Why Investing in Healthcare Innovation Matters to Us

by admin on January 6, 2012 · 0 comments

By Michael Yang

Ahh – New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s that time of year when we get besieged with ads and Facebook posts from friends about new gym memberships and finally getting fit this year. Whether you should go to the gym or not (as Men’s Journal provocatively suggests), or whether you should jump on the latest diet craze (and be a “Caveman”), there are so many unresolved questions regarding your healthcare. This is further compounded by the macro-issues facing America: We spend more on healthcare on a GDP percentage basis than any other developed nation, and despite all that, our collective health has declined. 

This, coupled with regulatory and reform changes in motion, make for a fascinating 2012.

Without a doubt, healthcare is complicated for the average American, and we are increasingly becoming healthcare illiterate consumers. Do we have insurance? Do we know if we’re covered for it?  Do we have a good doctor? Can we get an appointment with our doctor? Do we know what hospital we should be going to? Is this the right therapy? Do we know what drug we should be taking? What are the side effects? Are we getting better? Will it work? Do we know how much this is going to cost us? How are we going to pay for this? The list of questions goes on and on.

At Comcast Ventures, we have invested in two companies that help to address this:

  • Accolade is a healthcare services company that supports Fortune 500 self-insured employers with a new type of benefit.  Each employee has an Accolade Health Assistant that is available to them on a 1:1 basis for any healthcare-related questions.
  • Healthline, on the other hand, serves consumers online, at large. With an array of health information, applications and technology, Healthline allows users to self-manage many of their healthcare needs.

The winds of change are blowing on healthcare and it’s nice to see motivated actors and innovation on the scene. Comcast Ventures is emboldened by the millions of lives that Accolade and Healthline have successfully impacted and by the influx of ehealth/healthcare IT entrepreneurs that we meet. We’re eager to continue to advance healthcare in America, one small step at a time, and would be honored to collaborate with you. You know where to find us.

Our Predictions for 2012

by admin on January 2, 2012 · 1 comment

As we ring in the New Year, a few of our partners have collected their thoughts on what’s in store for 2012.

Amy Banse, Head of Funds, Comcast Ventures

  • 2012 is the year of the second screen experience. As we become more addicted to our mobile devices, we’ll see them being used more in conjunction with traditional TV viewing. Consumers are craving interaction, and the second screen enables this two-way activity in a way that TV alone has never been able to. I believe we’ll see more businesses taking advantage of this trend in 2012.
  • Tools and learning move towards TV. DIY content is a strong and growing segment that we’ll see greatly migrate to and expand on the TV screen.
  • Mobile payments go mainstream. While the technology has been in the works for a few years, we haven’t yet seen widespread adoption of mobile payments by consumers or businesses. That’s all poised to change in 2012. With smartphones reaching a tipping point, and new services aimed at helping small businesses accept mobile payments, we’re about to see this really take off.
  • BYOD (bring your own devices) will become increasingly more important. Playing off the notions of the growing second screen experience and mobile payments, the mobile device really starts to embed itself in aspects of consumers’ lives where it previously was absent. For everything from shopping, meeting friends for dinner, and watching TV, the mobile device is now as crucial as the physical wallet and phone service have been.

Gil Beyda, our partner at Genacast Ventures

  • Today’s social commerce is neither social nor commerce. Social is a two-way discussion. The days of pimping your friends for “$10 off” will soon be gone. Look for real social commerce models in 2012: collaborative experiences driving commerce.
  • “More” is the new “new.” Innovation will take a temporary backseat to scaling. Buyers, sellers and folks in between will take a deep breath in 2012 to absorb and roll-out existing solutions at scale, focusing less at doing new things in favor of doing more with what is already working. It isn’t about what’s new in 2012, it is about what’s more.
  • Early-stage investing in adtech companies will slow but later-stage investing will accelerate. Gone are the days of optimizing smaller slices of the online advertising pie. Investors will double-down on companies that can make a meaningful difference perhaps at the expense of the early pups.

David Horowitz, Managing Director, Comcast Ventures

  • Mobile: Internet entrepreneurs will start building products for mobile first, then traditional web in 2012. Having a website takes a backseat to the app, which has become the center of the startup product for many entrepreneurs.
  • Education: School districts will start giving out tablets in mass, replacing physical textbooks. Tablets are being recognized for the superior educational tools they are, and with more products on the market, schools will be convinced to invest.
  • Advertising: Online video will continue to be the fastest growing online ad medium over display and search. Advertisers have spent the last year or two experimenting with their ad mix, and will continue to add more and more dollars to the online video channel.
  • Social: Facebook will go public and will be on its way to becoming the most valuable company in the world. We’ve all seen this coming for a few years now, but 2012 is the year Facebook debuts an IPO. The interesting part will be the impact on the platform itself as it receives more pressure to perform. We’re already seeing changes like a deeper focus on advertising.

 

Demo Day at DreamIt Ventures Features Minority-led Startups

by Comcast Ventures on December 9, 2011 · 0 comments

By William Crowder, Managing Director, DreamIt Ventures

Yesterday, Philadelphia was the host city for a phenomenal groundbreaking event, DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 Demo Day. After three intense months of working on building their businesses, five minority-led companies along with nine other startups presented to a room filled with potential investors and executives and members of the press.

Nearly 250 people from across the country came to Demo Day, the capstone event for the class of startups making up DreamIt’s Philadelphia program this fall.

Unique to the fall program was the inaugural Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program, sponsored by Comcast Ventures. As part of this special track, five companies were selected by DreamIt in conjunction with David Horowitz, Derek Squire, Gil Beyda and others from the Comcast Ventures team to experience the opportunity of a lifetime for their respective companies.

Startup accelerators recently have emerged as highly sought-after opportunities that have acceptance rates lower than most Ivy League universities. Any entrepreneur who is selected for one of these programs immediately becomes the leader of a company that will receive unprecedented access to mentoring, coaching, investors and a community of supportive fellow entrepreneurs. For the DreamIt program, each founder receives $5,000 and each company receives $5,000 for a maximum total stipend of $25,000.

I had the pleasure of leading this program for DreamIt and must say that the experience was absolutely tremendous. For the past three months, while serving as a key promoter to the outside world of the program’s benefits, I have also worked very closely with an impressive collection of promising entrepreneurs. Their passion, drive and competitiveness will serve them well as they move towards achieving the next milestones for their respective companies.

With that, I present to you the inaugural MEAP companies:

ElectNext, which launched in November, matches voters with the political candidates who best reflect their values. The site has users rank the issues and answer quizzes in order to match their beliefs to specific candidates in the current election.

Kwelia is a new service for landlords and apartment building managers that compiles a database of rental real estate market data, and uses a proprietary model to crunch the numbers. The result is real-time, user-friendly analysis of critical market assumptions. Renters can also use the service to determine the current market value of an apartment.

MetaLayer wants to fight information overload and make sense out of big data by improving how people analyze images and text. Its products take streams of text or images and add structured, relational, temporal and geospatial metadata. Users can visually summarize information and prioritize relevant content with the service’s dashboard.

Qwite is a customer feedback service that works over mobile. It helps businesses deliver content to nearby smartphones, including customer surveys, incentives and other content that enhances the business’ brand. Businesses can use Qwite to increase customer retention rates, reward loyal customers and manage other customer-facing aspects of their business.

ThaTrunk is a mobile app that uses your location to distribute multimedia files with the push of a button. The app creates a “dynamic proximity network” which grows and shrinks with the number of other ThaTrunk mobile app users nearby. Authors, speakers, musicians and more can use ThaTrunk at expos, conferences and concerts to reach their audiences. Files are distributed from the cloud to nearby users who can then view them and share them on Facebook and Twitter.

Zynga: Beyond the IPO

by Comcast Ventures on December 1, 2011 · 0 comments

By: Andrew Cleland

Three years ago, Mark Pincus told me that he was going to make Zynga more valuable than EA within five years. It took him only two.

Zynga is a remarkable venture story, and the company’s impending IPO is a huge moment for the games industry — it marks the coming of age of the West’s leading proponent of casual, free-to-play gaming.

With the timing for the company’s roadshow now seemingly confirmed, what should we expect from Zynga as it goes public? The answer reflects Pincus’ exceptional level of ambition and has implications both for how investors should think about the company and how other developers manage their go-to-market strategies.

[READ THE FULL TEXT OF THIS ARTICLE ON VENTURE BEAT]

Why ‘Sofa Sunday’ Is the Logical Follow-up to ‘Black Thursday’ In the Holiday Shopping Lexicon

by Comcast Ventures on November 29, 2011 · 1 comment

By: Michael Yang

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and this is the time of year when Black Friday and Cyber Monday enter into America’s lexicon. The early buzz was how numerous retailers had moved up the timetable for store openings to just a few hours after we had finished off our pumpkin pie, effectively introducing “Black Thursday.” Early results from the National Retail Federation suggest that this Thanksgiving weekend set another new record, which is fortuitous for our nation’s retailers, since they typically garner at least 30% of their annual revenues in the fourth quarter.

Next up was Cyber Monday, which rang up an impressive one-day tally of $1.2B in sales online. None of this is unexpected as we have seen year-over-year results improve steadily since all this mania became media-worthy in 2005. However, a notable trend has emerged in this upswing: the arrival of mobile shopping.  Smartphones and tablets are changing the calculus for how shoppers engage retailers. Shoppers using iPads spend more and are highly engaged consumers.

That’s why earlier this fall, we invested in CatalogSpree, a company that’s bringing the aesthetics, the merchandising, and the inspiration that printed catalogs have offered for more than  100 years to the tablet with its top-ranked iPad app.  Catalogs, you say? Well, it’s probably surprising to most people that in this day and age, there are still 15M+ catalogs mailed annually and $200B+ in associated sales generated. Of course, this isn’t simply about replicating the printed experience online; there’s so much more going on (for both the consumer and the retailer), and starting with this baseline, we believe that CatalogSpree is an ideal mobile commerce platform for the future.

So who knows – maybe next year, we’ll be adding Couch Commerce and Sofa Sunday to our lingo like we did with Black Thursday this year. In the meantime, happy shopping and if you want to avoid the pepper spraying, just pick up your iPad and let your fingers do the swiping.