized news aggregation coupled with the counterpoint window, so that the individuals who join the group have a better chance of being exposed to the alternative viewpoint beforehand.  They may still hold to their chosen view, but they at least would know why the opposing side thinks the way it does.

Therefore, I’m making a small contribution to the MCPC 2007 by gathering the thoughts of some of those who did attend.

First off, Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs, who spoke at MCPC 2007, wrote briefly about the event on the company’s BugBloggers weblog. Bug Labs is is producing an open source, modular consumer electronics platform which they say makes building hardware just as easy as writing software or Web applications. Wade Roush, of the Xconomy website, provides a good description of what Bug Labs is trying to achieve in the ‘long tail of consumer devices’.

Elaine Polvinen, Professor of Fashion Textile Technology at Buffalo State University, published her thoughts on MCPC on her Virtual Fashion Technology blog. Her focus is primarily on areas of interest relating to Virtual Fashion Technology Education.

For Justin R. Saunders, the highlights of the day included Wikinomics author Don Tapscott.

Michael Galpert, Chief Operations Officer of Worth 1000, a Photoshop competition website, wrote some notes on MPCP 2007, which he hopes to transfer to his Michael Galpert blog shortly.

Adrian Bowyer of the RepRap digital manufacturing machine (3D printer) project, posted about his journey to Boston and how he set up one of the ‘Darwin’ 3D printers in the conference lobby.

Dave ten Have, founder and CEO of Ponoko posted on his personal blog a picture of a shoe which was shown as a proof of concept at MCPC 2007. The shoe was created using a 3D printer by TNO of the Netherlands.

MCPC 2007 Conference Programme Co-Chair Frank Piller posted a preview of the event before it began, and I am sure he will publish his account of the event when time allows.

If there is anyone else that I have missed who attended MCPC2007, and has written about the event online, please leave a comment and I’ll update this post later.

Update 24/10/2007:  Ruben Robert of innovation intermediary FellowForce has published a short summary of his MCPC presentation ‘The Business Smarts of Strangers’ on the FellowForce blog.

CreateSpace was originally founded as CustomFlix Labs, Inc. in 2002 and acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2005. Prior to launching the Books on Demand service, CreateSpace was already providing inventory-free, physical distribution of CDs and DVDs on Demand, and video downloads via Amazon Unbox.

In addition, the company is no longer charging setup fees for books, audio CDs and DVDs. Authors, filmmakers and musicians can now offer their works on Amazon.com, CreateSpace.com and via their own free customizable eStore without any inventory, setup fees or minimum orders.

“The new CreateSpace Books on Demand service removes substantial economic barriers and makes it really easy for authors who want to self-publish their books and distribute them on Amazon.com,” said Jeff Wilke, senior vice president, North American Retail, Amazon.com. “The service will also give millions of Amazon customers access to an even greater selection of books, just as CreateSpace’s DVD and CD on Demand services are adding significant selection to our movie and music catalogs.”

Books on Demand works the same way as CreateSpace’s DVD and CD on Demand offerings. CreateSpace books sold on Amazon.com are printed on demand, display “in stock” availability on Amazon.com and can be shipped within 24 hours from when they are ordered. The books are automatically eligible for Amazon programmes such as “Search Inside!”, “Amazon Prime”, “Super Saver Shipping” and so on.

There are no setup fees or minimum orders for the CreateSpace on-demand service. Members are required to purchase and approve a proof copy of their book, CD, and/or DVD before titles can be produced on demand. Books published via the CreateSpace Books on Demand service are printed with high-quality, full-colour paperback covers. Black-and-white or color interiors in multiple trim sizes can be selected as options. Members can also order high-quality copies of their book, DVD or CD at competitive wholesale prices.

An important aspect of the CreateSpace service is that the creator of the work retains the rights to the work. There is no attempt to ‘muscle in’ on the future earning potential of the work, should it become successful.

The scope of the CreateSpace service certainly provides plenty of options for content creators, especially in video. They can sell in DVD, HD-DVD or video download. Blue-Ray is due to be added to the roster in the near future. Additional services include assistance with cover artwork, conversion of videos to DVD’s, high definition capture and authoring to HD-DVD, and high volume disk replication.

Steffen Hoellinger, writing on the Openeur website, compares the retailer’s share of a commercial DVD sold on Amazon.com with that for a DVD sold on CreateSpace. The content creator retains a much higher percentage of the selling price when the product is sold through CreateSpace. For example, a 100 page black and white book with a list price of $25.00 sold through a CreateSpace E-Store would earn the author a royalty of $14.85 per sale. This raises the possibility that CreateSpace might become a distribution channel of choice for authors, film makers and musicians. If a writer or artist already has a public profile, is it necessary for them to contract with a publishing company to publish their work, if they can sell directly to end users and keep a much higher portion of the retail price for themselves?

The CreateSpace on-demand publishing service is not the only one of its kind – Lulu.com also offers self publishing services for books, digital downloads, CD and DVD. If CreateSpace provides publishers with an effective level of access to Amazon.com users (in other words, items available on CreateSpace show up in the search results on Amazon), then Lulu.com may find itself being squeezed out unless it can form an alliance with another heavyweight such as a mainstream search engine or social network.

Blends For Friends is run by Alex Probyn, who worked as a master tea blender for a number of years with one of the world’s leading tea brands. He became frustrated with the restricted styles and flavours of tea that he could use for large-scale commercial packs of tea. In an attempt to exploit his knowledge and to test his creative skills, he began to blend individual teas and herbal infusions for friends and family based on their personalities. The idea caught on, and now Blends For Friends offers customers across the globe the same service.

It’s fair to say that the current pricing for Blends For Friends is reflective of a craft-based operation rather than one which is mass customized. Every original new blend costs GBP27 plus postage for 100 grams of loose leaf tea, packaged in a gift-wrapped tin caddy with a bespoke label referring to the recipient and the different teas used in the blend. Reorders are priced at GBP7 plus postage. In addition to individual gifts, Blends For Friends also creates custom blends for corporate clients and for weddings.

While this is an innovative idea, the price is likely to make it attractive only to very affluent consumers. It does present an interesting question though: Why has the market for tea not generated the same level of fragmentation in Western countries that has taken place with wine or coffee? The market for coffee has changed significantly in recent years, with many consumers seeking out new flavours, and a growing market for niche blends of every description. This innovation in coffee can be attributed in no small way to the massive growth of one company – Starbucks. Tea has lagged behind to a large extent, perhaps because it does not have the same level of popularity as coffee in the United States, where most Western consumer trends originate. Here in Ireland, we drink more tea per head than anywhere else in the World, so one would imagine that a ‘Starbucks of tea’ might originate in this country, or in the UK, where tea also outranks coffee in popularity. It is difficult to shake off the perception that ‘tea is tea’, and that they all taste pretty much alike. I say this from personal experience as much as any observation of trends.

Perhaps if BlendsForFriends is successful, it would serve to generate more interest in niche or custom blended teas, and might open the door to more fragmentation of the market, presenting new opportunities for artisan and mass customizing tea blenders and outlets.

No official statement has, as yet, been issued by Zazzle regarding any investment.  If true, it would continue a remarkable run of success for Zazzle in attracting high profile investments.  In 2005, it secured funding of $16M from John Doerr and Ram Shiram, venture capitalists with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures respectively.  Doerr and Shiram were early investors in Google.

Keynote speakers include B. Joseph Pine (who wrote the book ‘Mass Customization – The New Frontier in Business Competition’ in 1993, which can be said to have kick started the whole area of mass customization), Eric Von Hippel of the Sloan School of Management and author of ‘Democratizing Innovation’, Marvin Minsky (‘inventor’ or artificial intelligence, and William Mitchell (Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab).

Confego manages order fulfillment and shipping for large retailers such as Reebok, to offer customized versions of their products through the use of Confego’s proprietary software. The company’s primary role is to build and maintain supply chains that are optimized to source customized products quickly and efficiently. Confego has utilized this experience to develop a network of contract factories that are linked directly to client web sites and other points of purchase through their proprietary, web-based order management software.

Through the acquisition, Zazzle will obtain this exclusive software, and will continue Confego’s current relationship with Reebok’s RBK Custom. Confego brings expertise in the customization of the construction of products, including cut, color, fabric choice and custom embroidery. In addition to its current arrangement with Reebok, Confego has also worked with Timberland and Nike.

Zazzle uses on-demand manufacturing to enabling consumers to create customized apparel, posters, magnets, mugs, cards, U.S. postage and other items. The ‘Zazzle Product Engine’ (the name given by Zazzle to its system) also hosts the Zazzle Create-a-Product API, the first-ever API that allows third party websites to offer their users a ‘one-click’ way to turn digital content into custom products.

“This relationship marks the beginning of a new generation of customization for Zazzle,” said Robert Beaver, CEO and co-founder of Zazzle.com, Inc. It would appear that Zazzle intend to use the acquisition of Confego to expand beyond personalization of products (placing images supplied by customers onto stock items) to full customization (allowing customers to specify the attributes of the product). The comments attributed to Brennan Mulligan, co-founder of Confego and now Vice President at Zazzle, would appear to back up this analysis: “Consumers have come to expect more for their money. The growing availability of fast, easy and affordable customization is empowering shoppers to get exactly what they want, without being force-fed what designers are offering.”

The press release issued by Zazzle says that “Mulligan will help Zazzle achieve limitless customization that provides consumers a unique finished product almost immediately and at an affordable price”. Confego’s manufacturing and fulfillment process is said to allow delivery of custom shoes in just one week.

Zazzle has been engaged in an ongoing battle with Cafepress for dominance of the customized product marketplace sector. The two companies have followed broadly similar strategies, often mirroring each others initiatives. With Zazzle seemingly making a move beyond product personalization into full customization, it remains to be seen how Cafepress will respond to this latest development.

Slacker says it has millions of songs with the breadth and depth increasing continuously. The extensive Slacker music library is organized into numerous professionally programmed genre and sub-genre stations and over 10,000 stations that are built around specific artists. Personalization options available to customers include adjusting stations to play more popular vs. more eclectic music, newer vs. older music, or even to play more tracks that the customer has tagged as favorites. Other features include:

• Log in from any PC or Mac to hear personalized stations in CD quality
• Playback through web player, jukebox software and portable devices
• Create stations by combining favorite artists
• Select favorite tracks/artists to play more often and ban other tracks/artists
• Click through album cover art, band profiles, reviews and artist photos
• Easily share stations

Slacker has acquired rights from content owners, including SONY BMG, Universal Music Group and hundreds of independent labels. The service offers Wi-Fi and satellite music distribution, as well as what they call ‘DJ intelligence’ embedded in portable players. Slacker states that customers can now “play highly personalized, continuously refreshed radio stations everywhere they go”.

The following comments were attributed to Dennis Mudd, CEO of Slacker: “Personalized radio is a great way to listen to the music you love without having to work at it. The only problem is that until now, personalized radio has been stuck on the PC. Slacker solves that problem. Now you can just kick back and listen.”

The reason Slacker may become a rival for the iPod/iTunes is that the forthcoming Slacker Personal Radio Players will enable music lovers to play personalized radio everywhere they go. The new devices include integrated Wi-Fi and an on-board Slacker DJ. The company says that the Slacker DJ combined with the new Slacker caching system guarantees personalized CD quality radio stations to be played everywhere, even when not in Wi-Fi range. Slacker customers get deep, personalized radio stations with optimized radio programming sequences, continuously refreshed and updated to include personalized new music.

Additional Slacker device features include:

• 4″ full screen display featuring album art /reviews, artist photos/bios and visualizations
• Support for MP3, WMA and video as well as “saved” radio tracks
• Automatically save and refresh personalized stations via Wi-Fi, Satellite or USB

Slacker is currently in discussions with selected partners to provide Slacker Personal Radio through a broader range of devices in the future. In the second half of 2007, Slacker device owners in the U.S. will have the option to purchase Slacker Satellite Car Kits that update the Personal Radio Player with new content through a breakthrough satellite broadcast system. Slacker car-top antennas receive high-speed music feeds from satellites throughout the continental United States, while the integrated Slacker DJ ensures favorite stations stay current.

Slacker Basic Radio is advertising funded and will remain free to use on Slacker software and portable Slacker Personal Radio Players, while Slacker Premium Radio will launch later in Q2 2007 at $7.50 per month.

Slacker premium service offers no advertising, unlimited skipping, and the ability to save radio tracks to a library.

The free beta Slacker Personal Radio service is available now at www.slacker.com. Slacker Premium Radio will be available in Q2 2007 and Slacker portable devices in early summer.

Industry experts said that the offering was likely to prove attractive to customers. “They’re leveraging multiple distribution channels, so they won’t be just satellite radio and they’re not quite an online music provider either,” Susan Kevorkian, of the IT analyst firm IDC, said. Slacker describes itself as the world’s first Personal Radio company. This hybrid of mp3 player and radio service is something of a step beyond the ‘personalization through massive product variety’ approach used by online music services.