More than anything, they should be studying math, including statistics and probability, and programming. No matter what the subject, we will have huge amounts of data about it, and will need these tools to get meaning from the data. The areas I’m thinking of include medicine, genetics, nutrition, and neuroscience; human behavior; energy management and consumption; materials science (so that we can use our personal 3D printers more effectively); aerospace and cosmology (so we can find asteroids, whether to deflect them from an earth-bound path, to mine them of valuable minerals or terraform them for human habitation); and of course biology, so that we can enjoy the company of animals, grow food, and ultimately create human-friendly living conditions on other planets and asteroids. It would also be great to get better at modeling and managing economic fluctuations!

But in the meantime, don’t forget to read world literature so you can understand your place in history and know how to be a human being.

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Ayer, MA-based Cambrooke Foods might be a bit deceiving on the surface. It is not a maker of packaged foods the average shopper would pick up at the grocery store. And its founders have no background in the food, health, or nutrition industries.

Cambrooke’s founders, David and Lynn Paolella, come from architecture and jeweler backgrounds, respectively. They are the parents of two children with phenylketonuria (PKU), an inherited metabolic disorder that renders the body unable to process the amino acid phenylalnine, found in many foods. If gone untreated, the amino acid can hit toxic levels in the body and cause brain damage.

Patients can go on to live healthy, relatively symptom-free lives if they keep low protein diets, which rule out most store-bought foods. See, even items you wouldn’t necessarily put in the protein category on the food pyramid—like Wonder Bread—are still too high in the nutrient for PKU patients to eat, as they are limited to around 5 grams of protein per day.

Cambrooke first got into business developing low-protein foods with the hope of alleviating parents of PKU patients from having to cook everything from scratch. Their online catalogue of food products now contains items from bagels to veggie “meatballs” to “cheese ravioli,” and are targeted at other types diet-treated metabolic disorders as well.

“We make bread without flour, cheese without milk, and meat analogues without any protein,” says David Paolella.

Treatment for PKU patients (and those with similar disorders) needs to go beyond a low-protein diet, though. Their bodies still need protein, but without the toxic amino acids. Cambrooke has been working since its inception with scientists at the University of Wisconsin and in 2010 started selling a protein called glytactin that is safe for PKU patients to eat.

Glytactin is a natural protein more complex peptide, and it stays in the patient’s system longer than free amino acids, which traditional metabolic formulas for PKU patients have been made up of, says Paolella. He likened the difference in the two types of nutrients to complex carbohydrates and simple sugars, respectively. Thus, glytactin is said to keep patients fuller for longer and is better processed by the body than the free amino acids that previously dominated PKU metabolic supplements. Cambrooke sells glytactin in a powder form called Camino PRO BetterMilk that can be mixed into drinks, and RESTORE—a sports drink lookalike.

Cambrooke’s foods and metabolic formulas are more complex than what grocery stores … Next Page »

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Yesterday we told you about The Eatery, a new iPhone app from San Francisco-based Massive Health. The app lets users snap photos of their meals, rate how healthy they are, and get a reality check on those ratings from other users. While the app is designed to be fun, it also has a serious point—if people are more aware of what they’re eating, they’ll eat better (at least in theory).

Well, The Eatery is shaping up as a viral success story. In just the first 48 hours since the app’s debut in the iTunes App Store, users have shared 200,000 meal ratings, according to Massive Health intern Andrew Rosenthal. “It’s addictive,” Rosenthal says. “That means we have a big data set about what people are eating, and what they and other people think of those meals.”

Along with the photos and ratings, Massive Health collects location data, which means it’s already gleaning some interesting insights about where people are when they submit meal photos, and how those locations correlate with the ratings. Specifically, it’s looking like people eat less healthy meals when they’re at work.

The heat maps below, shared with Xconomy by Massive Health, show ratings from people in New York City and San Francisco. Unhealthy meals are in red and healthy meals are in green.

See all those red areas in the SoMa and Financial District areas of San Francisco, and the mid-town and downtown areas of Manhattan? It’s a sign that people are loading up on burritos, potato chips, and soda at work.

That’s not the most surprising finding in the world, perhaps, but it’s interesting that Massive Health was able to gather a data set like this in just two days. “With people from around the world rating meals, it turns out that we have some data that nobody else has,” comments Rosenthal. And as the data piles up, who knows—it could make interesting fodder for nutritionists, epidemiologists, or marketers.

The maps are interesting for a second reason as well. They illustrate exactly where early-adopters in the mobile app world—the people who are likely to download and use an app on the first day or two after its release—tend to congregate.

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Do phones, food, photos, and fitness mix? Massive Health is hoping they do. The San Francisco mobile health startup, which debuted last spring with $2.25 million in seed funding from Felicis Ventures, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures, has come out with its first consumer app. It’s called The Eatery, and it’s designed to get iPhone owners to think more carefully about how they stuff their faces.

Introduced yesterday, The Eatery invites you to use your iPhone’s camera to take a picture of your meal—before you eat it, ideally—and then to rate it from “Fat” to “Fit” on an 11-star scale. The app will track your entries, and on a daily and weekly basis it will send you summaries intended to help you discover patterns and make healthier eating choices. There’s also a social element: you can connect with Facebook friends who also use The Eatery, and they’ll rate your meal photos too, providing a sort of reality check on your own ratings.

It’s all wrapped up inside a user interface that’s on the far slick-and-elegant end of the design spectrum. Noticeably absent: any way of quantifying what you’re eating, in terms of ounces, calories, or fat or carbohydrate content. “There are a bunch of apps in the App Store that are more about recording what you ate rather than helping you eat better,” says Massive Health CEO Sutha Kamal. “They are asking the wrong question. What you really should care about is how you are eating day to day or month to month.” The idea, Kamal says, is that simply paying more attention to what you’re eating and getting feedback from friends will prompt you to start eating better.

When Massive Health came out of stealth mode back in February, the team of ex-Mozilla, ex-Linden Lab, ex-gaming entrepreneurs declared that they wanted to bring great user-centered interaction design to the healthcare sector. They said they intended to build mobile apps that used crowdsourcing, game mechanics, social networking, and data analytics to help people deal with chronic health conditions.

True to that promise, Kamal says the startup is developing a diabetes app that’s still in alpha testing. But the company decided to bring out The Eatery first, as a way to get something into consumers’ hands faster and start testing its thesis that health apps will have more uptake and impact if they deliver what Kamal calls “delightful experiences.” With some pride, he describes The Eatery as “the most beautiful app in the Health part of the App Store…you don’t feel like there is a lot of work being done on your part, but a huge amount of value is being delivered.”

The startup isn’t planning to make any money on The Eatery, Kamal says. In fact, it’s presenting the app as “Massive Health Experiment 01″ rather than a full-fledged product. “This is a place where we are expecting to learn a lot,” Kamal says. The revenue opportunities will come down the road, when MassiveHealth introduces apps that help employers, insurers, and patients lower healthcare costs, he says.

In a phone chat yesterday with Kamal, I asked where the idea for The Eatery came from, how he thinks it will fit with existing social and mobile usage patterns, and where MassiveHealth is going from here. A summary of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: What’s the big idea behind The Eatery?

Sutha Kamal: If you step back and think about Massive Health as a macro thing, what we’re trying to do is build a lot of enduring value around helping people change their lives and stay healthy. We have another alpha [product] going in the diabetes space, and we have concluded that if you are thinking about getting and staying healthy, you care about four things: diet, exercise, medication adherence, and lastly … Next Page »

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Divya Gugnani grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and told herself she’d never do that.

Now, she’s CEO of two startups. One of which, she says, is out to transform the way women shop. That would be Send The Trend, a website that sells personalized accessories like jewelry and scarves. It’s one of the many New York fashion-focused sites that has started up in the last couple of years.

Gugnani, who early on developed a passion for cooking, pursued a traditional career in finance after graduating from Cornell, taking positions at Goldman Sachs, and private equity and VC firms Investcorp International and iFormation. Those exposed her to the creative side of startups.

“I really got to see how people started a business: how they grow it, how they start it, the problems they have,” she says. “I really got to get a feel for business, but the end of the day you haven’t done it. As much as I loved being a venture capitalist, there was just this bug in my body that wants to be on the other side.”

It took her a few years, though. She went to Harvard Business School, mainly because “working in finance for four years is enough to kill someone,” she says. She ended up cooking a lot and making new friends, but when she was done, jumped right back into venture capital.

While working at FirstMark Capital, Gugnani had the idea to turn her passion for cooking into a social website for tips on recipes, nutrition and mixology. A colleague encouraged her to pursue it as a fun side project in 2008, and months later Gugnani quit her career in VC to run the site, Behind the Burner, full time.

Living the scrappy startup life exposed Gugnani to the challenges most women face while shopping, she says. “From that experience my life as a woman changed dramatically. It used to be that a great sales rep would say, ‘this is what you need to wear.’ Shopping was an activity where you got so much service and customization. Once you don’t take a salary, shopping sucks.”

“Women have a hard time shopping, whether it’s online or not online, they can’t discover the things they want to buy,” Gugnani says. “Discovery is the biggest problem.

So last year Gugnani launched Send the Trend with friend Mariah Chase, who had worked with Project Runway winner Christian Siriano. The trio developed a website that surveys women on their style preferences and brings them … Next Page »

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Memorial Day observances made last week shorter than usual, but there was enough news from the local information technology sector for any week twice its length.

—San Francisco-based Rock Health, a new incubator for companies focused on using digital technologies to fix inefficiencies in the healthcare system, unveiled its first class of startups. They range from to CellScope, which makes smartphone attachments that can be used to diagnose ear infections, to Omada Health, a social network for diabetics.

—My Friday column took a look at the burgeoning world of food startups, where entrepreneurs are using the Web and mobile devices to simplify everything from to finding a farmer’s market to understanding nutrition labels. The column includes a list of nearly 60 startups, including 10 whose names start with “Food” (Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie).

—One of the companies on my list was Grubwithus, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps users sign up for discounted restaurant meals with strangers as a way of getting to know new people. Grubwithus expanded to Boston last week on its way to building a network of 30 U.S. cities, as my colleague Erin reported.

—With the May launch of xoJane, a new online magazine from publishing icon Jane Pratt, San Francisco-based Say Media began to reveal itself as a budding network of niche publications fueled by rich media ads. I talked with Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez about the company’s journey from video hosting provider to vertical media empire.

—Convore, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by former Pownce founder Leah Culver, is out to reboot the idea of real-time group chat, an idea that’s been with us since the late 1980s in the form of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. Convore’s system is Web-based and has key features that were always missing from IRC, such as persistent user identities and archives of old conversations.

—Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners revealed plans to open a new office in Palo Alto, CA, as Xconomy editor-in-chief Bob Buderi reported. The move came less than a week after news that Polaris is shuttering its Seattle office due to poor deal flow there.

—In funding news, SiTime raised $20 million, Punchtab raised $850,000, Miramar Labs raised $36 million, Mindflash raised $4 million, and Juice in the City raised $6 million.

—Oakland, CA-based Pandora set its IPO terms, saying it hopes to raise between $96 million and $123 million.

—Zendesk announced plans to move its headquarters this summer from SoMa to the Central Market district of San Francisco, where Twitter will also take up residence next year. Both companies are taking advantage of payroll tax break designed to spur economic revitalization in the beleaguered downtown district.

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[Updated 11/17/11 with additional listings] When the ex-CEO of Pure Digital, maker of the famous Flip pocket camcorder, wins funding from Sequoia Capital to open a chain of grilled cheese sandwich shops, it may be time to abandon your own enterprise-cloud-marketing-analytics-automation venture or your social-mobile-deals-gamification startup and think about getting into the food business.

I was already planning to compile a list of food-related startups for my column this week when I read about Pure founder Jonathan Kaplan’s surprise announcement. I happen to love grilled cheese, so I’m hoping that his new restaurants, to be called The Melt, fare better than the Flip camcorder, which Cisco recently discontinued after spending $590 million to buy Pure in 2009. The fact that Kaplan’s customers will be able to order and pay for their cheddar melts and tomato soup using their mobile phones is a nice twist. But the real message behind his move (and Sequoia’s investment) may be that food is back in fashion as an arena for startup founders.

Food-delivery startups such as Kozmo and Webvan were among the venture-backed companies caught up in the wave of dot-com failures around 2001, and years went by before technology entrepreneurs dared to venture back into the kitchen. But now they’re cooking with gas. Few urban-dwellers these days make a restaurant reservation without consulting a site like Yelp, Urbanspoon, or OpenTable. Smartphone and tablet owners can choose from hundreds of cooking, nutrition, and shopping apps. And there’s nary a venture incubator program without at least one food startup in its pantry (500 Startups has Spoondate, StartX has Kitchit, TechStars has Foodzie, and Y Combinator has Anyleaf, E la Carte, and Grubwithus, among others).

Here in San Francisco, a chocolate tasting organized by health-food search site Foodia last week attracted more than 400 young entrepreneurs—I know because I was elbowing them out of the way. There’s also a monthly meetup for hackers building food-related apps, and even tech publisher O’Reilly Media has come out with a cookbook. (It’s called Cooking for Geeks, and it’s really well done.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise—at a time when farmer’s markets are popping up in every town square, cooking and celebrity-chef shows keep multiplying on TV, and concern over the health impact of poor nutrition is growing—that startup types are trying to turn their food obsessions into businesses. With their usual ardor, these entrepreneurs are finding and fixing previously undiscovered inefficiencies in every part of the food business, from managing recipes and making grocery lists to reserving restaurant tables, reading nutrition labels, and figuring out which wine to buy.

But there are so many new food-related companies on the scene that it’s impossible not to wonder whether the market’s getting a bit frothy. Quick, can you tell me the difference between Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie? In the end, I suspect that there isn’t really room for three companies that page restaurant guests when their table is ready (No Wait, Textaurant, and ReadyPing), three marketplaces for artisanal food products (Foodoro, Fooducopia, and Foodzie), two members-only restaurant deals services (TipCity and VillageVines), and dozens of recipe search apps and sites. If DARPA were funding all this activity, it would simply hold a bake-off to find the top competitors. We’ll have to wait longer to see which of these startup soufflés get some lift, and which ones collapse.

Meanwhile, here’s today’s main dish: a list of all the notable food-related startups I could find in one afternoon of research. I tried to restrict this list to companies that are making significant use of software, mobile technology, or the Web (if only as a marketing and distribution channel). I focused my search mainly on companies in Xconomy’s home cities, especially San Francisco, and I deliberately didn’t hunt down the names of every maker of every food-related iPhone or Android app. So I know the list is incomplete. But if you know of a name that deserves to be added, please let me know in the comment section.

AllRecipes—Large online catalog of user-contributed recipes.

Anyleaf—Listings of local supermarket discounts; a replacement for Sunday coupon circulars.

Back to the Roots—Home mushroom growing kits using recycled coffee grounds.

BigOven—Web and mobile recipe organizer and shopping list maker.

BlackboardEats—Members get e-mails with 30 percent discount offers for select restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

Chow—Food-related news, entertainment, and instruction. Owned by CBS Interactive.

Cocomama Foods—Online vendor of gluten-free foods such as quinoa cereals.

Consmr—A social network that allows users to “check in” to the grocery products they’re eating.

Cookooree—Community recipe sharing “for the rest of us.”

Cookstr—Recipes from leading chefs and cookbook authors.

Daily Gourmet—E-mail newsletter offering daily deals on artisanal foods.

Daily Grape—Daily wine review videos from Gary Vaynerchuk, formerly of WineLibrary.tv.

… Next Page »

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We ran several terrific stories last week from Deborah Gage, a Bay Area technology journalist who filled in while I was on vacation in Alaska. (Thanks Deborah!) We also published an in-depth a look at Ideo nutrition-advice spinoff ShopWell.

—Cloudera, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup offering tools and consulting services around the Hadoop open-source distributing computing platform, aims to become the Oracle of distributed databases, Deborah learned in an interview with CEO and co-founder Mike Olson.

—At a Wednesday press conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced several changes intended to integrate Facebook more directly with users’ mobile activities, as Deborah also reported. People will be able to use their Facebook credentials to log into partner services such as Loopt and Yelp, and developers will have more ways to use the location information generated when users check in at various locations using Facebook Places.

—Erin profiled EcoMotors International, a Michigan developer of cleaner, cheaper internal combustion engines that’s backed by Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

—In a three-part series on ShopWell I first explored the basic challenges the Palo Alto, CA-based startup is trying to solve: supplying consumers with more personalized guidance about what foods to buy, while supplying food manufacturers with better market intelligence on what foods consumers want. Part 2 recounted how Ideo engineered the spinoff, while Part 3 examined the challenges the company will face acquiring customers and generating the data it hopes to sell to food producers.

—In a speech at a NASA Ames Research Center conference on biology and space settlement, famed biologist Craig Venter, CEO and co-founder of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics, suggested to listeners that genomic analysis and genetic engineering tools could be used to select—and eventually even engineer—astronauts with traits conducive to space travel. One example: inner ear changes that would minimize space sickness.

—Both the number of active angel investors and the fraction of angel deals benefiting seed-stage ventures were down in the first half of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009, according to a study Greg summarized from the University of New Hampshire Center for Venture Research.

—Bob took a deep look at one specific deal: the decision by Avalon Ventures managing partner Rich Levandov to invest in San Francisco-based social gaming juggernaut Zynga back in 2007.

—In other deals news, Vindicia raised $20 million, SpiderCloud Wireless raised $14.1 million, Curse raised $12.4 million, RingCentral and SnapLogic raised $10 million each, and Intersect ENT raised $30 million. For more details on those announcements, see this Tuesday roundup of deals news from Deborah. Meanwhile, Aeroscout raised $16 million, Nexant raised $50 million, and Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz closed a second fund amounting to $650 million.

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These days, the simple act of going to the grocery store is a fraught and anxious affair. Americans are being told that what they choose to eat isn’t just a personal decision, but has major economic, political, and moral implications. For one thing, there’s the spiraling cost to society of food-related health conditions, from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and hypertension. Then there are books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eating Animals and movies like Supersize Me, Food Inc, and Our Daily Bread, which expose the unsavory sides of a food economy dominated by supermarkets and fast-food joints and the factory farming system that’s grown up to serve them. And, of course, there are the burgeoning organic and local food movements, which argue that foods produced locally and without the use of pesticides or antibiotics are healthier and more sustainable—even if they’re beyond many consumers’ price range.

Into the middle of all this steps ShopWell, a Silicon Valley Web and mobile startup spun off last year by the design consultancy Ideo. The company’s proposition to consumers is simple: tell us a little about you, and we’ll tell you which products on the supermarket shelves best fit your nutritional needs.

It sounds great, given the difficulties ordinary mortals face with the very first step of responsible shopping and eating: trying to figure out how ingredient lists and nutrition labels relate to their own lives. But the company’s plan for making money is a bit more complex. It wants to be an advisor and information broker to food producers, who supposedly lack good data about how consumers make buying decisions in the grocery store and therefore have a terrible record when it comes to launching new products. To collect useful intelligence for its food-industry clients, ShopWell will need lots of users. And to sign up lots of users, it will have to provide non-obvious product recommendations in a usable format.

But frankly, it’s not there yet—which isn’t surprising, given that the company launched its beta site in September and its iPhone app even more recently. So in this third and final installment in our ShopWell case study, we’ll look at the product development challenges the company has ahead of it, and the business-model hypotheses it has yet to test.

[Editor's Note: This is the third article in a three-part series on ShopWell. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1 and Part 2 appeared on Tuesday, November 2.]

What makes ShopWell worth following, and sets it apart from the scores of Silicon Valley startups launched every month, is not just that it’s trying to validate two premises at once (i.e., that consumers want an easier way to identify healthy food, and that food producers will pay for fine-grained data about consumer preferences). It’s also that the startup’ fate will reflect on Ideo’s ability to launch successful companies. Is the consultancy’s fabled user-centered design philosophy an effective tool in the real rough-and-tumble of startup life? Do good designers also make good entrepreneurs? Such questions may not be answered until ShopWell itself exits the startup market and its venture cashiers ring up the totals.

The Google of Food?

Whatever else it may mean, the “user-centered design” philosophy espoused at Ideo and many other creative hotbeds is about listening to people and creating things they’ll want, rather than force-feeding them products that don’t fit with their existing behaviors. But one of the interesting things about food and wellness, according to ShopWell CEO Jasmine Kim, is that many people only start thinking about the subject once they’re forced to give up their old behaviors. “A big insight from user-centered design”—that is, from the stories people have told Ideo and ShopWell—”is that when you are starting a transition, that is when you need nutrition advice,” Kim says. “You could be told by your doctor, ‘You have type 2 diabetes, eat less sugar,’ but people are left to their own devices to go figure out what they could eat.”

That’s why ShopWell has put a lot of energy into allowing users to filter its database of foods based on health needs—there are simple “preselects” on each users’ account page that will … Next Page »

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With the ShopWell concept for helping consumers make more sense of the nutrition labels on food, Ideo thought it had a winner. But while the design consultancy has many of the attributes of a startup incubator—a large flock of creative thinkers and a commitment to testing new ideas, to name just a couple—it’s not equipped to fund and staff new companies on its own.

As soon as Ideo senior designer Michelle Lee and entrepreneur-in-residence Brian Witlin had formalized their pitch on ShopWell in mid-2009, Ideo partner Brendan Boyle put out the word that the team was looking for venture support—preferably from a firm that understood how to manage the spinout process.

“Within one or two hops, somebody told Brian, ‘You should talk to these guys at New Venture Partners,’ and that is how they found us,” says Robert Rosenberg. “It was actually a cold-call e-mail that came in via LinkedIn.” (Score another one for PayPal alum Reid Hoffman’s professional networking service.) [Correction, 11/2/10: Rosenberg sent Xconomy this revision: "The thread that actually brought Ideo to New Venture Partners wasn't LinkedIn.  It was somewhat high tech (someone at IDEO posted the question "does anyone know anything about spinouts?" on a Stanford GSB listserve), but it was also a little old fashioned in that a person who saw the post forwarded it to Frank (Rimalovski, a partner at the firm)."]

[Editor's Note: This is the second article in a three-part series on ShopWell, a Palo Alto, CA, Web startup that rates food products based on shoppers' personal health goals. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1.]

Rosenberg is a longtime partner at New Venture Partners, which has offices in San Mateo, CA, and Murray Hill, NJ, as well as the UK and the Netherlands, and purports to be the world’s only venture firm specializing in corporate spinouts. (In a two-part conversation in September with another partner at New Ventures Partners, David Tennenhouse, I learned exactly how that process has worked in cases such as Freescale’s spinoff of magnetic memory startup Everspin.)

Lee, Witlin, and Boyle presented their plan to Rosenberg and his former colleague Frank Rimalovski, who has since left New Venture Partners to head up NYU’s Innovation Venture Fund. “One of the first things we saw was how fully thought-through the whole concept was,” Rosenberg recounts. “The prototypical entrepreneur has a hammer and everything looks like a nail; they think they can take over the world with their hammer. What Brendan, Brian, and Michelle had was a much more realistic and frankly more nuanced vision. I think part of the reason is that at Ideo, where they come from, they have the discipline to think that way. But it also reflects the fact that ShopWell itself is not a point solution. There are lots of innovations that brilliantly spot a problem and pair that with a brilliantly conceived solution, but with ShopWell, it’s that times two.”

On the consumer side, Lee and Witlin had come up with a plan for offering personalized food ratings reflecting consumers’ specific circumstances—not just their age, gender, height, and weight, but their health conditions and fitness goals. “This stuff is not just for health nuts,” says Rosenberg. “There is a real desire to understand the health impact [of different foods]. It’s just really hard to get at that on a personal basis. The tools that are out there are the quintessential one-size-fits-all tools—the USDA Food Pyramid says, ‘Eat this, not that.’ Well, what’s good for me could kill my mother.”

And on the producer side, ShopWell was offering a solution to food manufacturers’ age-old problem predicting what new products consumers will buy. “These are some of the world’s largest companies, and they are swimming in data from supermarket scanners and from generations of focus groups sitting behind one-way mirrors,” says Rosenberg. “But it turns out that … Next Page »

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Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control shocked the nation two weeks ago with a study projecting that by the year 2050, as many as one fifth to one third of U.S. adults could have diabetes, up from just 10 percent today. Part of this increase is inevitable—a side effect of the swelling population of people at high risk for the disease, such as the elderly and Hispanics. It’s also a result of the fact that diabetics are living longer thanks to better treatments. But the CDC researchers also offered evidence that key “preventive interventions” could considerably reduce the future prevalance of diabetes and the resulting burden on the healthcare system.

It’s no mystery what those interventions might be, and they aren’t expensive or high-tech. The most effective way to prevent adult-onset diabetes, by far, is weight control through exercise and healthy eating. And diabetics aren’t the only ones who could benefit from a better diet: 34 percent of U.S. adults are obese, according to the CDC.

Unfortunately, choosing healthier foods is easier said than done. The huge stakes involved in those choices—and the opportunity to help simplify them—are among the reasons why team members at ShopWell, a recent spinoff of Palo Alto, CA-based design consultancy Ideo, are so passionate about their business: a Web-based service that helps consumers make smarter grocery buying decisions. As its name implies, ShopWell shows consumers which products on supermarket shelves mesh best with their health goals, and which are non-starters.

“Before I came on board here, I asked, ‘Is this just a Palo Alto problem that you’re trying to solve at Ideo?,’ because I really want to solve a big problem,” says Jasmine Kim, who joined the startup as CEO in September. “Well, when one in three children under 17 are overweight; when Americans don’t even recognize what overweight is now, because it’s the new normal; when you have Michelle Obama tackling childhood obesity on a national level; when Jamie Oliver is trying to get schools to go from chocolate milk to regular milk—that all tells you that this is a big problem, and that’s the kind of problem we want to solve.”

The first challenge ShopWell is biting off: the sorry state of nutrition labeling on food packaging. It’s been more than 70 years since Congress mandated that food makers list ingredients on their labels, and 20 years since the advent of the familiar “Nutrition Facts” chart. But while these labels are packed with information, it’s largely a contextless, one-size-fits-all deal—the percent daily values, for example, are based on a 2,000-calorie diet, which may be more or less than you really need, depending on your age, weight, gender, and activity levels.

Using ShopWell is like getting a Nutrition Facts label made just for you. At the ShopWell website, you start by entering personal details like age and gender, along with information about your health goals and conditions—whether you have high blood pressure or diabetes, for example. That allows ShopWell’s behind-the-scenes algorithms to spit out personalized ratings for thousands of common products. If you’re trying to lose weight, foods with lots of added sugar will obviously score low (bye-bye, Betty Crocker Cookie Mix). But on a subtler level, ShopWell will also bump up the scores of high-calcium foods for people with osteoporosis, or those with high levels of fiber and potassium and low levels of fat and cholesterol for people with heart disease. Armed with this data, you can build a shopping list that speeds your trip through the nutrition minefield that is the typical supermarket.

ShopWell’s executives and investors see the service as the missing link between nutrition labeling and personal health. “There is a groundswell of interest in the connection between food and wellness,” says Robert Rosenberg, a partner at New Venture Partners, the San Mateo, CA-based venture firm that backed ShopWell’s launch. “But if you look at where the rubber meets the road, in the supermarket, day after day you are going to see a consumer holding a box of this in their right hand and a box of that in their left hand, trying to figure out, ‘What does this mean for me?’ The world needs a personalized food rating engine that can connect this impenetrable mound of scientific data about nutrition and ingredients with my personal preferences or medical needs as a consumer.”

Of course, Silicon Valley is humming these days with Web startups and apps promising to help consumers with one challenge or another, from monitoring their finances to keeping track of their kids to buying a car. What makes a food website with only a dozen employees so interesting? Quite a few things, actually.

One is the undeniable scale and importance of the problem: some 100 million Americans have food-related health problems, from annoyances like lactose intolerance to life-threatening conditions like … Next Page »

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Palo Alto, CA-based ShopWell Solutions, which offers consumers personalized nutrition advice, said today that former Yahoo executive L. Jasmine Kim has been appointed chief executive officer. Kim is a veteran of consumer-facing businesses such as BabyCenter.com, LVMH Moet Hennessey Luis Vuitton, and Procter & Gamble. ShopWell, which was spun out of Palo Alto-based product design consultancy Ideo with funding from New Venture Partners of San Mateo, CA, also launched the beta version of its website, where users can plan grocery lists based on their personal nutritional needs or health objectives.

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Here’s an app that seeks to eliminate those impulse junk food purchases for its users. Shop to Lose, made by PICKKA, a division of Mountain View, CA-based health technology company Evincii, converts health guidelines into an individualized grocery shopping guide. It offers nutrition recommendations on thousands of common packaged food items and restaurant options, in an attempt to take some of the mystery out of dieting. The app, released in late March, is free for the next six months on Apple’s iTunes App Store.

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Seattle venture capital firm Maveron announced today that Kinetix Living Corp., one of its portfolio companies, has been acquired by Regence BlueShield of Washington state. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Kinetix, which was founded in 2000 and based in Seattle, provides customized health and nutrition programs to corporate customers and individuals. Regence is the largest health insurer in the Northwest and Intermountain region, with more than 2.5 million members in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah.

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[[Corrected version May 22]] One of the big ideas for tackling global malnutrition that’s been percolating for years at Seattle-based PATH is showing signs of its first real momentum in the marketplace. More than 60,000 children in India are now getting a daily serving of “Ultra Rice” fortified with iron as part of their school lunch programs, says Dipika Matthias, the project director at PATH.

I first wrote about Ultra Rice in this space back in August, when PATH, the nonprofit organization that works to improve public health in poor countries, had high hopes for it. I got the update on Ultra Rice from Matthias yesterday at PATH’s annual breakfast fundraiser.

PATH obtained the technology from a Bellingham, WA-based food scientist, who invented a way to pack vitamins into a staple food like rice by running it through a process commonly used for making pasta. It didn’t have commercial potential in the U.S., because we get our nutrients from other foods, but since rice is so cheap and widely available around the world, food scientists have long wondered how to turn it into a better vehicle for delivering vitamins and nutrients. To make it practical, it had to be engineered to withstand hot and humid storage conditions, and have a shelf life of as much as six months. Those hurdles are in the past—PATH’s job was to gin up market forces for this healthier brand of rice. The potential payoff for health is big. If millions of people got this on a daily basis, it could help ameliorate the chronic anemia that saps the energy and productivity of millions of people around the world.

“We’re trying to grow the market gradually,” Matthias says. “We’ve shown there’s supply and demand in India. We’re showing real progress.”

A lot of this depends on relationships, to hear Matthias tell the story. PATH made arrangements with the school lunch program in India, which could provide a proven distribution channel and a guaranteed market for the product, to give the Ultra Rice producer an incentive to manufacture it. For the first year, PATH got the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition to buy the rice, in hopes that a government agency would buy it the next year, Matthias says. [[Eds--the previous story suggested the government agency had committed to buy the Ultra Rice next year, but it hasn't yet.]]

A big part of PATH’s argument was that it could offer good bang for the buck—each kid gets half of his or her recommended daily allowance of iron through the rice, for 75 cents per child per year, Matthias says.

PATH’s commercial partner in India considered this market reasonable enough, and started producing the fortified rice in December, Matthias says. The supplies are going to children in the state of Andhra Pradesh, along the eastern coast of India, she says.

But India is just one of the four markets that PATH plans to crack open for Ultra Rice—the others are Brazil, Colombia, and China. The picture isn’t quite as rosy in Brazil. Back in December, PATH terminated the license with its previous commercial supplier there, who didn’t deliver on the kinds of quantities PATH wanted to produce, Matthias says. That company chose to “de-prioritize” production of Ultra Rice during last fall’s financial crisis, in favor of other products that had higher profit margins, Matthias says.

Now PATH has moved on with another supplier in Brazil, a pasta manufacturer near Sao Paolo called Adorella, which started making production runs earlier this month, she says. About one metric ton of Ultra Rice has been stockpiled in Brazil. Now PATH is working on the demand side of the equation, meeting with influential local officials there who might provide a spark for the product, Matthias says. Some of them may need a little more convincing than others—in the form of clinical trials that prove a public health benefit from eating Ultra Rice, she says.

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Bill and Melinda Gates don’t give their money away to just anybody who comes along with an impressive resume and a good cause. So why has the world’s largest charitable foundation seen fit to give $1.3 billion of its fortune to a little-known Seattle-based nonprofit called PATH?

PATH, which has raked in the second-largest amount of Gates Foundation grants of any organization behind the vaccine group GAVI, is one of the biggest success stories of the Seattle innovation community in the past decade. Since CEO and president Chris Elias joined in September 2000, PATH has grown from 240 employees to 775. Its annual budget has soared from $41million to $240 million. It has formed partnerships with 60 biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and most public health bodies in the world that count, from the World Health Organization on down.

The organization, formerly known as the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, sometimes struggles to explain what it does in a tight little Madison Avenue slogan. But essentially it seeks out clever, affordable technologies, and partnerships with clever entrepreneurs, to help improve the health of have-nots around the world. This vision plays itself out in a dizzying number of ways. PATH finances promising vaccine candidates, whether it’s for bird flu or other infectious bugs like pneumococcal disease that kills infants. It is working with entrepreneurs to develop fortified rice to so that people get more nutrition from a staple food. It is developing practical ways to purify water. It is helping ensure doctors get trained in a cheap, simple way to fix broken bones, so that people don’t languish in traction for months. It has pioneered the use of a sticker on vaccine vials that changes color if a vaccine goes bad. It serves as clearinghouse for the Gates Foundation-funded effort to eradicate malaria from the globe.

“We’ve really kind of grown up together with the Gates Foundation,” says Elias, whom I visited in his office. “We’ve grown dramatically.”

PATH got its start in Seattle in 1977 with a grant from the Ford Foundation to try to implement new contraceptive technologies that were developed for rich countries, but weren’t getting where they were needed in poor countries, Elias says. By about 1980, PATH’s founders realized that applying its model—of brokering deals between for-profit companies with innovative ideas and public health agencies with the means to get them to people in need—was a model that might work for expanding the use of diagnostics, drugs, devices, vaccines. Almost two-thirds of its budget comes from foundations, and the next biggest percentage, about 21 percent, comes from the U.S. government.

The people at PATH spend their time thinking about something most people in the U.S. are fortunate enough to never even consider—how to meet basic human health needs that the free market is unable to fulfill.

“The markets are very efficient ways of producing innovation where they work, where there’s a predictable demand and a system for delivery and financing. As imperfect as it is here in the U.S., that exists,” Elias says. “In poor countries, the market often fails. Either the market is unpredictable, or it’s not there. People are too poor. People who live on $1 a day can’t afford to buy products that will make anybody a significant margin.”

So there you have it, one of the world’s biggest fundamental problems, creating an enormous gap between haves and have-nots. Unsolvable, right?

They don’t seem to think so at PATH. In the face … Next Page »

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Everybody can relax. Bono and Angelina Jolie won’t be here. At least not this year. But some of the biggest names in science, global health, and business will gather in Seattle today for the Pacific Health Summit, to brainstorm about the world’s thorniest emerging health problems.

Key decision makers from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust (the world’s second-biggest health philanthropy behind you-know-who) will mingle with executives from Microsoft, Merck, and GE Healthcare, among others.

The summit’s founders, Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and George Russell, the chairman emeritus of Russell Investments and creator of the Russell 2000 stock index, will be there too.

The conference, in its fourth year, is invitation-only and limited to about 250 people. Like the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, it’s located in a setting with beautiful views of mountains and water, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66. The agenda is sprinkled with plenary sessions, small group talks, and time for one-on-one conversations.

It isn’t just all talk or wishful thinking. Last year, WHO director Margaret Chan outlined the threat of an avian flu pandemic, and London-based GlaxoSmithKline (the world’s second-largest drugmaker after Pfizer) listened, donating 50 million doses of vaccine for an emergency stockpile.

This year’s theme is about global malnutrition, basically what happens to public health when people eat too much cheap junk food with few nutrients, or not enough food with nutrients they need. As market forces lift millions out of poverty in places like China and India (a positive thing, obviously), many people are adopting the more sedentary Western lifestyle that leads to obesity and diabetes (a negative and very expensive problem).

If current economic growth trends continue in India, a country with more than 1 billion people, the demand for insulin for diabetics alone could be enough to swallow up the nation’s entire healthcare budget in 20 years, said Michael Birt, the summit’s executive director. Attendees want to brainstorm ways to harness market forces to prevent that from happening. They don’t want to be in the position of begging Eli Lilly or Novo Nordisk to donate insulin for needy diabetics. Summit attendees would rather find ways to invest in early childhood nutrition to prevent the problem in the first place, Birt said.

“We’re not just talking about sending a plane full of food over and thinking that will solve the problem,” Birt says. “Having a sustainable business is important. We want this to happen over decades.”

By getting the right people in the same room together—in a relaxed atmosphere, and at a moment in time when food prices are rising—the summit might just generate a few bright ideas.

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The Web has been around for long enough that many online businesses that once seemed revolutionary have begun to look routine, tired, even fundamentally flawed. In many industries, there is an emerging second generation of Web businesses that hope to supplant their pioneering predecessors. Look at online comparison shopping in the financial industry, for example. It’s a sector that has long been dominated by advertising- and commission-driven banking sites like LendingTree. But as we reported on Monday, there’s a new site called MoneyAisle that’s completely ad-free; its founders are out to replace the old regime with a reverse auction system where banks actively bid against one another for customers’ business.

Rather than “Web 2.0″—a term that has acquired a specific meaning having to do with hosted services, browser-based interaction, user-generated content, and social networking—you could call this phenomenon “the Web, Take Two.” And now it’s spreading to job boards. Waltham, MA-based PeopleAhead, which launched to the public yesterday, is taking on Monster.com (NASDAQ: MNST), Yahoo’s HotJobs, Dice, and the other traditional employment websites with a new mix of features that emphasize job seekers’ talents and aspirations over their raw résumé data.

There’s a big whiff of Web 2.0 to the PeopleAhead website, where the main activities involve creating personal profiles, soliciting endorsements, and networking with other job seekers. But more than anything, the site amounts to a repudiation of the Monster.com model, where job seekers toss their résumés in with millions of others, and where employers wind up sifting through hundreds of potential employees who may be technically qualified but aren’t good matches, for a host of reasons that aren’t captured by traditional database searches.

“First and foremost, it’s a career advancement website, not a job board like what you might have come to expect, although we do match people to the right career opportunities,” says PeopleAhead co-founder Tom Chevalier, a recent Babson College MBA graduate. As Chevalier and fellow co-founder and Babson graduate Carlos Laracilla explain it, PeopleAhead’s system is built around the concept of competencies. Members start off by picking the areas where they believe their own skills are most evident: problem-solving, for example, or persistence, enthusiasm, or team-building. Each member can then invite peers, supervisors, teachers, or other mentors to visit their profiles and leave their own input about the areas where they excel (a feature that will be familiar to users of the professional networking site LinkedIn). Potential employers can screen job seekers based on these competencies, and see the external evaluations alongside traditional résumé information such as a person’s educational and work background.

“Without knowing that sort of information, you may find somebody who has the requisite number of years of experience, but maybe they wouldn’t fit what your team requires personality-wise,” says Chevalier. “That’s one aspect of how our matching goes beyond what you’d find in a résumé. It goes into who a professional really is rather than what they’ve written down on paper.” To find out who a person really is, of course, an employer will probably want to meet them in person. But PeopleAhead’s process may at least help companies be more efficient about deciding whom to bring in for interviews.

Laracilla and Chevalier founded PeopleAhead in 2006, raised funding from Boston-area angel investors, and spent the last year and a half designing the website, writing and testing the site’s proprietary matching algorithms, and forming partnerships with New England-area MBA programs. Students from these programs have been helping to beta-test the site, and Laracilla and Chevalier expect they’ll now be one of the main sources feeding new members into the system. With today’s public launch, however, anybody can join the network, and employers can set up their own profiles and start screening job candidates.

It’s the PeopleAhead matching process, called “TrueMatch,” that Laracilla and Chevalier say they’re proudest of. It doesn’t work like the typical searches that employers can run against the databases at Monster.com and other job sites; it’s more reminiscent of what mathematicians call fuzzy logic. “Companies define the profile of an ideal candidate for a certain position—for example, the industries they would like that person to have experience with, the type of education they’ve had, the types of activities they’re involved with, the competencies relevant to the company and the position,” Laracilla explains. “Then we … Next Page »

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