Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Medify

Quick Pitch: Medify mines data from millions of studies to make assessing medical experts and treatments easier.

Genius Idea: Visually explaining how medical conditions and their treatments have been studied.

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A 2010 study by the Pew Internet Project found that searching for health information online was the third most popular online pursuit. But what you find when you search is not necessarily what you need if you’re managing a disease.

Searching “autism,” for instance, brings up a Wikipedia page, a fact sheet from the National Institutes of Health and an overview from MayoClinic. If I get more specific with my search, and type in “Risperdal,” a drug that is sometimes used to treat autism symptoms, I get a result titled “What Risperdal did to me” and another for a dense 2002 study by the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Derek Streat, Medify’s co-founder and CEO, didn’t find these sorts of search results helpful when his daughter was diagnosed with a rare and threatening illness.

“If you spend any decent amount of time with a doctor,” he says, “you will surpass what a WebMD will tell you within a half hour conversation.”

Meanwhile, sifting through troves of studies intended for medical professionals was frustrating.

Medify attempts to find a productive compromise between these two extremes of online health information. It aggregates published research from the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Medline, a database that contains more than 18 million references to journal articles going back to 1946. Then it scrapes data points like the number of patients studied, their treatments, symptoms and side effects to generate insights about medical treatments and experts.

It arranges these datapoints in easy-to-read graphs. At a glance, it’s easy to see what treatments are being studied the most and where most of the research is coming from.

A “strength of evidence” graph, for instance, uses an algorithm that bases rankings of treatments for a given medical condition on factors such as how far the drug has gotten in clinical trials, how often it has been studied, how many people it has been studied on and how quickly that treatment is evolving. Users can personalize the search by selecting their demographic information or symptoms to see studies that involved only people like themselves or their loved ones.

Ranking treatments this way might make doctors and researchers — whose papers include pages of caveats for a reason — squirm in their lab coats.

“Every patient is different, but if you get a big enough signal, that matters,” Streat argues.

He says that the platform intends to make it easier to have informed conversations with doctors rather than deliver a verdict on one treatment or another.

“At the end of the day, there’s no drug that you’re going to be able to look at on Medify that you can go buy yourself. It’s not going to spit out a pill.”

If nothing else, Medify helps narrow down relevant studies that might be hard to extract from Medline’s database without assistance. Each customized graph the site creates cites the long version of the studies from which it has pulled data.

Medify is still in beta and without a revenue stream. It is considering either offering premium research services or opt-in marketing services in the future, and Streat says that unexpected attention from the medical community might make a version for doctors another viable source of income.

For now, the company is operating on $1.8 million of funding from Voyager Capital and several angel investors.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peepo

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Say hello to Ness, a mobile app that can figure out which restaurants you’ll enjoy the most, based on your personal tastes.

The app, now available in the iOS App Store (U.S.-only), takes a different approach to restaurant recommendations than Yelp, UrbanSpoon and the regular tools people usually use to choose where they will dine. And Ness Computing, the company behind the app, hopes that its unique approach can also change how we shop, discover music and more.

Ness, at its core, is a recommendation engine. Users open the iOS app and quickly rate different restaurants nearby on a scale of one to five stars. After ten ratings, the app has enough data to deliver a set of nearby restaurants it believes you will like, based on your personal tastes and preferences.

The technology behind Ness is the key to the app’s functionality. Ness is powered by a proprietary technology called the Likeness Engine. It takes in information from a variety of sources, including Facebook, Foursquare, friend recommendations, restaurant popularity and personal tastes preferences to figure out whether you’re going to be interested in a restaurant on a scale of 0-100%.

Ness was developed over several years by a team backed by Khosla Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners, TomorrowVentures, Bullpen Capital and one of Palantir’s co-founders. The team utilized machine learning and natural language processing technology to create a recommendation engine that could cut through the noise of sifting through search results.

The app has come a long way since its previous incarnation (an app called Trumpet). We’ve played around with this app, and we’ve been impressed by the results so far. We’ve also heard stories of the technology being able to figure out your musical tastes just by looking at information in your Facebook profile.

If Ness can nail down restaurant recommendations, it has the opportunity to become a new type of mobile search engine that can be used for almost any decision.

After months of speculation, Facebook has finally announced the date of its annual developer conference, f8.

The fourth edition of the conference will take place Sept. 22 in San Francisco. “This all day event with Facebook engineers and product teams will feature keynotes and session tracks that highlight our new tools along with best practices for developers and partners building the next generation of social experiences,” the company said in its email invitation.

The all-day conference is where Facebook typically launches its biggest products and initiatives. It launched the Facebook Platform at its first f8 in 2007, unveiled Facebook Connect in 2008, and launched the Like button and the Facebook Open Graph in 2010.

What will Facebook announce at this year’s f8? Mashable will be there to cover the major news from the world’s largest social network.

I guess this is how a sports fan felt when Joe DiMaggio retired.

Business didn’t used to be personal. Now it is.

Computers didn’t used to make us smile. Now they do.

We didn’t used to care about whether a CEO made one decision or another, or whether or not he was healthy. I do now.

Sure, there was baseball after joltin Joe stopped playing. But it was never quite the same.

Thank you, Steve, for giving us all something to talk about and a way to talk about it with beauty (and fonts). We owe you more than we can say.

Fans watching the New York Giants play the Jets this weekend on TV will notice something new: their tweets.

The Giants will integrate live tweets from fans into the broadcast on NBC 4 in New York during Saturday’s preseason game and during the Sept. 1 game against the New England Patriots. The remarks from fans will appear on the lower third of the screen during big plays. The Twitter feeds will run just during those two final preseason games. But the Twitter integration will also be integrated into MetLife Stadium throughout the season. Game attendees will see the tweets on the stadium’s video boards and other channels.

The team’s Twitter integration will also include a voting system that will let fans pick the player of the game using hashtags. The Giants are working with social curation firm Mass Relevance to tabulate the results in real time and feature them on a dedicated microsite. The player with the most votes will have his merchandise discounted that week in the Giants’ online store. During the season, one player will also be available every home game for a Twitter chat with fans.

SEE ALSO: How Social Media Is Changing the NFL

A rep for the Giants says the team is the first in the NFL to embrace Twitter to this magnitude. In fact, the NFL has taken a hard line against Twitter in some cases. In 2009, the league banned players from in-game tweeting. That, however, hasn’t stopped players from taking to Twitter when they’re off the field. Many players tweeted their thoughts after hammering out a new labor contract in late July.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, spxChrome

I was just logging off to go to bed, and I ended up reading this great post by DJ Coffman, about how to create a pitch with a hook. He asked, at the end, if we’d read the comic based on the pitch. I wrote that I might, but that what I found interesting was that the “until” was missing. Now, the weird thing is, I didn’t even realize that I thought like that, until I read DJ’s post, and then I didn’t realize that I even knew about the “until” ..um…until that moment.

What is the Until?

Movies and most fictional stories have a reasonably similar plot projection that goes like this:

Everything was normal UNTIL it wasn’t.

That’s it. That’s the plot nugget. Let me show it to you with the examples I gave to DJ in his comments section (and do go check out his cool project).

Marlin and Nemo lived happily in their reef UNTIL Nemo got lost during a school trip.

Wall-E lived happily in his junkyard, finding old junk to treasure UNTIL Eva showed up.

Bob and Helen Parr lived secretly with their children, UNTIL Bob had to go and have a midlife crisis.

See? It’s the UNTIL that makes the story.

Real Life is Rarely Like Fiction

You see, most of us try very hard to cling to that first half of the plot. Most of us try really hard to keep things the way they’ve always been. But you can’t do that in fiction. The Incredibles would be pretty boring if Bob just worked at his insurance job all day. Wall-E would be interesting for about 8 minutes if all he did was collect garbage. Finding Nemo happens every day inside of fishbowls.

But You Could Embrace the Until

What if getting laid off was your Until? Erik Proulx made an entire movement out of that idea with The Lemonade Movie.

What if a break-up brings you to your until?

What if a change of faith, a sickness, the discovery of a new technology brings you to your until?

You’ll Never Know, Unless…

Most of us ward off our “untils,” but what if you didn’t? What would life be like? How would you see the world, if you were at least open to the possibilities of your until?

What do you think?

A recent study has found that increased vehicle access in urban areas might actually reduce fuel consumption — as long as those cars are shared, not individually owned.

It may seem counterintuitive that putting more drivers behind the wheel could actually have an environmental benefit, but Elliot Martin and Susan Shaheen at the University of California Transportation Center say that car sharing services such as Zipcar, Car2Go and Relay Rides are actually most often used by those looking to get rid of a car.

Therefore, car sharing reduces overall vehicle ownership, takes older cars off the road and helps individuals move away from car-dependent lifestyles — all trends that reduce tailpipe emissions.

In their study of 6,281 car sharing households, the study authors found that 80 percent of those surveyed moved from owning a single car to owning zero cars after joining a car sharing service. The cars that folks got rid of tended to be more than a decade old and averaged 23 mpg. Compare that to the vehicles in a car sharing fleet, which average 33 mpg and tend to be low-tailpipe-emissions hybrids or gas-sipping compact cars.

Aside from those study participants who ditched car ownership altogether, Martin and Shaheen also found that access to a shared car often allowed households to avoid purchasing a vehicle, or a sell a rarely-used second car that took up a parking spot and cost money to keep on the road. While it’s difficult to measure cars not purchased, they estimated that each car in a shared fleet represented between nine and thirteen individually-owned cars not on the road.

“Carshare households exhibited a dramatic shift towards a carless lifestyle,” the study authors wrote. “The vehicles shed are often older, and the carsharing fleet is an average of 10 mpg more efficient than the vehicles shed.”

The authors hope that as car-sharing services increase, even those outside of high-density urban environments may be able to shed a vehicle or two.

“While this study shows that carsharing has already had a significant and measurable impact in many metropolitan regions, industry growth into new markets may produce much greater environmental benefits in the future,” they wrote.

Photo: Flickr/crschmidt

Google has upgraded the +1 button with several new features, including the ability to directly share a webpage to Google+.

“Beginning today, we’re making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button,” Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra announced in a blog post. “Just +1 a page as usual and look for the new ‘Share on Google+’ option. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share.”

In the past, clicking the +1 button only shared content to a tab on a user’s Google+ profile. This is in contrast to the Facebook Like button, which posts an article on a user’s Facebook wall. Now that Google has its own social network, the search giant can match Facebook’s button functionality.

Google also announced the addition of +snippets to the +1 button. A +snippet is simply the link, image and description automatically generated when a link is shared on Google+. These +snippets make content more engaging on the Google+ social network, which is why the search giant is giving publishers the ability to customize their snippets. Publishers can customize the code of their +1 button to tweak what gets displayed in a +snippet.

Google says the +1 button has been growing rapidly since its introduction in June. The button is now embedded on more than 1 million websites, garnering a total of 4 billion daily views. Those are impressive numbers, but the success or failure of the +1 button will be measured in clicks, not views.

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to transform the way they develop applications that serve wide and diverse audiences. They are currently running Apps for the Environment, an app development challenge — with a deadline of September 16 — that is meant to encourage the public to come up with new ways of leveraging EPA data.

“The premise for a long, long time has been that the government knows what is best for folks,” says Robin Gonzalez, acting director at the EPA. “We collect data from the people we regularly work with — industry — and others and try to put it into digestible formats which usually come out as sets of reports or raw data sets. The EPA has a number of large databases, such as Envirofacts, and is looking forward to “seeing what kind of apps students and developers come up with using our data.”

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The Challenge

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Gonzalez says this challenge presents a different way for a government agency to operate. It lets the market dictate how years of valuable EPA data can be put to good use.

The Apps for the Environment challenge welcomes individuals, independent programmers and corporate programmers to participate in developing apps for consumers, business-to-business and even government-to-business scenarios (or vice versa). The three categories for entries are Professional, Student and People’s Choice, with one winner to be chosen in each category.

The apps submitted must address one of the Seven Priorities from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, such as taking action on climate change or building strong state and tribal partnerships. The apps should also be useful to individuals or the community at large. Developers can get ideas from webinars available on the site, which consist of audio interviews, slideshows and transcripts.

Even non-programmers can contribute to the challenge by submitting ideas for potential apps. The EPA’s challenge currently has 90 app ideas on their site, including:

• An app that would identify nearby recycling centers for disposing household hazardous waste
• An app that combines air toxics data from the EPA’s National Air Toxic Assessment (NATA) database with environmental public health data from the Centers for Disease Control and National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program to identify areas with high emissions that also have high incidences of disease
• An app that identifies all available beach advisories and/or closings near a user’s current location
• An app that allows users to compare the environmental impact of two products, such as grocery and household products

Developers are encouraged to either submit apps based on their own ideas or peruse dozens of app ideas from others. There is even a Hack-a-thon taking place on Labor Day weekend and hosted by American University that aims to bring together developers and teams from universities throughout the area, professional coders, as well as EPA data specialists. The goal will be to develop apps for the competition.

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App Contests Are Going Mainstream

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While app challenges aren’t new (take NYC Big Apps, the Civic Apps Challenge in Portland, Oregon and even a DC apps challenge called Apps for Democracy), what makes the EPA Apps for the Environment challenge different is that it is national in scope. The EPA challenge also encourages the use of not just EPA data sets but data from other agencies as well.

The EPA announced Apps for the Environment in June 2011 on the heels of another national app competition supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) called myHealthyPeople Challenge — a part of the Health 2.0 Developers Challenge for rapid app development. The goal of the HHS apps challenge was to develop a custom Healthy People 2020 app for professionals, advocates, funders and decision makers who are using the Healthy People initiative to improve the well-being of people across the country. Challenge winners were invited to meet with HHS leadership to demo their apps and to strategize additional development opportunities. The Healthy Communities Institute won the first place prize of $2,500 for its online dashboard that checks the status of all the HealthyPeople 2020 goals in Sonoma County to assess and improve local community health.

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The Reward

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On November 8, the EPA will present awards to the Apps for the Environment challenge winners in a high-profile event in Northern Virginia. At the same event, the Department of Energy (DOE) will announce details about their upcoming apps challenge. As federal agencies pass the apps challenge baton, they can learn from their predecessors and their own experiences in accelerating the development cycle through crowdsourcing. Additional federal agency apps challenges can be found on Challenge.gov.

Gonzalez acknowledges that apps challenges are a form of crowdsourcing for app development, and while their current app challenge doesn’t include a monetary award, he says the EPA is exploring several models of payment for future app development initiatives.

“We’re looking to streamline the app development process, looking at this as a model that will inform that process going forward,” says Gonzalez. “We don’t expect to get everything for free, obviously, but at the same time we want to do this in a more innovative and more competitive way than exists today.”

Gonzalez says he has a team in place examining how their initial apps challenge effort can lead to future challenges and future app development work at the EPA. The goal is to look for different ways than the traditional model of determining the app they want produced, writing up specs, putting out an RFP, letting vendors bid on it and then picking a winner who then builds the app. By getting the public involved, new opportunities may arise that wouldn’t have come out of the usual RFP process.

Once the winning apps are chosen, the EPA will not own any of the apps. As long as the information retrieved from the EPA’s data sets is not misused in any way, the completed apps are property of the respective developers, who can then market and sell the apps themselves. The challenge winners will be invited to present their apps at the November awards ceremony to an audience that will include representatives from the EPA and other federal agencies, the media and even venture capitalists.

And more apps challenges are on the horizon for the EPA.

“What we currently develop is what we think is best for the public. Our thinking is changing,” says Gonzalez. “We believe that there’s a whole lot of innovative ways to approach development of our applications.”

Apps challenges are the EPA’s move in a more open and inclusive direction.

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Series Supported by BMW i

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The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.

By Michael Kanellos, Greentech Media

In the future, your plug-in hybrid may be able to read your mind — and save you gas in the process.

Ford, which has been at the forefront among auto makers when it comes to integrating software applications into cars, is experimenting with an application that aims to leverage data amassed about your driving habits to increase the mileage of plug-in hybrids and standard hybrids.

Extending car mileage has become job number one at automakers now that the U.S. plans to raise the fleet vehicle average standard to 54.5 mpg by 2025. Ford and Toyota announced Monday that they will collaborate on hybrid technology for pickups and SUVs, and also work together to develop common standards for in-car Internet connectivity.

While the two companies focused Monday’s announcement largely on gas-electric trucks — Ford is No. 1 in trucks and Toyota is No. 1 in hybrids — software could become a more pervasive part of the relationship because it will become a crucial part of most new cars.

Ford’s latest project, codenamed Green Zone, taps Google’s remarkable Prediction API to create software that can determine where you’re going by examining where you’ve been. Say it’s 8 a.m. Tuesday. Your car knows it is the second in a five-day sequence in which you drive 23.5 miles to the same destination. The software crunches data about your driving habits, the topography of the drive, details about traffic and time-to-destination and information about how the car performs.

Then it attempts to maximize the power drawn from the battery pack and minimize use of the gasoline engine. When you get within a certain number of miles of your likely destination, you enter, from your car’s perspective, a “green zone.” Beyond that, it might go fully electric.

Further, if you typically charge up after the morning drive and don’t leave again until 5:00 p.m., the car can try other methods to squeeze out a few extra miles on electricity.

“We have this massive amount of data. The question is what to do with it,” said Ryan McGee, technical expert on vehicle controls architecture and algorithm design at the company.

The car continually refreshes its data by interaction with cloud-computing services.

The probabilistic principles underlying the experiment are similar to predictive algorithms exploited by search engines. In addition to using Google’s predictive APIs, Ford also works with Microsoft on in-car telematics and, like General Motors and others, has developed applications that let EV owners interact with their cars.

Quite a bit of work remains. Right now, Green Zone is in the proof-of-concept stage. The software designers also have to figure out ways to readjust predictions in the face of surprises.

Image: Ford