That’s not a typo, that’s Soocial, a web service that syncs your contacts amongst all your connected devices and web applications.  It promises a “one address book solution to contact management” syncing data from mobile phone to Google address book to all your home and work computers. All quietly in the background.

If this sounds a lot like Plaxo or (gag) Mobile-Me, you’re right.  But Plaxo can’t decide what it wants to be since they’ve been acquired by Comcast. Soocial on the other hand just wants to sync. It supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail and 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app (which we rolled out to replace top-heavy Salesforce.com).

So far the beta looks good and the first day’s experience has been positive.  I’ve got one beta invitation left, available to whoever writes me first.  In the meantime, you might enjoy this short 3 minute video about “Hassle Free Sync” featuring David Hasselhoff, a great visual pun if ever there was one.

iPhones and Tom-Tom’s oh my!  As more and more hand held devices begin sharing data with each other and with the net, the ability to predict behavior becomes the next big thing for marketers, social networks and of course governments curious about citizens’ behaviors.

All of this falls under the rubric of “Reality Mining,” a term used to describe the marriage of GPS (global positioning systems) and large scale data mining. Pioneered by Sandy Pentland, a researcher at MIT whose work received funding from Nokia (the mobile phone handset manufacturer), the field shows great promise for those interested in predictive behavior.

By tracking physical location of the handset and hence its owner, proximity to contacts in the device address book which is a new feature in the forthcoming iPhone 2.0, and activity information such as motion or rest, a great deal of information can be gleaned.  Here are some examples all ready under way:

• “Will shoppers go out of their way to visit Starbucks? Or do they visit the closest coffee shop?”
  Product: Path Intelligence
• “I am downtown and it’s lunch time.  What good restaurants are nearby?
  “Product: Yelp Location Aware
• “I’ve got some free time.  I wonder where my friends are?”
  Product: BrightKite Social Networking

All of this begs the question of privacy, an area in which the United States seems to be trailing Europe.  Will users “opt-in” or will we rely upon the good intentions of the telco’s to scrub data clean of identifying information?  Or is privacy just a mirage, long since destroyed by the marriage of barcodes, traditional data-mining and putative “customer loyalty programs”?

We all know that Google reads our email.  Those contextual ads in Gmail are the quid pro quo for free Internet email.  With the launch of “Google Health” the question becomes “but will they read my healthcare records?”

John Halamka, M.D., CIO of the CareGroup Health System, CIO and Dean of Technology for Harvard Medical,  author of the highly regarded Geek Doctor Blog and an unpaid advisor to Google (hat’s off to Dr. Halamka) says no.

Security and privacy are foundational to Google Health. The privacy policy, with oversight from the Google Health Advisory Council, stipulates that data will never be transferred, sold, mined or released without specific consent of the patient. Patients completely control the content and may remove it any time.

But I’m not so sure.  Remember the Google Reader debacle? When business acquaintances with whom you chatted perhaps once suddenly had access to your RSS feeds?  This prompted a public outcry of protest, with journalists like Garett Rogers of ZDNET to demand “Close all Google accounts: Google doesn’t care about privacy!”.

Privacy International - an internet privacy watchdog - placed Google at the bottom of the list of Internet service companies. And David Harlow’s Health Care Law Blog says Google Health privacy policy can be changed at any time in the future.

Now some might argue that opting in to online healthcare records represents an informed choice between convenience and privacy. But when companies like BIDMC, Cleveland Clinic, Longs, MEDCO, Minute Clinic/CVS, Quest Laboratories, RxAmerica, Wallgreens and now BlueCross BlueShield (see Boston Globe article) want to link up with you the stakes get significantly higher.  Most Americans have strong sentiments about the  trustworthiness of medical insurance companies.

I am much more intrigued by Microsoft’s Health Vault, particularly in light of the announced relationship with Kaiser Permanente.  Here patient data is not only centralized but enhanced by value-added services like interpretation and explanation.

Consumers can not only see a record of a test that they had, but also the result of that test and in some cases, direct feedback from their doctors about the result.

Not only is Microsoft’s privacy record thus far superior to Google’s  but they are offering data portability. Leave Kaiser and take your data with you.

There are no easy answers in the wild west of medical privacy. But given the gray market of pre-employment screening of  job applicants for adverse health conditions and the rampant fears of genetic discrimination the best answer to: “should I put my records online?” is

“Caveat emptor. Don’t do it if you don’t have to.”

According to a recent article in Drugs.com Novartis, Pfizer and Merck have taken the lead in “strong relationships” with physicians as measured along several axes including:

• personal and professional conduct
• knowledge and expertise
• sales visit quality and value

The original research published by TNS Healthcare Research notes that what separated the top performers from the pack was performance across the full range of other service experiences. This is interesting because it has often been difficult to quantify the ROI of investing in the myriad of ecosystem components such as:

• patient and physician education
• practice and staff support
• total brand experience
• corporate reputation

We’ve all known that these are must-have’s, but when faced with pressure to grow top-line sales they may often seem like distractions.  Yet in the complex business ecosystem of pharmaceutical sales so-called soft services do correlate to improved results.

What This Means To Marketers - Education Matters

Of particular interest was the finding that while rep interactions are important, “…two-thirds of physicians give high importance to both doctor and patient education programs.” In the new click-economy, the ability to deliver information, whether in-office or on the web will continue to be valued and remembered.

EyeForPharma just interviewed Baba Awopetu, Manager of Brand Strategy, EMEA at Stryker that highlighted the challenges that big pharma faces in a period of decreasing profit margins. “The future of pharma marketing” offers an interesting perspective of strategic shifts to come:

• Pharma will be looking for people to help solve its problems which new kinds of marketing skills. Think less hiring from within the industry and a more open-minded look at “pure marketing” that taps other industries
• Greater reliance on multi channel approaches in the ways brands are built and products marketed
• Emphasis on “innovating value” that places greater value on “out of the box” approaches that emphasize ROI and profit.

And in a shot across the bow of status quo, he suggests:

Less of what we have at the moment, which is agencies driving strategies in conjunction with brand managers. In the future, he says, marketers will be held more accountable for driving and developing brand building strategies.

All of which to say is the end of big budgets, big spends, and carpet-bombing sales tactics may be at an end. The layoffs in sales forces, disappointing pipelines and the prospect of significant healthcare reforms come post election would tend to back up his admonition that “the secret to success is paranoia.”

Raf Cammarano is an Enterprise Architect based in Australia whose blog covers the nexus of I.T. strategy and design. While I’ll grant it may be a tough read for non-geeks, he’s written a wonderful series on Business Ecosystems which outlines how old, linear supply chains are being supplanted by more complex ecosystems of interdependent and inter-related resources.

A linear supply chain is relatively easy to manage… Business ecosystems, on the other hand, have a complex array of relationships and each relationship has to be managed. This can’t be done without the help of technology.

What strikes me as interesting is that marketers hoping to tap new consumer demands will increasingly need to rely upon a new way of thinking. One that emphasizes relationships over process flow. And none of this will be possible without advisors able to translate complex technology into every day terms.

I went on a mad search to get an Evernote Beta invitation and thanks to fellow bloggers Wil Becker, Joshua Burdick (aka “The Gadget Pastor“), and Tanya Hughes whose URL has gone missing, I have 18 extra beta invitations to Evernote.

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, Evernote promises to help you capture the paper and digital notes swirling around your laptop and storing them all in a central location. You access them anywhere via a password protected web portal backed by a surprisingly good search engine. The OCR will blow you away.

If you’re ADHD’d inclined such as myself, using your webcam to digitize a receipt or “note to self” is just easier then remembering where you filed it. Which is probably why their motto is “Capture. Sync. Find.”

Next Steps:

Click for free Evernote Desktop software download from publisher

Email me ( Mark [at] Group8020.com ) if you’d like a free beta invitation to Evernote for yourself

Click here for a screenshot of the mac client digitzing a receipt

We all know that creative people just “think differently” than the rest of the population. What makes them great is the source of endless debate. But if you’re in a hurry, you might want to follow Salon.com’s 7 point guideline to achieving creative immortality.

1. Be a drinker
2. Begin with a smoke
3. Put gambling first
4. Think oysters.
5. Seek fashion first, then seek to be understood
6. Sex
7. Abuse your credit for all it’s worth.

LINK: Original Salon article

Mike Wesch is a digital ethnographer. An academic who combines the study of Media Ecology with Cultural Anthropology. He has a wonderful talent for explaining the semantic web and you can easily become the smartest person in the room by watching it now.

Our clients spend a lot of time researching and sharing information with others. And Diigo - pronounced “dee-go” - has proven an invaluable tool in making that happen across timezones and travel schedules.

It all begins with a simple to install browser add-on that allows you to highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. That’s been done before but perhaps not with as much elegance. There’s something nice about returning to a web page you visited weeks ago and finding the notes you left yourself right there.

Where the product really shines is in collaboration. Links, notes and annotations can be shared with your team on a granular basis. Which means that what you share with your boss doesn’t have to be shared with your vendors. You will want to pay close attention to how you set up your profile however. The defaults user settings are “share with the world.”

There’s magic in a simple idea well-executed and Diigo has got it right.

Next Steps

• LINK: Sign up for free diigo account
• READ: More articles Buzzword Reports
• CONTACT: Ask us a question. We answer all emails and will do our best to walk you through anything that needs clarification or amplification

* Note: We have no affiliation with Diigo. Our snobby little opinions are based solely on getting things done faster with less pain.