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Meet Stat, The Startup That Wants To Be Uber For Medical Transport
I’m getting sick of all the “[new startup name] is the [more prominent startup name] of [random industry]” descriptions that people like to throw around these days, but it’s hard to avoid that with a new startup called Stat. The three-person team demoed earlier today at Dreamit Ventures‘ Health Demo Day in Philadelphia, and long story short, they’ve created something that’s pretty much an Uber for medical transport.
When Stat co-founder and CEO Jason Ervin hit me with his pitch before presenting on-stage at the World Cafe, it sounded too good to be true. On-demand ambulances? Why would anyone call 911 again?
It turned out that in my haste to bypass centralized emergency services, I had missed something crucial — the big difference between Stat and Uber is that Stat isn’t for people you and me to use. Stat wants to furnish its iOS and Android apps to ambulance companies, medical transport fleets, hospitals, nursing homes — pretty much any organization needs to shuttle patients back and forth on a regular basis. Let’s say you’re nurse and you need to discharge a patient and get him home. That’s no problem if they’ve got a ride from a friend or family set up in advance, but if it happens to fall through, you can’t just stick them in a cab and call it day.
Instead, you fire up the Stat app, tie it to a corporate credit card, select the sort of transport you need, and select the pickup point and destination. Once the request is out there, the closest idle, Stat-enabled ambulance will get the alert and can accept the job — then the person who put in the request can track the ambulance while it’s en route.
The process works for organizations that need to send people to hospitals too — nursing homes for instance often need to shuttle residents to medical facilities and not all of them can afford to maintain a fleet of vehicles just for that. Enter Stat: after a few touches, the nearest idle ambulance will be en route to make the pickup and drop those people off as needed. It’s a win-win: idle ambulances (and the companies that own them) get more work, and people who otherwise would’ve been stuck at a facility or turned away outright can get their procedures done and get home safely.
As it happens, the service may get a lot more Uber-like in the months to come. There’s no consumer-facing version of the app just yet, but that could change once Stat starts expanding beyond Philadelphia.
“We just can’t wait to get to emergency,” Ervin said. It’s hardly a surprise — the four month old company is already generating revenue based off its operations in Philadelphia, and expanding to consumer emergency calls means more transactions to take a cut out of. Here’s the thing about Philadelphia though: if you’re involved in an accident and need immediate emergency attention in Philly, you can’t directly call an ambulance company, it’s 911 or nothing. Naturally, that means the prospect of Uberesque ambulance service won’t fly in the city of brotherly love, but that sort of regulation doesn’t exist everywhere.
Currently, Stat has linked up with one prominent Philadelphia ambulance company and is working to rack up a few more partnerships in the area, but one of the team’s big goals is to tap into their native Texas. Cities like Austin and Houston lack that particular restriction, so it would be easy enough to rejigger the app for regular folks to use too. As downright useful as Stat could be for streamlining hospital operations, bringing quick and timely medical transport to the masses is something really worth keeping an eye out for.
Zuckerberg Says Teens Still Steadily Engaged With Facebook
Critics claim that Facebook is losing its cool amongst kids and expect teens to start tuning out in favor of hip apps like Snapchat, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “Based on our data, that just isn’t true.” Zuckerberg explained on today’s earnings call that Facebook is close to having full penetration of the U.S. teen demographic, and that they’ve remained steadily engaged with its site and apps this year.
Zuckerberg admitted that it’s hard to pinpoint metrics on teens because some people lie about their age. Specifically, kids under 13 aren’t allowed to join, but there’s no strict verification process of the age users enter when they sign up. Some 10 or 11 year olds may say that they’re 15 so they can join. That means that some people listed as 21 could actually be teenagers.
But whatever their age, people are still spending a ton of time on Facebook. Users spent 20 billion minutes per day on Facebook in June. That’s 17.39 minutes per day per user, or 8.3 hours per user per month.
And that time isn’t just coming in binges. People are consistently addicted to Facebook. Zuckerberg started the earnings call saying he expected fewer of its total users to return each day as it grows, but he’s been pleasantly surprised to find that “the opposite is true.” Over 70% of monthly users in the United States and Canada come back every day and that “stickiness” percentage has kept increasing both domestically and across the globe over the last few quarters.
Many predicted mobile would be the downfall for Facebook. It was originally built as a web service after all, and when it did finally adapt to mobile, its apps were sluggish. Meanwhile, mobile-focused social networks and communication apps like Twitter, Snapchat, and Path threatened to take up users’ time on the small screen.
And they have taken a slice. But mobile has also drastically increased the size of the pie. People are spending more time with technology overall, and Facebook Zuckerberg says that studies by comScore and Nielsen say Facebook’s share of people’s time is increasing, especially if you count Instagram as part of Facebook.
Perk's Reward-Centric Mobile Browser Now Blocks Unwanted Ads
Austin-based incubator Jutera Labs is putting even more of its weight behind Perk, a rewards-centric mobile web browser that blocks out ads when used on tablets.
Perk, which originally started out as a way to give consumers coupons, discounts or airline miles while browsing the web, is now blocking ads. While companies like AdBlock have built up strong web-based businesses with more than 200 million downloads, Perk co-founder Julian Frachtman says that there’s a window of opportunity to do the same thing on tablets, especially as they cannibalize PC usage.
The company partners with affiliate networks to give Perk users deals at about 2,000 online stores. Those stores include big brands like Amazon, Target, Best Buy and Starbucks. There are also deals for frequent flier miles at airlines like Delta, US Airways and Alaska Airlines and charitable donations to non-profits like the American Cancer Society.
Users can explicitly opt into these rewards and there’s a shopping icon in the app’s top bar that lets users scroll through different rewards available to them based on points they’ve earned by browsing the web.
“When people shop online or when they do research online or take other actions like watch videos and fill out surveys, they can redeem these actions for cash or frequent flier miles,” Frachtman said. He says one advantage of blocking ads is that the browser will load pages faster.
The app is still quite small at this point with 5,000 monthly actives, but Frachtman said that once they figure out the lifetime value of a typical Perk users, they can use performance marketing techniques to grow the base. For now, Perk is only available for iOS, but the company plans to bring it to Android in a month and a half.
Jutera has raised about $1 million in funding and the company’s employee base is split between Austin, Texas and Bangalore, India.
Walmart Labs Scoops Up Site-Speed Optimizer, Torbit, To Help It Keep Pace With Amazon
Josh Fraser and Jon Fox founded Torbit in 2010 after becoming fed up with the amount of time they and other engineers dedicated to the tedious process of managing website performance optimization — by hand. In 2012, the Sunnyvale-based startup launched its first solution, called Insight, in an effort to make the tools they’d spent years developing internally available to the public — without requiring a degree in computer science or 15 developers to understand them.
By allowing any online business to track that critical correlation between the time it takes for a website to load and their core business metrics, Insight attracted the attention of both enterprise players as well as startups like Wayfair, Storenvy, and the Cheezburger Network. By February of this year, Torbit was processing over 6 billion performance metrics a day for its customers.
With each second a website takes to load potentially results in the loss of critical business, something to which big e-commerce properties, like Walmart, are increasingly susceptible. Rather than building these tools themselves, Walmart Labs today announced that it is buying Torbit’s help.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, in its announcement today, Torbit said it will be joining Walmart Labs as part of the e-commerce giant’s move to bring some speed and performance optimization to Walmart’s online properties. Specifically, Fox says, Walmart will look to leverage Torbit’s dynamic content optimization technology to enhance the performance and shopping experience for Walmart customers — behind the larger, and perhaps more pressing goal, of helping it keep pace with Amazon.
Following the acquisition, Torbit will continue to keep its site running for 30 days, but will be shutting down for good on August 23. The company will be offering an export process to its customers to prevent them from losing their critical performance data, which readers can find here.
In an effort to meet the expectations of an increasingly digitally savvy consumer, Walmart Labs has been on a mission to develop new commerce solutions to stay ahead of encroaching competitors (and chase e-tail leaders like the ubiquitous Amazon), while enhancing the shopping experience of its millions of shoppers. To do that, the company has been following the Yahoo playbook of late, making a handful of acquisitions to bring startup talent in-house.
Today’s addition of Torbit to its startup roster follows Walmart Labs’ recent acquisitions of companies like Inkiru, OneOps and Tasty Labs, which are all part of an effort to help its parent company become an actual technology company (and not just another e-tailer) and beef up Walmart.com. Buying Inkiru, for example, gave the company access to a mobile-centric point-of-sale solution, while last year’s acquisition of Grabble provided a critical Big Data component, allowing it to improve fraud detection and prevention and in-store recommendations.
With these acquisitions, Walmart.com is now able to tap into and offer key features, like improved semantic search, Facebook integration and better mobile support — which are essential as the company adapts to its increasingly digital user base.
With the acquisition of Torbit’s front-end optimizer, Walmart said that it will be able to add much-needed device and platform-agnostic performance optimization tools and minimize customer attrition thanks to slow loading digital storefronts.
The startup’s technology, Walmart Labs’ Jeremy King said in a blog post today, can “dynamically minimize and compress the files the browser downloads to best fit the browser’s characteristics … and by rewriting the page to best exploit the performance behavior of the Web browser requesting the page, Site Optimization can help each browser fetch and render each page as efficiently as possible.”
With a growing share of its revenues emanating from its e-commerce portals, this kind of image loading is critical to allowing shoppers to find what they need in real time, without the traditional invective directed at their browser.
With the acquisition, Walmart said today that four of Torbit’s engineers will be joining its team, including co-founder Jon Fox.
Torbit’s announcement copied below:
Today we’re excited to announce that Torbit has been acquired by @WalmartLabs. We’ll be joining the team and bringing our Insight / Atlas technology to the Walmart online properties. In addition, we’ll be using our cutting edge Dynamic Content Optimization technology to enhance the performance and shopping experience for all of Walmart.com’s many online shoppers. We’re exited to help make the Walmart online experience even better by optimizing for your device and improving the performance of all of their existing and future sites.
Torbit has been a wild ride and we’ve been truly blessed to work with many great customers. We couldn’t have built any of our performance products without all of your feedback, testing, and patience. I am truly grateful to have worked with all of you. As part of this acquisition, we’ll continue to keep everything running for 30 days, until Friday, August 23, 2013, after which time we’ll have to wind down. We do offer an export process so you can keep all of your performance data. You can see an estimate of your export size here and if you’re interested in exporting your data please email us at support@torbit.com with a list of sites you’d like to export and we’ll send you instructions from there.
There has been a long list of great people who have helped Torbit along the way and I want to thank each and every one of you. From our investors, advisors, and employees to our customers, beta testers, and friends – we couldn’t have done it without you!
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