Ask YC: This is our tech, how can we make this into a product that people want?

&#62;<i>When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.</i><p>I'm very surprised by this - it strikes me that I'd expect it to be hard to tell from such data that it wasn't a stomach upset, tiredness, onset of disease or simply a heavy cold. Indeed 90% sounds like it might be higher than correct identification via an interview with a doctor.<p>&#62;<i>[...] in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people's movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he says.</i><p>Makes me the 90% figure highly suspect.<p>That aside I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to have a smart phone app that gives you epidemiology info in return for entering your health status for the day. To encourage continued use a sort of diary function and stats could be added. Wouldn't this be more predictive than monitoring movement, and less intrusive?

I think a very strong possibility lies with the very experiment described in the article. Flu is a huge issue at college campuses, high schools, etc. Every level of education involves cramming a bunch of individuals in to small spaces with high amounts of contact (more so than in a prison, for example). In higher education, sexual activity and drinking (i.e. sharing cups) further increases risk of infection. My campus of 5,000 undergrads turned into a textbook example of mass hysteria during last year's swine flu scare. I can only imagine how many hours of education must have been lost through the whole ordeal.<p>So build an enterprise level system and sell it to individual universities. The school installs your application on each student's phone and receive an aggregate view of anonymous data through a back-end interface. This could give them a real-time look of how the infection is spreading through their community and allow them to be far more responsive in prevention measures. What if they could receive warning that the 3rd floor of Residence Hall A had signs of a potential outbreak? Just bring in those students for a preemptive checkup and stop the bug dead in its tracks.<p>Of course there is a boat load of legal and privacy issues to sort out for this type of intrusive monitoring. Nothing that couldn't be overcome I don't think (IANAL). I know that my school installs an app on all of our athlete's Facebook accounts for monitoring purposes so this isn't too far off from that.<p>Good luck with whatever path you choose! I'm always open to discussing startup strategy so feel free to drop me a line.

Anmol - you're building an information business. And at scale, IMHO, they're fabulous. Health information seems like a massive market, and this seems like unique data. (Think about financial consumers who care about health data in addition to the pharmas.) I'll assume your app scales so that you get critical mass of input, but once you have that in your sights, here's how we constructed our information business.<p>In my experience, the best information businesses are founded on a core of primary research - data that you find/generate that no one else has. Once you build that database, you build the products. You might be surprised, but here's what many information products look like - I'm a fan of doing it in this order:<p>1. A big honking CSV file of the primary data. For customers that have their own models, which your early adopters will likely have. Ours did.<p>2. A CSV file of derivative analytics (the output of your prediction tools perhaps?). For customers who want your algorithmic take on the underlying data.<p>3. Reports (manually written). People buy your analysis of the data. We found a majority of the potential market doesn't want Tools or data files (even if they're Wall Street "quants"). They just want answers - and by virtue of having the data, you're an instant expert. Reports have the nice benefit of being A) tangible B) easy to consume and C) subscribe-able (repeat revenue!) They have a bonus of being delicious chum for the media sharks.<p>4. Reports (automated, for scale). Subscribers get the latest insights each week, month, etc. Best not to automate until you see which of #3 are most popular.<p>5. Now come the technology Tools. #3 and #4 above will be excellent test beds for your prediction tools. Doing it in this order, you won't have to build any front end applications until you understand what predictions people pay for. One way to build a tools-based product line is to give the tech away for free and have the customer subscribe to the latest data.<p>You might also find that a great consumer-facing website is powerful for the information business. We don't have those skills in our company, but have found that when we pull it off even a little, institutional buyers begin as personal, individual consumers. A great consumer facing site/app is a perfect way to reach them.<p>rock on.

At the direct-to-consumers level, think "I've fallen and I can't get up!" Automatic detection of illness and alerts for the old and infirm could be a potential market, though research on college students is not going to be at all effective for monitoring old people. And, if it can only detect trends rather than a specific individual situation, then it won't work in this context.<p>As others mentioned, making it a standard part of all phones might be something you could sell to governments, particularly in areas where flu frequently becomes epidemic.<p>It's a public health issue, which isn't usually an extremely easy to go-to-market area, I would think. Since it doesn't cure people of the flu, and doesn't help prevent it in any particular individual, it has nearly zero market value for any individual. I wouldn't even have a reason to install it for free...what good would it do me?<p>Is there some element of your research and tech that can be generalized to spot other kinds of trends? Trendspotting is extremely valuable, particularly to marketers...Google would probably acquire a company that can effectively trendspot from mobile devices, and even if they didn't, a mobile ad platform with trendspotting would be incredibly lucrative.

My personal opinion: if you can REALLY do what you claim then you should get every country's equivalent of the CDC working with you to MANDATE that this be part of every phone, and then of course you get the revenue from IP licensing.<p>In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.<p>Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.

Thoughts? We're thinking of individual-level prediction tools, but there are other ways of using this approach. e.g. at the community / city scale with mobile operator data.

Interesting.<p>Questions<p>1. How fast can you spot a trend? 2. How is the tracking working? 3. How precise is it.<p>I could imagine traffic would be a good area to look into.

I would market this to pharmaceuticals as a way to effectively gauge demand geography. The value added for them would be supply chain optimization.

Have you looked into SBIRs? www.sbir.gov/<p>BTW, small world, my SO knows Eagle :P

just make an app that warns you if any of you friends cell or computer use changes. I'd pay to see which of my friends might be getting sick. Luckily, each new health scare will drive up demand.

Seems like you have something that public health officials would want, and <i>maybe</i> mobile carriers, if the privacy issues can be solved and having it installed wins them some points with their regulators.<p>If you want to make something businesses want to pay for, see if the same predictive models work for forecasting product demand and other economic activity. What is the effect of a movie release on patterns of communication and movement? Can profiles be (semi-anonymously) correlated with other tweets/purchases, so you know that learning about a certain product, or buying it, changes behavior in some way?

Apply to YC:)