According to the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, using a program like SugarStats will reduce the complications associated with diabetes by as much as 40%.

Volcano, Hawaii - Marston Alfred, founder and chief architect of SugarStats.com, himself a diabetic since he was 9 years old, has developed a web based self-management application in which users can track, manage and monitor the most essential and important of their diabetic information online. Through a user-friendly web interface using the latest in web and information technology, SugarStats.com also enables the Diabetic to selectively provide friends, family, educators and health care professionals ‘read only’ access to their statistics. Primary elements affecting blood sugar levels including medication, food intake and physical activity are addressed in a manner that is not overly complex or too feature rich, enabling the end user to expediently self-manage via the Internet and Internet-enabled mobile devices. The core of this system will be available free to the public.

20.8 million people, approximately 7.0% of the U.S. population, have diabetes. Diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death listed on U.S. death certificates in 2002. The prevalence of diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate, as are the associated personal and societal costs, including long-term complications such as blindness, kidney damage, cardiovascular disease and lower-limb amputations. Further studies show diabetes and its complications cause substantial loss in quality of life, are the fourth most frequent reason for ambulatory physician visits, and incur $132 billion dollars in U.S. health care expenditures, directly and indirectly annually. There is now abundant evidence that complications of diabetes are preventable.

According to Dr. IM Stratton, Al Adler, HA Neil, et al, management of glycemia in diabetes is crucially important to the prevention of both acute and long-term complications. In general, every percentage point drop in A1C blood test results (e.g., from 8.0% to 7.0%) reduces the risk of micro-vascular complications (eye, kidney, and nerve diseases) by 40%. When programs like SugarStats were used regularly by the diabetic, they showed an average of a 1 point drop in the A1C levels.

Web-based tools have been emerging as effective methods for lowering HbA1C levels and several other key health markers in diabetics such as blood pressure however, to date, none have been available to the public. SugarStats.com provides a proven means to substantially lower these important health markers while also supporting the important opportunity to shift the focus of diabetes management toward patient self-management.

Alfred was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes as a child. He always felt dissatisfied and uninspired with the various ways to monitor and track his blood sugar levels and trends, finding them either over complicated and involved, or pedantic and & ‘boring’. Now 24 years old, Alfred’s professional expertise in the field of computers, networking and Internet technology/programming provided the foundation from which he developed for himself an engaging, informative, time saving and means to effectively address his diabetic management needs. From his personal quest, SugarStats.com has now emerged to support Internet-accessible diabetics the world over an alternative means to effectively address, control and ultimately improve their health.

Alternate Contact: Daerick Lanakila at dlanakila [@] sugarstats.com SugarStats POB 909 Volcano, HI 96785

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Need a screenshot of what a diabetic would see on their personal SugarStats page along with more info regarding SugarStats is available at http://www.sugarstats.com/tour

CONTACT: Marston Alfred at 619-573-4071
SugarStats
PO Box 909
Volcano, HI 96785
http://www.sugarstats.com

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FOR most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual way.

Late last month, an online shopper posted a photo of one of Amenity Home’s $400 duvet covers on ThisNext.com, one of a new breed of Web sites that promises to connect independent-minded shoppers with hard-to-find products. Other shoppers copied the photo to their own blog pages, bringing the company some much-welcome attention, said Kristina de Corpo, an Amenity Home founder.

“We’re a young business furiously trying to keep our heads above water, so this is really exciting,” she said. “We’ve gotten tons of hits from it.”

Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,” that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included.

Social shopping is just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and shoppers: many shoppers aren’t sure what to buy, but they know they won’t find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macy’s, Amazon or Wal-Mart.

Online retailers often refer to this as the “product discovery” problem, but it might better be referred to as online retailing’s Teflon piñata, so many times have entrepreneurs tried to crack it.

“Online shopping is more accurately described as purchasing, because it’s so directed and goal-specific,” said Gordon Gould, ThisNext’s chief executive. “You might be looking for a plasma screen TV, but there’s not a lot of lateral thinking about what else you might be interested in. We want to show people other products that wouldn’t make sense for an e-tailer to batch together.”

•Users who register with social shopping services typically create their own pages to collect information on items they find. But instead of simply describing what they have found on other sites and posting a Web address, they can download a piece of software that allows them to grab images of those products to post on their own shopping lists.

The social shopping services can then post pictures of items that have been viewed or circulated widely among visitors who have searched the site for, say, home furnishing ideas.

The social shopping sites hope to parlay that enthusiasm into advertising revenue, once they attract enough visitors to go back to merchants with a better sales pitch. Some sites, like ThisNext, also plan to form so-called affiliate relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other sites.

ThisNext also gives users the ability to transfer pictures or videos of their favorite products from the site to their personal blog pages. Mr. Gould said the site could also eventually make money by helping companies find influential customers that they might involve in early-stage marketing plans or product testing, among other things.

“If you’re the go-to guy for buying Kona coffee, I want to find you, not a generalist,” he said.

Kaboodle, meanwhile, has created another revenue source by striking a deal late last month with eBay’s comparison shopping service, Shopping.com. Under that agreement, whenever a Kaboodle user features a product that also appears on the Shopping.com database, Kaboodle will post the prices at which the product is sold online at various merchants. Should a reader click through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a share of the fee the merchant pays Shopping.com for that click.

Kaboodle has also worked with eBay to create pages for collectors of certain items on Kaboodle, wherein they can receive feeds of eBay auctions that are relevant to their collections.

The site, which has about 50,000 registered users, has so far raised $3.55 million from well-known Silicon Valley investors, like Guy Kawasaki and Shea Ventures, according to Manish Chandra, Kaboodle’s chief executive.

Last week Kaboodle introduced a set of new features, including one that allows users to run a slideshow of the products on their list, and then transport that slideshow to their own blog pages. (That could account for the late-summer popularity of a collection of string bikinis featured on Kaboodle’s home page last week.)

According to Rob Goldman, who leads the American division of Shopping.com, Kaboodle and its cohort have potential.

“Who knows? This may be the only way you shop for clothes in the future, by seeing what your friends and other people are wearing,” he said. “But in the scheme of the way commerce is conducted online right now, I’d see these more as venture investments, and less as line extensions.”

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an online consultant, agreed. The increasing popularity of customer reviews on retailer sites and elsewhere, she said, “will help get customers a little more engaged, and thinking about recommendations from other people, which is what ThisNext and these other sites are based on.”

One hurdle, Ms. Evans said, is getting users to go through the trouble of downloading software so they can grab images of products they like, assuming they are motivated enough to post favorite products to begin with.

Ms. Evans said that social shopping sites would also have to be vigilant against featuring stale products — a particularly vexing issue for fashion merchandise — because retailers typically carry such products for about 12 weeks.

But instant popularity for such sites is not assured. “I think this will have a nice developing trajectory, rather than something that’ll explode tomorrow,” Ms. Evans said. “Customers are so used to going to the store to discover new products that it’ll take a long time to get them out of that.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

As social news works itself out, advertisers seek to get into places like MySpace and YouTube and the line between amateur and pro continues to blur - there’s a number of things unfolding that could change media in the same way as bloggers at the Democratic National Convention went down in history as a key turning point for that medium. When Yahoo! bought Flickr they said that one of the system’s biggest appeals was that users built the community for free. According to Calacanis’s logic, that’s not be the direction things are moving in these days. There’s a lot of evidence to support that opinion; these sites are being made viable by the work of rewarded top users combined with high quality, very unorthodox corporate advertising.

To put the recent debates about Digg (our coverage) and Netscape (our coverage) in context, here’s an overview of some of the key events unfolding right now that are blurring the line between amateur users and professional content producers.

Here’s some bullet points for this meme:

• some top Digg users feel unappreciated
• Netscape’s hiring top contributors is helping grow page views fast according to Calacanis
• a top YouTube user turns out to be a professionally produced work
• YouTube users are going pro and pros are succeeding in YouTube
• MySpace isn’t a training ground anymore - it’s a sales platform
• the Revver video community has stars of its own and they’re getting paid
• people hate Paris Hilton.

Details below.
YouTube is the most interesting site right now concerning these questions. Last week one of YouTube’s most watched video makers, Lonelygirl15, was revealed to be the work of the powerful Beverly Hills talent agency Creative Artists Agency - not a stereotype affirming, sheltered 16 year old girl making and posting videos behind her parents’ backs. The controversy has been huge; was Lonelygirl15 a legitimate work of pre-commercial art or a manipulative attack on the authenticity of community media sharing? Danah Boyd has some of the best blog coverage of the event and says that the New York Magazine has the best mainstream coverage so far.

The community response has ranged from Bravesgirl15’s attempts to emerge as a leader in condemning the company behind Lonelygirl to long time site leader Renneto recording what appears to me to be a piece of faux indignation smartly following the lead and ethos of Lonelygirl. Still others have posted a mock press conference with a purple monkey puppet that resembles Lonelygirl’s and countless other less interesting replies. This is the discussion driving YouTube right now and it’s important to the future of all of these kinds of sites.

While the headline smashing YouTube/Paris Hilton deal has been an unqualified flop and provoked a substantial backlash on the site, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video is at least very compelling if not a success. Site favorite Brookers has signed a deal with NBC after making less than 30 videos, many of which were her lip syncing to commercially copyrighted songs.

Arguments that copyrighted video pilfered from off site was the only thing sustaining YouTube seem less solid than ever, but so do arguments that commercial activity on the site is impossible to pull off.

MySpace has become the new companion home page for YouTube stars, a major advertising platform via the Google deal that will go into effect later this year and a path direct to market for musicians. While the Arctic Monkeys rode MySpace success to big record sales off-line earlier this year, these new developments indicate that social media sites have the potential to be more than just training grounds for mainstream success.

Not content to concede viral video to YouTube, competitor Revver has stars of its own and a revenue sharing program based on still image ads at the end of each video. Ad based revenue sharing is unlikely to be sufficient incentive for the vast majority of any system’s users, but that may not be the case for a site’s biggest stars. Those stars may be incentivized to use a particular service and pull in a large audience of viewers who are also long tail content producers themselves; they could in aggregate monetize well for the site. Ze Frank has shown on Revver that news video blogs don’t have to be performed by boring, pretty girls in order to build a large audience. Even Steven Colbert has been accused of lifting several jokes from Frank. Ask A Ninja, another project now on Revver, is working on a commercial movie with Viacom’s Atom Films and selling merchandise on their site.

Of all of these examples, the Lonelygirl15 controversy is probably the most timely and interesting, but I think all this sheds light on some of the recent Digg/Netscape debates. As my friend Alex Williams puts it, viral media sites are the new Star Search and recognition of top users, be it through financial compensation and/or status, could be a key driver in making these sites viable. And conversely, commercial activity is possible in these communities but the format it can take is still up for debate: Paris Hilton no, Tea Partay yes, but for short campaigns and Lonelygirl15 maybe - I don’t think there’s consensus, or any indication that model could be reproduced well enough to be sustainable. As a proof of concept though, it was fascinating.

Advertising in these spaces well takes a whole lot of skill and we’ll see far more people fail than succeed, but occasional success could help build tolerance for the bulk of attempts instead of a wholesale rejection of commercial engagement with viral media communities. Companies are struggling to find people capable of pulling off advertising in social media spaces. Second Life is a whole other can of worms.

Who’s going to drive these sites and make them commercially sustainable? Top users are going to be an important part of it, and they will want to be rewarded for their work. It’s hard work to do what these people are doing and recognition, if not payment, is proving itself to be very important.