Congrats to Chas and the Aptible bunch. Really smart guys. Also saw they joined RockHealth. Tackling a ton of hard problems in healthcare to make it easy for people to build apps. Learned quite a bit about HIPAA compliance from their blog, but it seems like they've taken that stuff down, unfortunately.
Seconded - I could not be more excited for them (especially as a customer!). I know Chas & Frank from our days together in the Blueprint Health accelerator[0] (they were in the class before mine).
Aptible is going to allow a lot of people to enter the health-tech space when the costs would otherwise be prohibitive - it's going to be huge. Forcing every company to duplicate all that compliance work in-house makes no sense, just like having every company maintaining its own colo hardware makes no sense.
I looked at it the other day and it starts at $3,500/month. That's pretty much a non-starter for any bootstrapped health startup that wants to deploy a working MVP.
There is actually a forum my wife participates in for Married Orthodox Jewish Women that has done an excellent job qualifying users before letting them in.
They ask questions that even their husbands wouldn't know.
All women.com needs to do is ask questions about feminine products and they'll keep out most men.
Edit: For the record, my wife participates in the forum dozens of times a day. The ability to discuss sensitive issues with other like minded women in a verified exclusive forum is an incredibly good idea - one that is proven to work.
Aside: I recently went to a bar and didn't have my driver's license.
When this happens, the typical bouncer response is: 1) Realize that I look well over 21 years of age, and wave me in. 2) Be a hard ass and not let me in.
This particular bouncer looked at me and asked: "What was the first album you bought?"
I answered promptly, and he seemed content with my answer. I imagine this is something that would be hard to do, off-the-cuff but quickly, if you're faking it.
(In case you're wondering, the album with The Wayne's World Soundtrack. I wanted to hear Bohemian Rhapsody.)
Many months ago there was a thread on HN about words that only males or females know the definition of... Thats one option... (I can't track it down.)
In the case of verifying women, you can simply ask the difference between different tampons or whatnot and most guys will have no clue. There are lots of things that ALL WOMEN know that men don't.
In the case of the forum my wife participates in, they ask questions about what happens at the Mikvah. While a few men might know the laws around this, no jewish male has ever been present at the mikva, and no single jewish women either... It is an experience exclusive to married jewish women...and there are specific things that are said and done that most men would have no idea how to answer. The few that would know the answer would likely stay away from the site in the first place (if they even use the internet!)
Not really. Many of these questions boil down to specific customs that are observed by different sects of Orthodox Jews. For example, how long to wait between eating meat and eating dairy can either be, 1 hr. 3 hrs., 5 hrs., 5hrs and 31 minutes or 6 hours.
If your other answers aren't consistent with the others, it would be obvious to the moderator. (i.e. you went to a lubavitch school, but wait the sephardik amount of time between meat and dairy.
Sure, some people can probably figure this all out, but the questions are just as much for making the users feel comfortable than it is to keep the one moron who googles this all, out of the forums.
So awesome that I've been tracking most of these companies without even realizing they were YC affiliated over the last few months. Love the Zenamins- what a great idea. I've been obsessed with Product Hunt. Seriously. I call it "The Vortex". I hope they all succeed.
Backpack isn't "kinda" illegal, gray-area, like AirBnB or Uber. It's straight-up, completely illegal. And this isn't municipality-level policies it's up against, it's customs and border, national law.
I can't see any future where they don't get shut down.
All it is going to take is a couple smuggling stings on the travelers, and then they will have the reputation as not being safe.
I mean, who wants to spend their vacation in a foreign prison, waiting for the consulate? Or risk losing their job for smuggling a couple hundred dollars?
Maybe whatever you take along has a bunch of cocaine in it.
I'm a pretty experienced traveller and I do people all kinds of favours but I'm fairly picky about what I take across borders for others. As in: I get to inspect the item inside and out beforehand.
