

Asthmapolis Wins Twilio + Union Square Ventures Contest - stanleydrew
http://blog.twilio.com/2010/10/asthmapolis-wins-twilio-union-square-ventures-contest.html

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adityakothadiya
Well, I thought the competition was for developers as in indie-developers and
not startups! Here is what the description from contest page says -

"We've partnered with Union Square Ventures, who are investors in Twilio, to
give _one developer_ the opportunity to travel to New York City to meet with
Fred Wilson, Albert Wenger, and Brad Burnham."

This doesn't seem to be a appropriate winner to me. Please note, I'm not
demeaning Asthmapolis' value proposition. I'm just saying, probably they are
better suited for TechCrunch Disrupt kind of competiion as a startup, and not
developer contests!

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dmor
The theme for the contest was "Building a Business on Twilio" and the
description was posted here: [http://contests.twilio.com/2010/09/build-your-
business-with-...](http://contests.twilio.com/2010/09/build-your-business-
with-twilio-and-win-a-meeting-with-union-square-ventures-ends-927.html)

While we can only commit to covering the travel costs for one developer, the
contest was open to everyone - including existing startups.

"The partners at Union Square Ventures will serve as our judges for this
round, and they will select one awesome Twilio-powered company to meet with
them in New York City, all expenses paid. Three runners up will each receive
$250 in Twilio credit to help get their businesses off the ground."

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atomical
I seem to recall a winner of the Twilio contest that developed a similar app
for reporting symptoms. Couldn't this easily be extended to just about any
condition?

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johns
Yep, we had this one win before: [http://blog.twilio.com/2010/08/chris-
bennett-wins-twilios-an...](http://blog.twilio.com/2010/08/chris-bennett-wins-
twilios-anything-goes-contest-for-as-journal.html)

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jasonz
very cool - I wonder if a more generalized smart cap for prescription drugs
could track usage in the same manner.

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gtracy
There are some companies doing this for general prescriptions. Vitality -
<http://www.vitality.net/> \- has a wireless cap that helps track adherence.

But asthma is pretty unique since the inhalers are used in "rescue" situations
and there are strong geographic correlations that arise from environmental
issues.

~~~
jasonz
Yeah the fact that it tracks the use of inhalers is very clever. It provides a
much more rich history of use to help doctors decide the best way to manage
their patients. Currently medications for asthmatics are determined by a
asthma severity scale (symptom frequency, night time attacks, etc) - so a more
fine-grained analytics would be interesting.

I would think this approach would work well if applied to other diseases where
the frequency that the patient takes the medication is tied to symptoms -
chest pain/nitroglycerin or acid-reflux/antacids are a couple of examples.

