Consumer genomic testing update

In the wake of expected industry-wide regulation of consumer genomic testing, two of the big four testing companies, Navigenics and Pathway Genomics, have pulled their direct-to-consumer offerings in the last few months. Now a doctor must order their tests.

23andMe and deCODEme still have consumer genomic tests available, covering 174 conditions for $429 and 49 conditions for $2,000, respectively (Figure 1). Sooner rather than later could be a good time to sign up for a genomic service, possibly using year-end HSA dollars.

Figure 1. Landscape of direct-to-consumer genomic testing services.

Source: DNA Testing: Living Longer Via Personal Genomics

The potential industry-wide regulation is in regard to two issues, one is whether a physician must order the tests, and two, whether companies should be able to publish their interpretations of the results.

The DIYgenomics website lists two online petitions in support of rights to one's own genetic data:

• Petition for Access to Genetic Information

• Petition for Health Data Rights

Hardware apps (smartphone peripherals)

Apps are not just software anymore! The interesting new field of hardware apps, or smartphone peripherals, is under development.

One example is the iPhly iPhone-based radio controller. Radar detectors and dashboard car-surveillance cams could follow. Earthquake sensors are another obvious application, as accelerometer chips for sensing earthquakes have already been used in laptops.

Miniaturized modules could snap onto smartphones for many different applications. Scientific instruments could be an interesting application area, giving any individual the opportunity to have a mobile lab. Ultrasound and portable microscopes have already been demonstrated (iPhone attachment, cell phone attachment).

Portable personal sensing modules for biodefense (iPhone biodefense app spec) and health optimization could be a killer app. Microneedle arrays could continuously or periodically perform a sampling of hundreds of blood-based data points like Orsense does for continuous glucose monitoring. Mass spectrometer attachments could identify any substance chemically. Miniaturized genome sequencers and RNA sequencers could identify the underlying DNA and expression profiles of samples.

Future Art

Art interprets, defines, and responds to the social and intellectual milieu of any era.

Impressionists reacted to the precise definition of the day, somewhat from the newtech, photography, by making things more blurry. Modern art reacted to everything having been made visible by transcending into the conceptual and abstract. What is the iconic reaction that could drive the contemporary art of today into a radical new era?

Computers, data flows, communications, machines, computation, and software are the hallmark of today’s culture. Their ubiquity and influence invites rejection and commentary, and the anticipated response has been portrayed in dystopian machine art.

Beyond the obvious rejection of the machine era, computers, software, and data provide a vibrant new medium for art. For example, data visualization could be seen as art modulated with information.

Sentiment engines have become the art and barometer of worldwide emotion, for example We Feel Fine (blogs), and Pulse of a Nation (Twitter).

The time lapse photography concept used for flight pattern visualization (US, worldwide) could be extended to other areas.

Software code base data visualization
One form of contemporary art could be the sped-up visualization of code commits to software repositories for large-scale projects. The code might look like living organisms, possibly interesting new species. The fast flash of DOS is the prokaryote to Windows 7 and Mac OS X eukaryotes. iPhone could be the raptor to the Android’s human.

Real-time economy feeds and ambient economics

Social economic networks are just one part of the broader context of the transformational economics that may eventually lead to a post-scarcity economy for material goods. In addition monetizing alternative currencies and unlocking previously inaccessible value, social economic networks are also generating a critical meta asset: billions of data points which can be aggregated into real-time economy feeds.

At present, the pulse of the real-time economy can be read first through crowd-sourced websites such as Blippy, where users automatically post personal economic transactions as they occur, and consumer prediction markets sites like the Hollywood Stock Exchange and the simExchange, where users opine on box office receipts of new movie releases and the sales levels of new video games.

Aggregated longitudinal comparisons can be made, for example getting an early look as to whether this is a slower quarter for a particular company, or whether consumer spending in general is lower in this period compared to another.

Just as social media ‘likes’ and status update commentary can be used to infer consumer values and preferences with a sentiment engine for anticipatory demand, this data too can be aggregated. While many dismiss ‘I ate a hotdog’ as meaningless social media drivel, when aggregated at the macro level, it could be more broadly meaningful as a leading indicator of pork consumption.

Connecting social economic networks with real-time location through mobile networks and smartphone applications could be another significant step in shifting economics as buyers and sellers connect seamlessly in an ongoing process of ambient supply and demand interaction and automatic markets.

Personal genome: data analysis challenge

Five themes emerged from the material presented at the 3rd annual personal genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory held September 10-12, 2010.

First was the trend of family sequencing becoming more of a norm; looking at genetic disease as it is represented in trios, quartets or other family groups.

Second was the trend of increasingly common multi-level analysis, investigating traditional genotype data together with structural variation, expression data, pathways, and cell lines.

Third was the trend of greater breadth and sophistication in cancer genome analysis; the fledgling field of a few years ago now including dozens of sequenced cancer tumor genomes, the first cancer methylome, and cancer transcriptome analysis.

Fourth was the trend of the oft-heard challenge of scaling personal genome interpretation, making it automated, affordable, and actionable.

The fifth theme was the continued improvement in genome sequencing technology through new approaches such as quantum dot nanocrystal sequencing and strobe sequencing.

Crowdsourcing: labor-as-a-service marketplaces

The dynamism of the information economy, the internet, and the recession have forced and allowed the flowering of labor-as-a-service marketplaces. Individuals can self-direct their professional activity with greater empowerment, and service-consumers can be more selective and focused in their purchase of labor services through crowdsourcing. More productive use of time can occur for both service-providers and service-consumers.

Work is becoming quantized.

The big shift is to labor-as-a-service generally, where in the past marketplaces were more focused on software coding and other vertical markets. The new labor marketplaces include oDesk, CloudCrowd, CrowdFlower, ClickWorker, crowdSPRING, LiveOps, and editLift. These startups broaden the existing affinity marketplace landscape of companies such as 99designs, Justmeans, TopCoder, RentACoder, Elance, and Guru.

You know an industry has arrived when Freelance Camps and conferences (CrowdConf2010) start happening!

Thought-leadership provided by Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation, the ROWE (ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) concept, and Tom Malone’s The Future of Work is finally coming to greater fruition.

Anticipative demand and consumer intent prediction

Social economic networks improve the value proposition for both individual and institutional consumers since products and services can be discovered and targeted with greater relevancy.

Rich attribute information posted publicly by social media users (individual and institutional) can be used by marketers and other interested parties (for example, potential employees) to infer the values, preferences, and interests of others. In response, hyper-personalized advertisements may be presented (Reference: Shih, The Facebook Era, 2009).

Hyper-targeted-marketing, recommendations, and authentic product endorsements from friends are some of the ways that social economic networks have improved commerce relevancy.

The next obvious step would be for vendors to predict demand before it occurs, responding to customer intention.

Intention prediction could be accomplished by merging aggregate Facebook or other social media ‘likes’ and comments from high-influence users into purchase intent well before sales transactions. An anticipative demand market could arise.

Traditional economics equations could be further transformed as vendors test large varieties of targeted offerings in cost-effective ways via the internet.

The long-tail of supply and demand could meet in millions of micro-markets, possibly even at the level of individual pricing and individual offerings. Smaller lot sizes means higher margin. There are numerous entrepreneurial opportunities in facilitating product and service generation, production, and distribution at the level of n=1.

Social currency unlocks value for individuals and organizations

Social currency, shared information which encourages further social encounters, is transacted through social economic networks.

From an economic perspective, the role of social economic networks is to unlock and monetize hidden value. This value is mainly in the form of information asymmetry as buyers and sellers hold information that is useful to each other. Both buyer and seller realize greater utility than if the social economic network did not exist.

Social economic networks are impacting both individuals and organizations at the global and local level. Transactions may be between anonymous parties or parties who know each other. For example, in the Groupon / Peixe Urbano group-purchasing model, individuals pre-commit to a purchase to obtain a discount if a minimum number of people participate.

With social economic networks, organizations can unlock intellectual capital (social business intelligence) in ways that were not possible before with tools such as prediction markets (a mechanism for collecting and aggregating opinion using market principles). The concepts are attractive on a global level and can be implemented on a local level with the democratizing power of the internet.

Social economic networks could likely grow in the next several years, particularly in the type of assets created, and in the venues and models for their exchange.

Social economic networks and the new intangibles

Social economic networks are helping to monetize the new intangibles that arise from alternative currencies such as intention, attention, time, ideas, creativity, and health data. Individuals are starting to realize that they have more assets that have economic value besides labor; multiple currencies that are starting to become monetizable.

The new currencies have new measurement metrics for monetization such as awareness, influence, authenticity, reach, action, engagement, impact, spread, connectedness, velocity, participation, shared values, and presence. As market principles become the norm for intangible resource allocation and exchange, all market agents are starting to have a more intuitive and pervasive concept of exchange and reciprocity.

Reputation has always been an important intangible asset, and was one of the first alternative currencies cited; however it was not really monetizable other than as an attribute of labor capital. Now, there are more alternative currencies, such as social currency, that are directly monetizable through social economic networks.

Real value and real assets are being created in social economic networks. For example, products and services have higher value when they are recommended. An information asset that has been generated, largely through crowd-sourced labor, is product and service recommendations. Some examples of these information resources that facilitate shopping include Amazon reviews, Yelp local business recommendations, social shopping sites (e.g.; Kaboodle, Polyvore, StyleHive, ThisNext), and product attribute discovery and dialogue sites (e.g.; Stickybits, ClickZ).

Long-tail economics extended to physical objects

Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine, gave an excellent talk on August 5, 2010 at the PARC Forum. He explained how the long-tail economic models which have driven digital content (allowing consumers to access books, music, and movies in the 80% of the market that is not blockbusters) are now starting to appear in the world of physical goods.

The process of realizing long-tail economics in any sector is that of going one-to-many; democratizing the tools of creation, then the tools of production, and finally the tools of distribution. This is what happened with internet content such as publishing, where it is now easy for anyone to create, produce, and distribute content with blogs, twitter feeds, YouTube, etc. This has also happened with other digital content and some physical goods that are ordered and distributed via internet models (e.g.; Amazon, Zappos, etc.).

The new industrial revolution, argues Anderson, is in opensource hardware factories. The supply chain has now opened up to the digital and the small. The ability to make and distribute anything massively decentralizes traditional manufacturing and could completely reorganize industrial economies…atoms are the new bits. Matthew Sobol’s holons (communities of local resilience and sustainability) are in the works. Goods can be self-designed or crafted from available digital designs (e.g.; communities like ShapeWays and Ponoko), and then printed locally on the MakerBot or ordered from Alibaba or other global manufacturies. Opensource manufacturing is starting to have an impact on industries like auto design and construction (e.g.; Local Motors), drones (e.g.; DIY Drones), and general hardware design (empowered by the Beagle Board and Arduino).

It is likely that long-tail economics can be applied to many other areas. Medicine is the next obvious example, where health care, health maintenance, drug development, and disease treatment are already starting to shift into n=1 or n=small group tiers of greater customization and ideally, lower cost as more precision is obtained in the measuring and understanding of disease and wellness.