Are you getting the love back?

In this economy, it’s all about execution. Customer acquisition continues to remain expensive, so the question is, when a client chooses you, are you “giving the love back”? When you are a start-up and your competitor is an industry giant, this might be the only way to carve out your niche. Love your customer. Just ask MMIS and Mosaic Storage Systems from our last Entrepreneur Forum.

MMIS provides a cloud based secure collaboration platform within the enterprise and to external third parties. Their focus is the health industry federal transparency requirement. Effective January 1, 2012, certain medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers will be required to disclose payments or transfer of value to a covered recipient. What this means is that all of these transactions will be in a public database for the world to see. Thank you federal government, you have found yet another way to make public every dime spent by a bio medical company in the name of research. Business lunch? Yes, that must be tracked – who you ate with and what you discussed.

There are two problems with this, for the doctors in private practice; their every move can be tracked by watch dog groups. For life science, and bio/medical device companies, they have to identify what needs to be tracked and report it for the world to see. Michaeline Daboul, President & CEO of MMIS explained that their cloud based dashboard aggregates and posts data that is compliant with state and federal regulation to make this process more seamless through their secure PPN (Physician Professional Network). Their service essentially prevents inaccurate data from being reported by pharmaceutical and medical device companies to the government. Also, as a safety net, they can track and dispute payments before they are reported to the Federal Government and instantly become public record.

Our distinguished panel consisted of Michael Balmuth, General Partner, Edison Ventures Donald C. Crandlemire, Attorney, Shaheen & Gordon, P.A., and M. Weston Chapman, President and CEO, PCD Partners. Overall, the feedback was that security is a huge concern between providers and hospitals, so a cloud solution makes sense however for many health care professionals, these this type of reporting is not part of their culture. Training is a must. And no one wants to remember another password. Who is paying for this? So far it’s free to physicians, so the reporting parties would foot the bill which is an affordable $ 250K within three years with MMIS instead of per year. Finally, simplicity is a must. The channel strategy is AMA, who is interested in branding the platform. One final pearl of wisdom – find a well healed angel to complete the development and get the $ 32 billion market “love back” with a mammoth like Ascension Health.

It’s all about love for Mosaic, cloud based storage for professional photographers. Our second presentation was enthusiastically delivered by Gerard Murphy, founder of Mosaic, and a photographer himself. When professional photographers take thousands of pictures two things happen, they quickly run out of local digital storage and they have trouble finding photos once stored. What’s more, Mosaic has created a plugin to Adobe Lightroom, the de facto standard for cataloging thousands of digital images used in post-production and asset management workflow.
Digital file security, data integrity, and indexing are huge needs for busy photographers and most are not IT savvy. Mosaic takes care of this though enterprise level SAS 70 data storage, redundant data centers, RAID 6 in both locations, proactive hard drive failure monitoring and data synchronization using 128-bit encryption. For you techies, you’ve figured out that the secret sauce is in synchronizing metadata. Now let’s go take pictures.

Our panel of experts consisted of Gary Samson, Chair, Photography Department, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Bill Becker, President & Chief Executive Officer, Recordsforce Management, and Tom Elliott, Founder & Director of the Idea Greenhouse. The overall feedback was that the concept is solid. The challenge is convincing photographers to use the platform. A cloud based platform for digital photography is enviable; in fact, Adobe has announced this statement of direction already, making them the 800 pound gorilla.

Gerard Murphy walked away with some great advice from this panel who recommended that he find a Michael Jordon or in this case, an Annie Leibovitz of the industry to adopt Mosaic. Second, to focus on agencies and institutions who have a need for storing client images. (Imagine Harvard University or Dartmouth and the loads of images they keep in-house for historic purposes.) And finally, with Adobe on your heels, you need to “show the love” to your customers so they love you more than Adobe. Can Mosaic do this? Sounds like they are already on their way.

See you at the next Entrepreneur Forum!