Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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Name:3Degrees

Quick Pitch: 3Degrees is web-based application that lets you meet your friends’ friends via Facebook.

Genius Idea: Leverages the power of your Facebook social network to help you find people, activities and events through friends you trust.

Whether you’re looking for a new friend, a date or a connection to a job at your ideal company, chances are you already know someone who can help connect you to that person.

To help you find that connector, Brian Scordato created 3Degrees, a web-based application that allows you to search for your friends’ friends via Facebook to find interesting and compatible people in your area. The site enables its users to harness the power of their Facebook friends to meet new people and expand their social networks.

“So much in our lives is based on our networks – whether it’s an introduction to a potential boyfriend or girlfriend, an influential employee at a company we’d like to work at, or simply a new friend with similar interests,” says Brian Scordato, founder of 3Degrees. “Our networks open doors to new relationships and opportunities.”

Users can sign into 3Degrees and view their extended network for free by logging in with their Facebook account. They can then search for people by location, interests, relationship status or keywords, and 3Degrees will generate a list of people within their extended network who match the criteria.

The results are limited to friends of Facebook friends and includes only profile information that is set to be public.

 

Zooey Deschanel is getting into the web series business. She’s serving as creative consultant on season two of The Single Life, a show created and coproduced by Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) and Real Mom Productions. The series will “live and breathe on HelloGiggles.com,” a website Deschanel cofounded with Sophia Rossi and Molly McAleer, DBG’s CEO Chris Young tells Fast Company. The deal swells DBG’s long roster of original web video content, while nudging Deschanel into a growing coterie of Hollywood starlets who moonlight as entrepreneurs.

DBG calls itself a “content production and distribution company,” and is something of a hybrid between a production company and an advertising agency. One of their highest-profile productions to date was Kiefer Sutherland’s The Confession; the company also often works with brands to build video series offering what Young terms “utilitainment” (“providing a brand utility while entertaining the consumer at the same time,” he explains). DBG also produces a lot of brief video content that it then pushes to 2,600 partner websites. The company’s “sizzle reel” lays it all out.

The trick, Young says, is to keep the branding subtle and integral to the story. “The idea is to try to figure out brand objectives, where are the natural integration points, where it works with the story arc.” To “tastefully integrate” the brand is key: “If we the beat user over the head with the brand, they’re not going to engage.” Subtlety is so key, in fact, that Young asks me not to divulge the name of the brand DBG collaborated with on the first season of The Single Life, though you could probably figure it out if you watched it.

The collaboration with Deschanel came about, according to Young, through conversations with the CAA agency. For the girl who already has everything, though–a hit TV show, a talent for the viral music video, mesmerizing bangs–what’s in it for her?

Deschanel wasn’t available to comment for this post, but in dabbling in Internet entrepreneurialism, she is a product of her time. For the modern starlet, stardom is rarely enough; a thoroughly cultivated personal brand also involves an Internet investment or two, à la Kutcher. Each week seems to bring more news of the young and famous flexing their inner venture capitalist: Teen star Selena Gomez recently invested in a postcard app. And Jessica Alba just threw her weight behind Honest.com. A startup investment, for many, is the it accessory this season.

In Deschanel’s case, of course, her own investment is more directly in line with her persona–comic actress–since HelloGiggles bills itself as a site for “cool girls who like to laugh.” Deschanel cofounded the site in May of 2011. The site is quirky and cute, very much in Deschanel’s image, and has a lofty mission: to be “lady-friendly, so visitors need not worry about finding the standard Boys Club content that makes many entertainment sites unappealing to so many of us.”

If that’s a vanity tech investment, it’s the kind we’d like to see more of.

Follow Fast Company on Twitter.

Image: Flickr user Breezy Baldwin

How can I go about teaching enterprise, and their B2B marketers, how to produce better content? This is a real marketing emergency, if there is such a thing.

Have you looked at the number of white papers out there lately? And how they all suck? At the collateral? At the websites? At the press releases and the fatuous corporate blogs? At the 178 social media sites per company–few of which offer much relevance or are of interest to customers, shareholders, suppliers, or even employees. Enterprise writing does not “go viral.”

There are better things to do with time and money than produce content no one will read or see. “Content marketing” is king, but not if you create the wrong content, or bad content.

I ask myself, can I help more by writing for them, or by teaching them how to write themselves? And is that even possible? As a professor years ago, I saw that by the time people got to my classes, their ability to write had been more or less fixed by the amount they read as children and the amount of encouragement they received in elementary school.

With all the time I spend at startups, I realize young companies are much better communicators and marketers than enterprise companies. They have to be. They have to get and keep customers, or they die. In the enterprise, approaching death is often non-obvious. Kodak. (Squirrel.)

Long, long ago, when I was teaching English, I belonged to a group in the National Council of Teachers of English called the Committee on Public Doublespeak. We professors were committed to wiping out jargon, bullshit, unclear writing, and all the ways people obfuscate rather than clarify.

Thirty years later, I look around me and the amount of content has proliferated, but the quality of it has gotten even worse. About five years ago, Chelsea Hardaway wrote a book called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, addressing the same problem.

Yet B2B marketers have long discussions about whether they should be doing more or less SEO, more or less inbound or outbound marketing, more or less “earned media.” This discussion is the proverbial arranging of the Titanic’s deck chairs.

How much of what you do is never important. The quality, and relevance, of what you do is important. Every enterprise company should pretend to be a startup.

Image: Flickr user bburky

“I really believe diseases are verbs,” says Dr. David Agus, one of Steve Jobs’s oncologists and a medical researcher at the University of Southern California. “You’re cancering. So I want to take you from a cancer state to a health state.”

In his new book, The End of Illness, Agus argues that the key to a radical reduction in illness is to prevent the unhealthy lifestyles that allow diseases to thrive. And while the saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” dates back to Benjamin Franklin, the idea is timeless–even if our current approach to medicine doesn’t always reflect it.

“For example,” he explains, “skipping a flu shot and getting the flu has major implications for heart disease and cancer a decade from now.” Everything from improper running shoes to an unnatural dose of vitamins from supplements can tip off a domino effect of complex reactions. The solutions, he argues, are cutting-edge “proteomics” technologies that allow researchers to customize medical treatments, a insurance system that penalizes unhealthy behavior, and eating and workout habits that are more akin to the active, whole-food lifestyles of ancient man.

Viewing Health As A “System”

Modern health care, Agus argues, has wrongly gone after diseases with laser-like precision. To Agus, proper prevention means getting the body to a place that limits the number of possible ways diseases can develop and thrive. “I’m a big believer in flu vaccines,” he writes, citing a 2006 recommendation from the American Heart Association. “If not to prevent the flu, then to at least prevent marked increases of inflammation that can come back to haunt us later in life.”

Agus notes that many people unwittingly coexist peacefully with mild forms of cancer. His focus is less about destroying cancer cells and more about preventing those who die “from cancer.”

The philosophy also extends to nutrition and diet. For instance, we combat weight loss by driving to the gym to walk on a treadmill–and then return to hunch over laptops for hours on end. “Sitting at your desk is akin to smoking a cigarette,” he says. Prolonged sitting, independent of physical exercise, he writes, “has been shown to have significant metabolic consequences,” influencing everything from cholesterol levels to blood sugar.

As a result, Agus purchased a mobile headset that allows him to talk on the phone while walking around the office. More sophisticated technologies like the Jawbone Up, a smartphone-enabled wristband, monitor activity throughout the day and remind idle users to periodically move about.

The End of Illness is, in part, intended to dispel the common myths that Agus believes are pervasive even among well-informed individuals. He attacks vitamin-crammed supplements, health shakes, and a lack of critical-thinking activities with an entertaining mix of history and contemporary research, ultimately advocating for a lifestyle that is more akin to ancient man: locally sourced or flash-frozen whole foods, constant activity, and prolonged reading and writing, especially during the golden years.

To motivate such behavior, insurance companies should vary prices and subsidies in accordance with healthy behavior–while punishing unhealthy behavior, he says. “Why should people who get the flu shot subsidize people who don’t?”

Tailored Medicine

“We treat everyone the same in this country,” says Agus. “The goal is to figure out who should get what.” Since all medical research is based on the probability of a treatment working, patients are treated like lab rats with various medicines and treatments until (fingers crossed) something works. With an advanced understanding of a patient’s genetic makeup, doctors can know “whether you are likely to experience severe side effects with a particular drug, and in other cases whether the drug is likely to be effective for you,” he writes.