I hate to be a jerk, but why so many first-world problem startups?

Is keeping a handle on your cat pictures and food shots really that big a deal, something that keeps Joe Sixpack up at night?

Here's an idea: instead of helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos into the cloud, do something that matters.

For example, go after the giant clusterfuck that is medical image sharing. Again, it's cloud data storage of images, it's sharing on all kinds of devices, and it's technically challenging (privacy concerns, etc.)--and it actually helps people.

Why don't you take this tech and use it to help patients move their medical images between practitioners?

a) Photos are a fundamental form of data, and better infrastructure for managing them helps everyone.

b) We did fund a startup for managing medical images: Clariso, in the last batch. You don't hear as much about b2b startups as consumer ones, because unless you're e.g. a radiologist, they're not trying to reach you. Which means if you try to estimate the number of consumer focused startups based on which ones you happen to hear about, you'll overestimate.

pg is right- fundamental.

angersock also touches on a higher level, fundamental need here: the ephemerality of human memories.

Technology should be able to help and this is exactly the problem that Jan and his team at Loom are trying to solve.

Our memories- of our grandparents, our parents, our loves, our children, our grandchildren- they should last forever, and not be ephemeral like clouds and the Cloud.

Technology should help them endure like the cave paintings in Lascaux France. They were created by the earliest, most primitive human technology and remain to inspire awe in all of us.

More than that, our memories- the visual stories of our lives- should be available on any device: any iPhone, any iPad, any Android. And even any TV, Windows or Glass- wherever we are, and wherever we go.

Memories should be memorable and shareable with those we cherish most. An heirloom of us.

Fair enough.

My comment was more rooted in seeing a rough area of application for what I presume their tech and backend must be capable of, and then thinking about where else it could be put to use outside of the consumer market.

How'd the Clariso folks end up? Still around, I hope?

How much interest do you gauge for these sorts of things (better tech in medical, which is admittedly a whole can of worms)?

Yes, Clariso is still very much around. In fact, I introduced their product to an organization that is used by large hospital chains to outsource radiology reports to, these guys have tens of full-time, in-house radiologists looking at hundreds of reports all day, every day. Their immediate reaction after checking out the product? Blown away! The best alternative costs them over $100k/year and it feels like Windows95. Their CTO could not believe such a solution was even possible. The CEO (a radiologist with >25 years of report-reading experience) said to me that this could be "revolutionary".

It "only" works in Chrome. That's a problem.

//

Limited in ie, firefox and mobile.

If it saved your company > $100k a year, you'd probably rollout Chrome or at least ChromeFrame

While this trivializes the issue substantially, it is true that if you depend on chrome there are ways to roll out nice site-specific chromium apps that keep everyone happy.

I'm curious about what differentiates Clariso from other PACSs, as that space has been crowded and active for nearly 20 years (since radiology went digital).

There are some big players in the PACS space that major medical institutions are pleased with, and there's considerable lock-in/inertia associated with these types of products.

As someone working on a medical imaging product who decided that building a PACS was not a good starting point, I'm curious to see what others are doing to sell PACSs.

Pretty much all current PACS suck, actually.

While this is true, getting institutions to adopt a new PACS is a non-trivial process. I'm curious as to what improvements Clariso bills as big enough to warrant adoption/switching.

I'm pretty cynical as a rule, but I'd be careful about classifying startups as trivial or first-world. Facebook was a startup based on the notion that ivy league kids wanted another exclusive place to themselves, and it's obviously put a dent in the world.

The amount of visual information we're collecting nowadays is vast, and I think the idea that it's cute but that it's value ends at individual nostalgia might be shorting it's potential quite a bit.

Further, I'd love to see sharing of medical information get easier, in fact that's literally what I do at the startup I work for... but a big part of what makes what we build possible is the enormous amount of technology in the form of other people's ideas and software (most of it open-source). Loads of that tech came from people working at shops taking shots at problems you might consider first-world.

Yeah, it'd be neat if more people were geeked about working in healthcare. (I'd sure love it if we could find it easier to hire!) But to suggest that everyone else is wasting their time is ridiculous.

To your point about collecting visual information:

Look, I agree it's awesome and all, but consider that I can still hold the physical photographs of myself from five years ago, of my parents thirty years ago, and my grandparents fifty years ago.

I can't get at the images I uploaded to Facebook two years ago.

So, while I agree that the data is great, I don't exactly think that turning all of it over into the cloud is going to do much for permanency.

What I heard you say: Putting my pictures in the cloud isn't working for me today

Gee, that sounds like a pretty solid defense for someone trying to do it better :) Of course, I did notice you also concluded that because we haven't gotten it right yet, we should give up. That's even better. When people say that, that's when I really start to believe there's a problem worth working on here.

If a good number of people don't think it's impossible or silly to do (or that it's already been done poorly and that's the best we can hope for), it's probably gonna be boring to work on.

Agreed. Solving any real problem is a good problem to solve. Cell phones have changed the way Africans communicate with each other, as well as any other developing country/area, but I don't think the initial problem was to solve poor tele-com infrastructure in developing countries.

Largely because with big business in general, and especially with medicine, modernization is more of a political and economic problem than a technical one. There's been medical records keeping software that's better than paper for 30 years now, but a lot of hospitals still use filing cabinets full of handwritten charts.

Switching systems for a major enterprise is hugely expensive. In addition to retooling and retraining, there's the cost of paying someone the often thousands of hours to import all the existing records. Plus six months (optimistically) of dealing with lost records, transcription errors, and learning curve errors from staff unfamiliar with the inevitable quirks of the new system. Not that this is good for any business, but in a hospital setting that can mean dead patients.

Remember that "I'm to entrenched to make major changes" is emphatically not an engineering problem. Neither, for that matter, is "I don't have the money or political power to get access to technology". They are real problems and need real solutions, but throwing more tech at them is not an effective strategy.

Isn't cloud medical image sharing a "first-world problem" too? I can't imagine it being one of the top 10 things a doctor in a 3rd world country would ask for.

Actually, it is something that 3rd world country doctors desperately want. Why?

Turns out that in many parts of the world, there's a lack of specialists to read and interpret these images (radiologists, pathologists), even though there are technicians skilled enough to generate them. Fewer still are specialized to handle cases effectively. Thus patients wait long periods of time for diagnoses as slides are transported to places where they can be read, suffering throughout.

Teleradiology and telepathology are burgeoning fields which are necessary across the globe, with the potential to save lives and make money. There are quite a few aggressive players in these spaces, and we're excited to see what they do.

I'm working in an extension of one of these spaces; feel free to reach out if you're curious...

It's true, it's true.

Holding startups to the criterion of helping the poor, unwashed masses is, however, rather unreasonable.

box.net is now HIPAA compliant. (And S3 can be to, if you're careful and want to build something.)

Not necessarily. AWS doesn't sign Business Associate Agreements, as required by HIPAA/HITECH for any healthcare payers/providers who want to use their services today, and for any Health IT companies who want to use them starting in September (per the new Omnibus Rule announced in March).

AWS and Rackspace have both hinted that they are considering becoming BAA compliant, but they aren't today. Azure (Enterprise) and pricier services like Firehost are.

It is possible that you could make a legal case for storing encrypted patient data on S3, but this is still a gray area, especially when some states (like Mass.) have enhanced patient privacy laws that trump federal laws. And before anyone replies, note that it's a LEGAL question of possession of data, not a technical one about encryption algorithms. We have very expensive HIPAA attorneys who do understand how encryption works but are still undecided on this.

Which is why you're working on stuff like that right? As opposed to third world problems like video games?

I'm spoken for by my cofounder at the moment (profile info is a little out of date). After that, well, I'm in the best town for healthcare.

What does Hey do again, anyways?

We're making a journal that writes itself, to help people remember their lives. It is most definitely a first world problem, but I also think those are fine to work on. =)

Ah, cool. It didn't seem immediately obvious from your landing page or about page what you all did. Good luck on your work!

Thank you! We're still pre-launch so the site is still unfortunately vague. Best of luck to you as well sir.

I assume you're talking about Houston, right? ;) If not, then what are people considering the best town for healthcare?

This isn't very imaginative. There's nothing first-world about taking photos; people everywhere like to do this. Furthermore, it's not just entertainment but a practical tool; I take photos of shopping lists and whiteboards all the time, and people everywhere will find it useful for remembering things. Uploading photos to the cloud is great way of backing up information on paper, which might be hard to preserve in challenging environments.

The difference is that people in the third world will likely only have cell phones and no desktops. So I would think that making photo sharing work well on mobile (particularly with low connectivity) counts as a third-world problem. And hey, this might even be useful for medical practitioners in remote locations too.

I don't know anything about Loom, but perhaps the first step to building a HIPAA compliant image store is to simply build an image store? Perhaps Loom's roadmap or eventual plan is to build an image store for a very specific business purpose? Perhaps its more than just cat pictures?

I don't know either way, but I sure wouldn't assume its designed for the exclusive purpose of "helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos" (nice alliteration btw).

People prefer to parse problems that personally perplex.

I have strong opinions and knowledge about what I'd want from a photo sharing service. A medical image sharing service? Not a clue.

Nice alliteration, btw.

The first-world tends to care about first-world problems.

It'd be great if everyone's ambitions and efforts were grande and noble, but that's not the world we live in.

Some people need to care about the first-world problems. One reason the first-world is so comfortable is because people have put effort into solving such problems.

Fact is, products and services like this will impact peoples' lives - otherwise it wouldn't be very successful in business.

If they're doing something people want (which they are), does it matter?

I think angersock is going to be right about this one. Looks like nothing more than a dropbox with hooks into camera and image viewing apps. Ultimately resulting in TBs of scruffy selfies.

Yo, that takes actual work, investment, and domain-specific knowledge.

:(

I weep for our generation of engineers.

> hate to be a jerk, but why so many first-world problem startups?

Short answer, because it's easy. Any developer can build a photo management app. It's a known quantity.

First-world problems are accessible.

The first world has the money.

Medical image sharing has more red tape, it's more challenging.

Dear "angersock", it appears in fact you don't hate to be a jerk. The entire contents of your comment indicate the opposite, you enjoy being a jerk. However, there's an interesting question of what's worth working on in the comment, so let's rephrase so we can maybe discuss:

"Is photo storage really broken as the post says? Do we really need more of this kind of technology? I know of some real inefficiencies in medical image sharing which seems like it'd be a similar problem to solve, but to my eyes much more valuable. What would it take to convince people problems like that are worth tackling?"

I've been using Loom's beta version for about two months now. I have to be honest. At first I didn't completely get it and I didn't use it too much. I thought it was just a photo centric version of Dropbox. And it took me a few more weeks and a few "I wish I could show you this right now" moments until I did get it and started appreciating a few of it's features.

I've been traveling a lot over the years and it is such an uplifting feeling to meet somebody again after some time, to share some "good old times" pictures and reconnect. One of the things about Loom is that it stores a low res. version of your pictures on your phone and allows you to stream full res. in no time, so I have pretty much all my pictures of the last 10 years on my phone. I've also found some really interesting use cases at work lately...

Does anyone else remember Lucas Art's Loom?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/32340/

I do! It was a great game and I thought this was going to be some sort of remake. I was a little disappointed.

Do you remember the Pirate in Monkey Island I in the Scumm Bar, whom you could ask about LOOM?

Ha, good one!

The only one I still remember was the button in Space Quest I escape pod that when pressed ejected you through the time-space warp into Kings Quest I and then killed you on impact :)

When i saw Loom it is the first thing that came into mind. 2 weeks ago i found the old CD (dating from 1992) that is still in perfectly good shape, i don't know how i kept it for so long. It is one of the best games ever made. E C E D.

Smile Son of Signa, It is the dawn of your 17 years. The Elders are awaiting in the sanctuary. (From memory)

I loved The Dig, Full Throttle, and Sam and Max. I'm going to dl loom on steam pretty much the second I get home.

This also made me end up reading wikipedia articles on the SCUMM language/engine for half an hour, so that's fun.

There's a pretty good bundle on Steam that has The Dig and Loom in it (and both Indiana Jones games I think). I never caught The Dig when it came out so I've been playing through it lately. Loom was an absolute favorite when I first played it (I think I was 11 or 12?). Mind-blowing. Probably internet-common knowledge but in case you're not aware of the Double Find Adventure kickstarter, it's worth knowing there's a studio working on a new point-and-click adventure for those of us who were (or still are) ravenously obsessed with the genre - http://www.doublefine.com/dfa

Wasn't aware of it at all. I'll check it out, for sure.

One of the best adventure input systems ever.

I still want to get an Arduino and build a real-world "distaff". Not sure how to properly model the inputs...

I've been lucky to be in the beta for the last two months or so... my wife and I use it to group the photos we individually take on our iPhones and then share them with our family back home. It just works, unlike our old setup

Could you try explaining what this actually does? I can't figure it out from the link.

My 'what is does' for Loom is; it stores your images / videos in the cloud and syncs smartly and selectively between all your devices (mac, ipad, iphone, web).

E.g. I have ~180G of photos on Loom, but I can still access them all on my SSD MacBook, even though it's only got a few G free. Selective sync FTW.

Yeah it's awesome for this, super quick to share via email / sms both ways.

Looked at loom.com, don't get what this site does.

Looked at loom.com/about and read wall of text, still not sure.

I'd suggest finding a more efficient way to communicate what this site is to newcomers.

Watched video, still not sure - it's enabling things and there's space - what do I do on Loom? Can I do this? Can I do that? One screenshot or even a conceptual one would have done all that...

I followed your steps and after reading:

"We're making it fast for you to access and manage your entire photo and video library on every device without taking up local storage space. "

I came to the conclusion this is a Dropbox with extended managing tools for pictures- it wasn't that hard.

Dropbox uses local storage space... How hard?

When I said hard, I wasn't talking about the implementation I was talking about figuring out what it does...

It helps us share the moments that matter with those close to us.

Ignore the hate -- this is a huge problem for millions that still hasn't been solved very well. I take tons of photos on my phone, and iPhoto is a terrible, clunky piece of software to manage all of them.

The end result is that, aside from the one-off shares to Instagram or Facebook, I don't do anything with my hundreds of photos at all. But I really want to. If Loom helps me do that, it's a very valuable service indeed.

I thought this was about the classic adventure game and was briefly excited...

As did I -- especially considering the shutdown of Lucasarts, I had hoped this was an article about the license being given to some other company

That was my first thought as well. Glad I'm not the only one.

Loom: Hire me to write your blog posts/press releases because that one is simply not engaging.

You should have made your comment more engaging.

You read it and replied. Textbook definition of engagement.

By that definition, Loom's post was engaging to you...sorry, I had to take the bait. :)

You do have a valid point. Though there are different types of engagements. The one we have here is a negative engagement to the message/media. What they want is to get a positive engagement from the marketplace to get them to use their app. Anyhow, Paypal me $99 and I'll show you how to do this correctly (did I just close on you? (: ). /Joke.

Agreed, that was not a fantastic pitch.

I've switched to using DropBox for my image storage and haven't looked back. It just works on all my devices, no problem. It works with videos too. How is Loom better than that?

Or Google instant upload. If all you've ever used was Photostream, this sounds great. But not everything (anything?) is as broken as the disaster that is Photostream.

I agree with the premise of the startup that dealing with photos on the iPhone is broken and an issue. Having used a Windows Phone for the past 6 months, I can say that I while I hate lots of things about the OS and phones, the syncing to Skydrive is truly awesome and has taken me out of the world that is described in the Loom positioning. My understanding that the Android space already has this figured out as well. I love not having to worry about syncing/downloading/etc - it has felt very freeing.

Which is to say, I think this is an interesting company, but very likely to face a serious challenge if/when Apple comes out with an update to iCloud that does the same things. Competing against stuff built into an OS is very, very hard - not impossible (see: Chrome, Firefox), but definitely hard.

>Photo management is still broken – we want to change that.

Are you sure? Really really sure? There are countless photo management web, desktop and mobile apps.

But very few of them really solve the problem well. And as photos are quite universal form of expression, there is need for multiple solutions: a professional magazine photographer have different needs than a serious hobbyist who again has different needs than a mom photographing her kids and sharing photos to grandparents, and the mom differs from a teen who wants to express him/herself to find a new friends and get laid.

After searching for a couple of years for solution my needs, I finally found Everpix, which is really really good, but it still doesn't handle sharing as well as I'd like to.

There is a lot of room for innovation or just plain good execution left in the photo space.

So, uh, dropbox?

To be a bit more specific: please be more specific! How is this any different than dropbox? Are you building 'Adobe Lightroom for the cloud'?

"Ideally, you wouldn’t have to take time to think about personal content management anymore."

Sigh. Everytime someone makes things "easier" for me by removing my ability to manage my content, it ends up being way more frustrating than if I could just get the files with a file manager.

sorry I'm a bit late to the party, but I'd be curious to have a discussion about this. maybe we can help :)

what's your favourite way of interacting with your photos? organising them in a folder hierarchy on disk and having them mirrored/rsynced to some remote location? would you prefer a no-nonsense poweruser interface? we'll in all likelyhood open up our api soon so there could be a flurry of clients for all wants.

or shoot me an email on daniel loom com

Actually, this is how it works on your local computer - projects are folders. Moving them around re-syncs it on the web / iphone (and vice-versa)

Ask me about Loom...

Is it a bit like Spotify for your photos? e.g., originals in the cloud, and streamed/cached in a smaller format to your local device? That I could get behind.

I wonder how much that domain cost.

Good name for a mobile / cloud app though.

Almost as much as color.com?