Consumerization of Healthcare

Last year, the well-known VC, Vinod Khosla, made the controversial statement that 80% of what doctors do will soon be replaced with healthcare technology. He goes into more detail about why this is the case in his papers and presentations titled “20% doctor included,” which I recommend reading on the Khosla Ventures website here.

I’ve been fascinated about this idea of having consumers take charge of their health by performing their own routine physicals and checkups through precision diagnostics at home.  This is one of the easiest ways we can help reduce the cost of healthcare, improve early detection and preventative medicine, as well as keep everyone better informed about their own health.

It’s been pretty remarkable to see the latest devices that are becoming available which allow you to, in essence, become your own doctor. Devices like AliveCor allow you to take your own ECG and track your heart rate using your phone. You can get measured for eyeglasses at home using EyeNetra and check on ear infections using CellScope or track respiratory disorders and asthma with Adamand and RespiRight. Sano Intelligence is even developing a skin patch to monitor your blood chemistry data and connect it to an analytics platform.

In my opinion, one of the most impressive devices is the Scanadu Scout, which pretty much allows you to perform your own physical at home by collecting data on your pulse, heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability, and blood oxygenation.  Scanadu is even developing another product called Scanaflo, which will allow people to take their own urine tests at a fraction of the price it would cost to do at a lab.

It’s exciting to see the development of all of these health tech and quantified self devices. The next step will be to help consumers better analyze all the data they gather. I’m sure that these digital first-aid/general checkup kits and quantified self devices are only the beginning of much more to come.

Joining StartUp Health

I’m now going into my fifth week of working with the StartUp Health team reviewing applications for companies interested in joining the StartUp Health Academy. It’s been a really great experience so far going through the 800+ healthcare startups in the system to review and rate them and then providing recommendations for which startups to interview.

After going through roughly half of the applications in the system, I've noticed that there are a few big themes that new healthcare startups seem to be focusing on including ideas around patient engagement, telemedicine, physical rehabilitation, big data, wearable devices, etc. I've also realized that it's very important to have a clear idea of what I'm looking for when I rate and compare the startups. The main factors that I have tried to focus on as I've been going through the applications is the product differentiation, market size/opportunity, experience of the team, and customer traction.

When I’m reading about the product description, going through the company's website and watching the product demo video, the two key questions I like to think about is whether the product/service helps reduce costs in the healthcare system and whether it can make a big impact on improving the quality of healthcare. After thinking about whether the idea has the potential to greatly reduce costs or improve quality, I then consider the market size and business model. The main factors I use to rate the startups is how big the unmet need is and whether there is a significant ROI they can prove for their customers. The market opportunity is ideally greater than $50 to $100 million and the ROI should be a quantitative analysis demonstrating the value add of the product to customers. Also, since a lot of the startups that I review tend to be in the digital health space where there is less regulation and patents involved, it’s important to think about how the startup can create barriers to either prevent other competitors from entering the space or significantly differentiate itself from existing competitors. This is why another of the important factors to understand is customer traction and whether the idea has the potential for a large network effect. The other part of the business model that I like to learn about is how the startup reaches and acquires new customers. I want to understand the sales cycle and how much it takes to acquire new customers.

It's been exciting to see that there are a large number of new startups emerging in the healthcare space that have the potential to make a huge impact on both reducing the costs and improving the quality of the industry. This past week StartUp Health celebrated its 2nd birthday and I'm sure there will be many more years to come for the organization as it continues to help startups transform our healthcare industry by providing guidance, mentorship, connections and resources to grow these ideas into innovative companies.

Congrats to Augmedix and the new Rock Health Class

Earlier this week, Rock Health posted the list of startups that will be participating in their fifth class and I was excited to find out that I was familiar with one of the companies on the list, Augmedix, which is creating a Google Glass application for doctors.

There has recently been a lot of debate and controversy about how Google Glasses will be used, since people have been raising concerns about privacy. It's difficult for people to know when someone who is wearing the glasses is capturing videos or pictures and even though the Glasses may have a good number of eager early adopters, in order to become more mainstream the look and feel of the device will need to improve to become more fashionable. For these reasons and more, it's hard to imagine Google Glasses being used by regular consumers in their day-to-day routines.

However, I can see how useful the glasses could be to certain niche markets and occupations such as doctors, who can use them while they diagnose a patient or update an EMR. It's great to see Augmedix working on a useful application for the Google Glasses and getting recognition by participating in Rock Health. Augmedix also seems to have a good chance of getting the attention of big name investors who are looking to fund more Google Glass applications. This past April, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, announced the formation of the "Glass Collective" to fund new Google Glasses startups. It'll be really interesting to see whether Augmedix becomes one of the early investments in this new Glass Collective after the startup completes the Rock Health program. Congrats to the Augmedix team and the other Rock Health startups!

Learning to Become a Successful "Giver" as an Entrepreneur

There is a new book that I have recently added to my reading list called Give and Take by Adam Grant, which is about how some of the most successful people in life are categorized as "Givers" or people who try to add value in others’ lives without expecting anything in return. The author, Adam Grant, is a professor at Wharton who has done research studies around motivation and has categorized people as Givers, Takers, and Matchers to determine what traits successful people have in common.

The surprising fact that I learned from a interview with the author and articles about the book is that it turns out that Givers are over-represented at both the top and the bottom of professional success.  What differentiates those Givers at the top versus at the bottom is that the Givers at the top learn how to set boundaries for themselves instead of helping everyone all of the time without taking their own interest into consideration, which helps keep them from burning out or becoming a doormat.

Most entrepreneurs view being a Matcher as the safest strategy when it comes to networking. When someone helps them or makes a connection for them, they will remember that favor and try to return the favor down the road. However, one way we can all learn to become more of a Giver without feeling like we need to help everyone all of the time is to think of what we can offer someone else that is valuable, but may only take us a few minutes, performing acts that have a high benefit to the other person at a low cost to ourselves. This way Givers will be less likely to run out of time, energy and resources when helping other people.

In order to learn more about applying these principles, I went ahead and took the free self-assessment online to learn what my own default style was on the book's website: http://giveandtake.com/

I found the assessment helpful in confirming how I viewed myself on the Give and Take spectrum, but it also helped me reflect more about what types of giving I enjoy. Both making introductions and mentoring not only give me a sense of helping others, but both of these acts also cost me very little and I know they can be valuable for the people I interact with.

Caremerge Selected for GE & StartUp Health Program

Three months ago GE and StartUp Health announced a partnership for a new three year program geared towards consumer health tech companies. This past Thursday, they announced the selection of 13 startups, which they narrowed down from 400 applicants from 22 countries.

The program is free and does not include funding, but in exchange for 2-10% equity ownership, startups will receive mentorship, training and access to plenty of VCs as well as the opportunity to work closely with GE’s Healthymagination Fund (venture arm of GE) and StartUp Health, an academy and network for digital health and wellness companies.

I’m very excited to share that Caremerge is one of the 13 startups selected to join the program! See below for some of the press coverage on Caremerge and the other startups selected:

 

• CNN Money
• Chicago Business Journal
• TechCrunch
• GE Press Release 
• Reuters 
• All Techie News 
• GIGAOM
• Gizmo Envy

Traveling Lens

One of the most memorable activities of my college experience was joining the photography staff for Duke's student newspaper. I first came to college my freshman year knowing only how to use a basic point-and-shoot camera, but my curiosity and drive to become involved on campus, led me to join the photo staff of The Chronicle. After attending all the training sessions and shadowing upperclassman on photo assignments to understand the various camera settings, I found myself covering everything from basketball games and art exhibits to student plays and musical performances, snapping and editing hundreds of pictures a week. For the following two years, I took on the role as the Photo Editor of the Arts & Entertainment section and had a really rewarding experience getting to know the whole staff and discovering a new appreciation for photography.

A year after graduating I decided to purchase my first DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel T2i. At first, I was a bit disappointed that I had forgotten so much of what I had learned about photography from college since I had been out of practice for so long, but after skimming through the manual and a few online tutorials, I started taking my camera with my everywhere in New York on the weekends and snapping a few pictures. Since then, I've also made it a goal to travel to at least one new country a year and I've made sure to take my DSLR camera with me to all the places I've gone. This year I finally got around to putting up a website with some of my better photos from all my trips. "Capture the world through your lens" and check it out here.

Quantified Self Research Study

Last week I agreed to participate in a Quantified Self Research Study that was being done by IIT design students. The research study involved a lot of self reflection about why and how I started getting involved in the Quantified Self movement and what I've learned. Here were a few of the major questions that I had to think through and reflect on:

What do you track and why?

I started off using the health & wellness QS gadgets that track steps and sleep, like the FitBit, but I got into other forms of self-tracking because I was going through the business school application process and I wanted to start keeping track of my goals, tasks and productivity, since it was a busy time for me balancing projects at work with community activities and still finding time to hang out with friends and work on my applications. At the same time, I also wanted to track how I was spending my time and the activities that I enjoyed doing because one piece of advice that I kept hearing from others who had been through the process was to spend a lot of self-reflection time because it would help make it easier to write the essays which included topics like "What matters most to you and why?" This led me to start looking into ways I could track mood and happiness, so I started searching for other types of Quantified Self applications that I found either on the QS website or through word of mouth.

I also started using applications like RescueTime, which would give me a productivity score each week based on how much time I spent on applications like Excel, Word and Powerpoint vs. reading the news on the web or checking email. I needed some way to keep myself accountable and on task for getting my work done and I found it helpful to see a breakdown of the time and applications I was using to get my work done. 

What have you discovered?

Most of what I discovered in terms of my productivity ended up being common sense and I already knew the answer, but it was good to see the data to back it up. For example, I had an idea of how many hours a week I would spend working, but with RescueTime I discovered that my productivity averaged in the 80% range vs. 50-60% for other RescueTime users and I spent significantly more of my time in Excel and Outlook vs. other users.

From TrackYourHappiness.org, I learned that I’m almost equally balanced between how happy I am when I’m focused on work vs. when I’m interacting with other people. That helped me realize that I’m more balanced between introversion and extroversion than I would have thought.  The data also showed that I tended to be happiest when I was either catching up with friends in person or on the phone or on Saturdays while I was volunteering for the mentoring program I'm involved in.  I actually used this last insight to help me write my business school essay on the fact that what mattered most to me was mentorship in the form of both being a mentor for others and appreciating the mentors that I had.  

Have you changed anything as a result of your tracking?

Even though I’m now finished with the business school application process, I’ve continued the process of tracking and still try to write and self-reflect each day, since I still find it helpful to review what I’ve done and what I want to accomplish the next day.  

Also, since I’ve learned that I’m more productive in the mornings than at night, I’ve shifted my schedule to wake up an hour earlier at 6am because I find it easier to focus and make sure that certain tasks get done first thing in the mornings rather than getting put off until the afternoon or evening.

In addition to mentoring on Saturdays through Minds Matter, I’ve now also taken on an additional mentee through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and have been more involved in advising local Chicago startups because I’ve realized that’s how I most enjoy spending my time outside of work.

I would also say I’m now more aware of things that have a large effect on my mood and energy level. I’ve been more consistent about fitting in a workout every morning no matter how short it is because otherwise I’ve seen my energy level decline earlier in the day and have I’ve needed more than one cup of coffee to keep me going.

Overall, the self-tracking data has helped me become more aware of what’s important to me, what I enjoy doing, and how balanced the time I spend is between aspects such as work, friends & family, community and health & fitness.

Did you start out of pure curiosity, or with a goal in mind?

It was a combination of both. I started out in order to keep myself accountable for the goals I had set for myself, both in terms of health & wellness and productivity. I wanted to keep track of what I was working on, get into the habit of regularly writing and self-reflecting as well as just remember the things I had done or the places I had been that I enjoyed the most. 

Pledge to Learn How to Code

I've been learning how to code on and off now for about two years. However, until recently I haven't been able to make much progress on my Codeacademy lessons and other free online Python and Ruby tutorials. I've learned that the biggest obstacle for me to learn how to code last year was coming up with ideas of applications and websites that I wanted to build as my personal side projects. Until I found something I wanted to create and a tool that I would enjoy making or would be useful to me, I couldn't motivate myself to keep finding the time to read through programming tutorials and go through the online lessons. I also realized that it took me a while to get back into student mode. By making sure to study a little bit each day and take notes while I was going through the lessons, I've now been able to get through almost all the Codeacademy lessons.

I'm also excited to see that learning to code has taken on a new movement with the viral video that came out recently from Code.org, which featured entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. After watching the video, I made sure to fill out the pledge to help every student learn how to code on the website here. It seems crazy to think that we all had foreign language requirements in high school and college, but learning how to interact with computers through programming was never a specific requirement towards graduating.

As someone learning to program now, I really appreciated how Code.org put together a list of all the resources people can use to learn how to program online. After finishing my Codeacademy lessons, I'm now looking forward to trying out the other resources listed on the website such as Treehouse. My goal is to be able to build my own Quantified Self-tracking application either through a website or an iPhone application, while also working towards creating a separate website to feature some of my travel photos. With a little bit of progress each week, I'm hoping to have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and iOS development as well as my two completed personal projects by the end of the year.

Investing vs. Entrepreneurship

One of the questions I’ve thought a lot about over the past year is whether I consider myself more of an investor or an entrepreneur. At most tech or startup meetings that I go to, I’m usually required to identify myself as one or the other.  During the weekdays, I view myself as an investor since I work at a private equity firm where I invest in mostly growth-stage healthcare, consumer and technology companies. At nights and on the weekends, I enjoy working with early-stage healthcare startups helping out Co-Founders in any capacity that I can, which is typically focused on finance, business development and strategy given my prior work experience.

However, it wasn’t until I recently read Mastering the VC Game that I came across a good way to differentiate how I viewed these two roles. I love the following quote in the book, which nicely summarizes why I view VC and investing as a better long-term career fit for myself:

“I have found that being a VC entails a very different kind of excitement than entrepreneurship does. It offers intellectual adventure, exposure to amazing people with brilliant new ideas, and the chance to make a positive impact on the world. I have found far fewer ups and downs as a VC as compared to being an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, the emotional roller-coaster is such that the highs are very high and the lows are very low. For the VC, there’s greater emotional detachment. I don’t get to personally create products or companies or lead teams. The VC is the backer of a movie in which he never starts, but he prefers it that way. As a VC he would rather be the enabler and facilitator than the builder or onstage performer. The best VCs are people who tend to get bored working on one business at a time in an in-depth fashion. They are notorious BlackBerry addicts and because of their hyperactive minds and love for rapid, varied stimulation, have the attention span of someone suffering from attention deficit disorder.”

Becoming an Expert on Any Topic

Like most people, I find that I develop new interests every year.  Topics that I am currently exploring or have explored in the past include: design, programming, product management, investing, finance, venture capital, new languages, entrepreneurship, healthcare, startups, web development, photography, painting, cooking, traveling, wine tasting, running marathons, financial modeling, user experience, nutrition, and quantified self.  Through the process of exploring these new interests, I have come up with a series of steps and resources that I use to completely immerse myself in a new topic in order to understand everything I can about it as quickly as possible.

I know it may seem silly, but I actually still start out learning about a new topic the old fashioned way - by checking out every relevant book I can get a hold of from the library. A quick Google search often helps me narrow down the best books to check out on a topic and I start placing holds on each of the top books. I also search on Hulu and Netflix for any relevant documentaries because these are often just as informative as books and quicker to get through. I then subscribe to new blogs and podcasts (which are great for commutes to work) on the topic and begin following relevant questions on Q&A sites like Quora and Stack Exchange. These often help me get a sense of the main companies and thought leaders in the space and then I begin to follow those people and companies on social media sites including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and AngelList.  I’ve also found that several of the free online education resources like Coursera and iTunesU have great courses on new areas that I’ve been trying to learn more about. The final step I take is to put myself out there and talk to people in the industry who already have a significant amount of experience in the topic I’m interested in. I try to set up a few informational interviews through my network, LinkedIn and websites like OHours and I make sure to keep a look out for local conferences, events or Meetup groups on the new topics.

It's pretty amazing how with all the technology and resources that we have available today, I can go from being a complete beginner to an almost expert in just about any topic I’m interested in. However, I think the one downside to all this information overload and free educational resources is that with the opportunity to learn about so many different topics, it becomes more difficult to become an expert in any single subject because I keep discovering more and more areas that I’m interested in learning more about. Next thing I need help learning – how to focus!

Kickstarter for People Instead of Projects?

I've always been fascinated by the idea of investing in people. On more than one occasion, I've met a person that I've been truly impressed by and have thought about how amazing it would be to invest in them, their ideas and their career. This is also one of the reasons why I'm excited about investing in passionate entrepreneurs by learning more about angel investing and venture capital.

Recently I discovered a new website that takes this idea of investing in people and makes it into a business. Similar to Kickstarter and MedStartr (basically Kickstarter just for healthcare companies), there is now a company called Upstart, where "the startup is you" and others can invest in your career or ideas if you are a recent undergrad or graduate student. In fact, I was talking to a Stanford GSB alum who recently received the seed funding for his startup through Upstart, which fascinated me because it was such a unique new way to raise money that I hadn't heard of yet.

Upstart is a community of "Upstarts" and "Backers," where the "Upstarts" are able to raise a certain amount of money (they need to reach at least $10,000) for a small amount of their future income (the max being 7% of their income over 10 years). Based on a statistical model the company uses, it says that the average "Backer" tends to receive an annual 6-8% return on their investment, which of course also depends on the "Upstart" they pick by browsing through their profiles, but this is still a very decent return given the state of the public markets today.

I think this is a nice option for raising funds for recent graduates who have a cool startup idea, but are unable to raise funding through the traditional method of angel investors and VCs.  It's also interesting that most of the "Backers" on the site right now are actually angel investors or VCs who want to invest directly in very promising individuals and their ideas. At the end of the day, I truly believe that early-stage investing comes down to investing in the right people and teams and Upstart is a unique new way for people to invest in passionate and creative young adults.

Chicago Health 2.0’s Hacking Healthcare Event

I often find that some of the best ways to discover new ideas for startups is through attending local meetup events around the specific industry that you're interested in learning more about.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Chicago Health 2.0's Hacking Healthcare Series, which was centered around the topic of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and the new opportunities it would open up for healthcare startups.

It was interesting to hear that over 10% of the population is already covered by ACOs and there are ~350 ACOs in the U.S. today with the largest one located in Chicago. The basic idea of the ACO model is that there will now be quality metrics that will drive how physicians and providers get paid (instead of being paid by patient volumes) and we will now have healthcare managers that work with you and your physician to not only improve your care, but also reduce unnecessary spending and over-treating of patients with repeat procedures, scans and unnecessary tests. The savings generated through this new model will then be divided between the payer and the provider, so initially it seems that the patient and employer does not save much money on the reduced healthcare costs, but they will hopefully benefit through better quality of care.

The most interesting part of the conversation was when the discussion turned to advice for startups. The two tips for healthcare startups were summarized as: 1) Follow the Money and 2) Don't screw with the money. 

The idea of "Follow the Money" is to make sure that as a startup working with healthcare companies, you need to make sure to understand that these companies are not only working for improved patient care, but they are also following the monetary incentives that the government is creating to help reduce costs and improve healthcare quality (i.e. government incentives to implement electronic health records).

The second tip, "Don't Screw with the Money," basically means that as a healthcare startup you need to make sure that your business model does not hinder the transition from Fee-for-Service to the ACO model of paying for quality, since this is most likely the future direction that the healthcare industry is moving towards.

Specific ideas for healthcare startups that follow these two pieces of advice include discovering a new method using the combination of programming and statistics to help insurers determine which patients can become high risk under this ACO model to help diagnose them early on before implementing a treatment plan. This could theoretically be done by looking through 2-3 years of historical claims data on patients to identify those with high healthcare costs.

Another idea for healthcare startups is to figure out a way for EMRs (electronic medical records) within a system and outside of a system to be able to communicate with each other. We will need to discover a way to add a layer over traditional EMRs to help implement a way for various healthcare systems to transfer information to each other electronically. 

Overall, we will see healthcare moving towards personalized medicine at a faster rate with improved treatment plans that are tailored for specific individuals. Also, it's clear that our healthcare system is at least 10 years behind the banking system because we need a similar platform or model as online banking, but for our healthcare industry. I think within the next 5 years, we will have a mint.com for healthcare which includes charts and graphs to help us track and analyze our health and share this information with our doctors. I personally cannot wait until this is developed because I believe it will help give consumers more transparency into their personalized healthcare and also motivate them to take better care of themselves by exercising more and eating better as they are able to see the benefits of small changes in their behavior showing up in the trends they are tracking online. 

New Year, New Habits

I’m usually not a big fan of coming up with New Year resolutions. However, I've recently become more methodical about putting together a list of goals for the new year and reviewing how the past year went across various aspects of my life from career, health, friends, family, community, personal, financial etc.

I think along with reviewing your goals, at the start of each year, it's also important for me to think about the things that I am most thankful for. Every year this list seems to get longer as each year ends up being better than the year before (it's a well known fact that we get happier as we age up to a certain point). And while this year I'm thankful for many things, one of the areas that have really helped me improve and that I'm looking forward to taking advantage of again this year is all the technology that makes my life simpler and helps me focus on self-improvement. Many of my New Year resolutions this year involved creating new habits to work toward personal development goals. A lot of these resolutions came about through all the self-reflection that I had to go through for business school applications. They have also been inspired by the numerous articles and blog posts that have been written about how to use new technology to help keep your New Years resolutions (TechCrunch and BBC).

A few of the new applications that I plan to use this year to help tackle some of my goals include:

·         100Plus: to help develop new and healthier habits. I especially like this app compared to a few of the other digital health applications that focus on improving health because it starts out by asking you a few questions and then calculates your hypothetical life expectancy. From there it uses gamification techniques to motivate you to do new tasks and pick up new health habits to add to your life expectancy score. I'm currently at a life expectancy of 88 years, 5 months, 3 weeks and 1 day and given the fact that I've had a few relatives live past 100 years, I'm hoping that I can get that number to grow to a few additional years by completing 100Plus daily "Hopps"

·         iPad: to motivate me to cook more. I just read 4 Hour Chef and I want to try and learn how to cook at least one new meal a month

·         Podcasts and Wikipedia to brush up on languages starting with Turkish, French and Spanish. Here I'm taking another tip from Tim Ferris by focusing on the 1,000 most frequently used words in each language

·         Learn to code (Python and Ruby) using all the free resources I can get my hands on - Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, Codecademy and this site

·         Basis: I'm still waiting for my Basis to finally ship so I can use it to track heart rate, stress, sleep, exercise, etc. I currently use the FitBit and really enjoy it, but based on everything I've read, I'm looking forward to trying this new device out to see if it's worth all the hype

·         Project 365: to help my get back into photography by reminding me to take a picture every day with my iPhone

·         Continue to read a book each week. I have a very long reading list that I keep through both Google Docs and Goodreads and with my library card, I always seem to have the maximum number of holds on both physical books and ebooks. Keep a look out for a new startup called Oyster which will be like a Netflix or Spotify for books.

·         23andMe: to learn more about my health through my DNA. I've gone back and forth about whether or not I would want to know if I'm predisposed for certain conditions and I've finally decided that I think it's better to know in the event that there is anything you can do to help improve your health.

·         Sleep101: I'm getting rid of my old alarm and now focusing on not only tracking my sleep but also making sure I wake up around the right time in my sleep cycle.

·         Buster: to help write more regularly each day. I used to just use pen and paper but I wouldn't do it everyday and I would forget. Buster is a great motivator because I become disappointed if I miss a day since I'll see a mark on the website showing which days I've missed. I also really enjoy how it analyzes my writing to tell me how I'm feeling based on the words I'm using and what I've written the most about and whether I'm feeling more introverted or extroverted based on my writing.

·         iPhone Timer: to help time myself during meditation. It's amazing how many books I read last year that all mentioned the benefits of meditation (clear head, reduce stress, visualize the future, gain energy, improve optimism, etc.). While I tried last year to make this a daily habit, I failed miserably because my mind would wander constantly and I would often sneak a peek at the clock to see how much time passed. Now I just set my iPhone timer to two minutes and hopefully by the end of the year I can ease myself into longer 10 or 15 minute sessions.

I know this seems like a long list of new habits I’m trying to pick up, especially since many people recommend picking one new habit each month and focusing on just that one until you've maintained it for 30 days. We all have a finite amount of willpower, but since I've never been the type to wait, so I'm just going to challenge myself and go after them all at the same time. I have a feeling that not all of these new habits will stick throughout the year (which is why I'm not referring to them as New Years Resolutions), but if I can benefit from even a few of these new technologies listed above, I will consider 2013 to be an overall success!