Apple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads.
Marin Software, which offers a way to manage paid search advertising, conducted a study it provided to TechCrunch which shows that 80 percent of the time iOS devices don’t count paid-search conversions (i.e., clicks) because cookie-tracking is turned off. On the Mac, the undercounting occurs 50 percent of the time. All told, when you count all browsers, 38 percent of all paid-search clicks are not being counted.
These numbers are for so-called third-party cookies, not first-party cookies which come only from Websites you visit. Third-party cookies are served from various advertising networks or monitoring tools, and they are required for any type of retargeting across multiple Websites. While Marin only looked at paid search ad conversions, the numbers should hold true for display ads as well.
Not only are ads not being tracked properly on most Apple devices, but if they were tracked properly, Marin suggests that Apple devices actually perform better. As part of the study, Marin compared actual ad conversions to Windows computers as a baseline. While the perceived conversion rate of search ads is 56 percent lower because of the undercounting, the actual conversion rate is 23 percent higher.
Following the maxim that you don’t get paid for what can’t be measured, this blindspot poses a growing challenge to the online advertising industry, and Google in particular. (And you thought Apple was just doing this to protect consumers). The way around the blindspot is to use first-party cookies served from the Websites people visit, or to come up with better ways to measure the performance of online ads. But that’s the topic for another post.
“There are certain times in your life when you know it’s the right move to do something. Health care has always seemed like it’s just not there with technology; it always felt backwards.
I believe health care should be as seamless as this: If you’re hurt while skiing in Colorado, doctors should be able to pull up your medical records and browse through your medical history immediately, reading what you’re allergic to and a list of previous injuries. It should work as seamlessly as banking systems talking to each other, but it doesn’t.”
– Daniel Kivatinos the Co-Founder of DrChrono
The U.S. government, which has notoriously failed to produce a reputable health care system, is trying to solve this problem. As part of the healthcare stimulus, it has implemented new incentives for electronic health record (EHR) adoption. The HITECH Act specifies that physicians can qualify for $44,000 or more in economic stimulus incentives for adopting an EHR over the next 5 years. To fund this, the government is shelling out $19.2 billion dollars to help move all doctors off paper charts and manilla folders and onto electronic systems. The main goal is to improve the overall cost and efficiency of our healthcare system. After the first 5 years, doctors will be penalized for not using electronic medical records (EMR).
Daniel Kivatinos and his Co-Founder Michael Nusimow, the CEO of DrChrono are both software developers and hackers who met in college. In elevator pitch lingo, “DrChrono addresses the complexities and critical needs of today’s healthcare environment by providing a multi point solution, mobile health point-of-care apps plus access to our cloud web based Electronic Health Record platform.” They founded the company in January 2009 and released their feature product- the DrChrono iPad app for doctors one week after Apple started selling them last spring. The iPad is a perfect device for doctors, in fact it almost looks like a clipboard. Paul Graham, the famous programmer (inventor of Bayesian spam filters) and venture capitalist has called DrChrono “the SAP for doctors.”
Current features include e-prescriptions, allowing doctors to send a prescription to any pharmacy in the USA electronically through SureScripts, which connects to 98% of U.S. pharmacies. The app processes medical billing, allowing the doctor to tick off certain procedures and problems and automatically submit bills to insurance companies. Kivatinos and Nusimow spent the first year of their company building relationships with insurance companies and clearinghouses to be able to process these. Lastly, the app includes form builder tools, which allows doctors to turn their current paper forms into electronic documents with customizable fields. They’re continually upgrading the app, with a new release every month, consulting doctors throughout the process.
The Evolution of DrChrono
DrChrono is a New York born, San Francisco/YCombinator bred startup. The first version of their app was just an appointment reminder system for patients. Then they built a medical billing engine which hooked into all of the insurance companies.
“Then we heard that the iPad was coming out and our whole company changed,” says Kivatinos. “We said, ‘Let’s make this thing totally different. We started to build on Apple’s SDK for the iPad before the hardware came out. When the Apple iPad came out, Apple released our app immediately and all of a sudden we had doctors coming out in droves. This was the turning point in our company when doctors started to call us. A doctor could be at the gym, looking at his schedule and processing bills. Essentially we built a platform, which hooks into the iPad and the cloud through a web browser. The future is mobile.”
DrChrono’s released their app a week after the first iPad came out. Up to this point, they have over 1,500 doctors signed up. It’s particularly popular with single or small doctor practices. Over the next month, they will hold in-Apple store training sessions for doctors on the iPad in the city of Chicago.
New Features
Speech to text on the iPad
DrChrono worked with M*Modal to create the first medical speech to text functionality on the iPad. The feature works with a bluetooth headset. Over time, the speech to text module improves as it learns the doctor’s inflections and choice of diction. It’s an extremely helpful tool for doctors who need their hands to deal with patients and can’t be typing notes on the iPad’s keyboard at the same time.
Drug Interactions Checking on the iPad
Another new feature includes “drug interactions checking.” This video shows how a health provider can check drug interactions on the iPad through the DrChrono app.
The Future of DrChrono on the iPad 2
The iPad 2′s front and rear facing cameras open up a world of diagnosis-related possibilities to expand the doctor-patient relationship in the future. Let’s say a child has a rash. Kivatinos envisions a doctor taking a video or picture of the patient’s rash. The patient, and future doctors would then have access to this totally new form of electronic medical record. The other huge possibility to expand the doctor-patient relationship with the iPad is by using FaceTime for instant and remote contact. Emergency alerts are also coming soon, something akin to a push notification.
Pricing
DrChrono’s pricing model ranges from a free base offer including storage for 1,000 patients and one doctor login to a premium offer including 10 staff logins and unlimited patient record storage for $199 per month. Setting up medical billing costs quite a bit, which is why they charge for the premium versions of the app. Kivatinos also notes that most doctors pay upwards of $50,000 for a similar electronic system. A complete list of pricing can be found here.
Know any on-the-go, iPad owning doctors who want to cash in on an extra $44,000 from the government over the next 5 years? Tell them to download the free app here.
Other startups that are building electronic health record systems (EHRs) as platforms to support app stores, include HealthForge, an open source EHR platform, Boundary Medical, Phytel, and emerge.md. Also other notable efforts to revolutionize health care through technology include Aza Raskin’s Massive Health and Dr. Jay Parkinson’s Hello Health.
Apple could be limiting the speeds of web applications launched from the homescreen on iPhone and iPad devices, potentially limiting the effectiveness of HTML apps by developers, it has emerged in a report by technology website The Register.
Web applications were found to be running at “significantly slower speeds” when they were launched from the homescreen of an iOS 4.3-powered device, instead of being launched from directly within Safari, rendering “two and a half times slower” than when loaded within the browser.
Web apps loaded from the homescreen should take advantage of the new Nitro JavaScript engine, which was introduced with the iOS 4.3 firmware update, but it is not invoked, as it should be.
Apple, which advertises that it fully supports HTML5 and the development of web-based apps, allows users to save website bookmarks to their homescreens, providing developers with a way to replace native applications that are available via the Apple App Store with web applications.
One mobile web app developer believes Apple is purposefully limiting how web apps are loaded:
“Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality – even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform.”
Another developer has identified that homescreen web apps aren’t currently using the various web caching systems available to them. This includes the HTML5 Application Cache, meaning web apps/websites can’t run offline and are not rendered using Apple’s new ”asynchronous mode”, instead they are loaded using the old “synchronous mode”, which means means they don’t look as good as they should.
The tests performed by The Register show the speed differences between homescreen and browser loaded web apps. The left image shows a website loaded from the browser, the right from the homescreen:
Left – 4047ms / Right 10747.3ms
Apple did not respond to requests for comment but is aware of the problems, acknowledging speed issues on the company’s developer support forums.
It is easy to believe that Apple is purposefully limiting web applications, ensuring that developers come back to its ecosystem to develop iOS apps that are able to run without limitations. With the recent launch of in-app subscriptions, some developers have had to develop pure HTML5 applications so they don’t fall foul of becoming a “Service As A Service” app that would mean they would have to pay Apple 30% of each subscription they earned via the app.
We will be keeping an eye on the issue and report if Apple addresses the issues.Image Credit
A man connects his iPhone to a video transmitter which sits precariously in his handsets headphone jack. Whenever he places the video repeater near a video source, he is able to broadcast whatever is on his iPhone’s screen, effectively hacking video billboards in Times Square.
We can’t vouch for the authenticity of the video but it certainly looks real. What do you think?Image Credit, 9to5mac
Your new iPad—and old too, with iOS 4.3—has a new hidden feature that Apple doesn't want you to know about: Extra multi-touch gestures that completely changes the iPad experience—for the best.More »
Daniel Kivatinos and his Co-Founder Michael Nusimow, the CEO of 
DrChrono is a New York born, San Francisco/
