May 2011

A project coordinated by Children's Hospital Boston researchers found that social-networking tools, in conjunction with the use of personal health records, could be valuable in the monitoring of a chronic disease.

Dr. Kenneth Mandl, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program's Intelligent Health Laboratory, and Elissa Weitzman, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and of adolescent medicine at the hospital, were co-principal investigators for the project. Members of a social website run by a not-for-profit foundation for diabetes patients were invited to publicly or anonymously share their personal data regarding one common diabetes-control measure. Data was submitted using an application based on the C.H.I.P.'s personally controlled health record; it was then displayed on state- or country-level maps in real time, according to the release. One in five users of the social website signed up for the application, and 81% of the application's users shared their data, the researchers noted.

Gov. Pat Quinn's (D-IL) ambitious, $96.4-million project to expand high-speed Internet connections Downstate is off to a stumbling start.

Illinois officials rejected all bids last week to install more than 1,000 miles of state-owned fiber-optic cable from Chicago to Collinsville after disqualifying more than half of the contractors for not following Illinois procurement rules. The project was rebid April 29. The cable installation throughout 55 counties in East-Central Illinois is the largest of five regional fiber-optic projects statewide that won a total of $173.9 million in broadband stimulus funding last year, and it's the only one directly managed by the state. The East-Central portion uses more than a third of the stimulus funds and about half of the $60.2 million in Illinois matching funds for all five projects, most of which are starting construction or about to name contractors. The state is operating under a deadline: The improved network has to be up and running by June 2013 to qualify for federal broadband stimulus funding the state won last year.

As he eases into the role of chief of Comcast's NBCU, Steve Burke is doubling down on an idea that's fallen out of favor in the media business: synergy. While other media companies are breaking apart to streamline, Burke is fixated on strengthening ties between assets as diverse as theme parks and cable channels like CNBC to pump up interest in NBCU's franchises.

He's ordering executives to lend their support to company-wide projects, starting with the animated Easter film "Hop" from Universal Pictures and NBC's new singing competition show "The Voice." The result: promotions ranging from a golf-club swinging Bunny from "Hop" on the Golf Network to dousing Comcast's online-video site with clips of belting wannabe pop stars. He calls the strategy "Project Symphony" -- a play, on synergy, a word he resisted because it evoked cost-cutting and had become a derided term. "As the world fragments, it becomes harder and harder to promote anything," he said in a recent interview. To get people's attention, "you have to take this approach." Some senior NBCU executives say Burke's approach is similar to how they operated in the past, when NBCU tapped "uber priorities," including a new Harry Potter ride in its theme park, the animated film "Despicable Me," the Olympics, and the fall TV line-up. But Burke's pushing the idea more forcefully, they say, reflecting his management style of picking a few projects where he is very hands-on but giving executives room with the rest. He's also directly marketing NBCU content to Comcast's cable and broadband subscribers -- an avenue of cross-promotion NBCU couldn't access in the past.

Bringing study questions to the smartphone screen students glance at every few minutes has caught on in the educational app marketplace.

When Ashish Rangnekar wasn't studying for his business school entrance exam, he played games, perused websites, and checked eMail on his iPhone. Now he – and 75,000 other students – can do both simultaneously. Rangnekar is the cofounder of Watermelon Express, an application available for the iPhone, iPad, and desktop computer that helps students prepare for high-pressure exams such as the GMAT, GRE, LSAT, and SAT using game-playing features, competitions with peers, and analytics showing precisely where students need to improve. Watermelon Express uses reams of educational and test-prep content from books and open-source websites to create questions for seven subjects. “There’s a lot of content out there, but when you interact with it, you realize how one-dimensional it really is,” said Rangnekar, who passed the GMAT and is now a student at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “So we start from where [publishers] leave off.”