Can Play-it Health Play Well In Digital Healthcare Field?

We believe that healthcare industry is on the cusp of IT adoption and it's time for us to go all out for it. Thus, we can see that a lot of digital health start-ups spring up in these years, and disappear. Last month, Play-it Health, a digital healthcare application that helps patients keep on track with their medical regimens, founded in 2013, received funding from the 2015 Digital Health Challenge. Apart from that, Play-it Health was also selected to pitch at several big events as well as received two offers for paid pilots in the past month. Obviously, Play-it Health is gaining momentum in this playing field, kindling my interest in it and making me wonder whether it can play the game well and win its future. 

Though the digital healthcare industry is hailed as a promising and profitable market, actually the technology adoption rate in health care is not that high by now. To examine whether a product or service really works in this market, a few question have to be answered. First, what unique health-related problems can it address? Second, who will pay the innovation? And third, can it be adopted at organizational level? 

Play-it Health aims to fill the gap in prescription drug compliance, offering solutions for both patients and doctors to improve medication adherence. It is estimated that the volume of drugs that people consume is about half of the volume that doctors prescribe and the non-adherence causes about 30% to 50% of all treatment failures with millions of deaths and great waste of healthcare budget every year. In this way, Play-it Health does address real problems in health care. However, Play-it Health is, surely, not the only player in this sector.

What the main service that Play-it Health offers is to remind patients of the required timing, dosage and frequency of their medication intake through its mobile application, which is a thing that many companies, like Mango Health, Pillboxie, Medisafe are doing. Actually, in terms of reminder function, Medisafe outperforms Play-it Health by sending alerts to selected families, friends or caretakers of the patient to help them stick to their medical plans. It seems that Play-it Health knows this situation well and thus, channels its effort to develop data analytics, build platform for patients and doctors to communicate with each other, integrate itself with other pharmacy systems as well as to improve the compatibility of its mobile app. Moreover, Play-it Health provides healthcare-related game app to increase patients engagement by helping them know more about their health in an interesting way. 

For patients, according to McKinsey report, the core features they expect are surprisingly mundane: efficiency, information availability, integration with other channels and access to professionals when digital innovations fail to meet their demands. If so, Play-it Health are doing the right things now and should focus on reinforcing these pivotal functions in the near future rather than develop a comprehensive platform with overall offerings. It will be wise to start small and act fast. 

A product or service with good value propositions is not enough in the market where it's all about monetization. Having relationship with major PBMs in U. S. and receiving fundings from investors, Play-it Health reduces the healthcare cost of patients. But the sales process of convincing institutions or private payers is quite complicated and painful which can in further lead to the slowdown of technology update and user base expansion. If Play-it Health can offer solutions which are unique or better enough to tap its users and patients to foot the bills, it will help a lot. 

Undoubtedly, the adoption rate of a new innovation will be accelerated if the company is able to leverage the power of organizations. Play-it Health realizes this key point and tries to do so, partnering with hospitals and seeking for B2B opportunities.  However, it is a big challenge to have doctors embrace new technologies as many doctors think that the data entering and the fixed structure of data entry format slow them down. Apart from that, baby boomer physicians are reluctant to adopt technology in medical care because they see technology and digital data as impersonal. Though Play-it Health has upper hand over other start-ups in the same market in terms of partnership and organizational cooperation, it is merely the starting point for Play-it Health to fight in this playing field which is an immature one. 

Taken unique solutions, payers and organizational system into account, Play-it Health, as a start-up, is on the right track with respect to business model. But the whole industry is tougher than it seems to be due to the fragmented innovations and the slow technology adoption rate. 

How Long Can Google Keep Its Catbird Seat in Online Advertising?

"Sorry, I have no idea but I can do some googling for you." 

As the word "googling" has been taken into dictionary, it is easy to predict the huge market shares of Goggle in web search. Thanks to the powerful search engine and rich database, Google remains undisputed leader in digital advertising field through targeting consumers with the simple but effective text ads. However, in recent years, Facebook has performed quite well in social media advertising, Bing seems to come up as a serious player in search engine battlefield and more alternatives are provided for advertisers in the market. How long can Google keep its catbird seat in online advertising?

It is undeniable that Facebook outperforms Google in display ad category with its strong relevancy and personalization. As is shown by ADI, Facebook's display click-through rates (CTRs) is up 35%, 10% higher than that of Google. It is demonstrated that Facebook's display ads are more relevant than Google's and thus surely it will attract more marketers and advertisers. 

Now, Facebook is testing new ad forms, allowing Facebook users to see the details of products on Facebook pages rather than direct them to the websites of the companies. In this way, Facebook attempts to keep users stay on the page by helping them get rid of the slow-loading sites. 

According to Morgan Stanley, from 2012 to 2014, the share of display online advertising kept growing while the search marketing, the edge of Google, was shrinking. And it is projected that the U.S. digital display ad market share of Facebook will rise by 3.1% from 23.8% to 26.9%, while the share of Google will dip 2.6%, from 13.7% to 11.1%.

As a new entrant, compared to Google, to digital display ad market, Facebook is likely to eat away more Google's slice of market share.

Since Google AdWords is no longer a cost-effective tool for small businesses or startups as it used to be in the beginning, small businesses have to drop a lot to drive traffic. Due to the low return on investment (ROI), small businesses or startups are turning to other lower costing solutions, like Bing Ads. 

Based on eMarketer, it is shown that Being outperformed Google in terms of the paid search spend growth in regions around the world except North America. Plus, on the basis of statistics from StatCounter, Google's search share is shrinking in these years and fell below 75% in U.S. for the first time in January. While its competitors, like Bing and Yahoo have been witnessed a trend of growth, reaching 12.4% and 10.9% respectively by January 2015. 

Faced with the growing bargaining power of substitutes, Google expects to return to China market in this fall following a five-year absence. Besides the large scale of 6490 million Internet users in China, the support of national policy in Internet industry which helps boost the digital economy in China, also attracts Google to re-enter the market. However, it is difficult to say whether its strategy will work or not in Chinese ecosystem, which is a complicated and closed one.

Apart from going  for display advertising and search engine marketing (SEO), marketers can also do search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing or email marketing by themselves. As increasingly more choices are provided for advertisers and marketers, the charm of Google may encounter a drop. 

According to eMarketer, the worldwide digital ad market shares of Google just increased 0.2% from 2012 to 2014. Meanwhile, Facebook along with Twitter and other smaller players are eating away Google's slice of digital ad revenues in display advertising. It is projected that Google's total digital ad market shares will shrink from 41.6% to 35.4% in U.S. market. 

Admittedly, Google still remains in the catbird seat in online advertising, but faced with the growing bargaining power of new entrants, substitutes and buyers, Google is under pressure now. Can it bring us another impressive innovative as it used to do with AdWords or come up with any strategy to keep the throne?  Let's wait and see.

GoPro's Future Looks Gloomy?

GoPro shares have taken a beating in the last three months with a disappointing sales earnings release of its Hero4 Session and shares down approximately 40%. As some analysts hold that the valuation of GoPro Inc. is too stretched, predicting that the GoPro stock is going to plunge with the challenging profit margins and looming lockup expiration, investors are fleeing. GoPro is no more than a fad and its future really looks gloomy? 

Before answer this question, let's take a look into GoPro's business model.  

As shown in the canvas, GoPro should not be regarded as a simple wearable camera manufacturer anymore as it attempts to evolve into a media company. To project its future, a deep analysis of its revenue streams together with its key resources, partners and cost structure will help a lot. 

Undoubtedly, the electronics sales will sill be the main revenue stream of GoPro in the near future. As an action camera manufacturer, it already has a multitude of daredevil followers globally, enjoying 72.5% market share in U. S. market and 56.7% worldwide action camera sales. Since wearable cameras are still on the early stage of adoption, the sales of GoPro can take advantage of this phrase of diffusion to grow its user base out of enthusiasts into casual individual users or even organizational level users. It is estimated that the wearable camera shipments will go up from 5.6 million in 2014 to 30.6 million units globally by 2020, according to Tractica. 

Plus, the prospects of consumer drones and virtual reality cameras have not yet reflected in GoPro's stock yet. In June of this year, GoPro announced to build its consumer drone and plans to launch in next year. Since consumer drone market still lacks strong brand name, GoPro has a chance to become the leader of the market. Moreover, it will be a wise decision for GoPro to enter virtual reality sector partnering with Google in that Google's "Jump" VR ecosystem will save GoPro's efforts to do much development by its own. At the same time, users can get a better battery life which is still a limiting factor for GoPro users since cameras will automatically synced by the software developed by Google Jump. In this way, the software side of GoPro can also be reinforced with help of Google Jump, besides its own mobile app and studio software. 

Apart from selling wearable cameras, GoPro finds its new revenue growth by monetizing its content. Partnering with YouTube, Virgin, Xbox, GoPro started to sell ads on these platforms by splitting ads revenue with its partners. According to Leo Sun, a Wall Street analyst, these moves can generate extra revenue for GoPro, but it is unlikely to be the main revenue stream for GoPro. For instance, YouTube analytics site Social Blade estimated that  GoPro's YouTube channel is only worth 135, 500 US dollars to 1.2 million US dollars, just a drop in the bucket for GoPro which generated over 1 billion US dollars last year. However, it is indeed a smart move for GoPro to monetize its user-generated content through integrating its resources. 

With the guide of this business direction, GoPro introduced GoPro Licensing in July of this year, an exclusive platform for advertisers to buy high-quality and expensive user-generated videos made with GoPro cameras, targeting a high-end and high-margin revenue advertising market. Since story-telling is becoming a trend for commercials and marketing strategy, high-definition, first person point of view, inspiring and innovative video ads witness a great potential market. According to Advertising Age, advertisers are expected to spend 540 billion dollars on advertising globally, a 4.6% increase over last year and the global ad spending is estimated to see a 5% rise year over year in 2016. As such, GoPro shall benefit from the growth of advertising demand. Making use of its high-quality popular videos and its big fans base where there are 3.1 million subscribers on YouTube, 5.8 million followers on Instagram, over 9 million fans on Facebook and about 2 million Twitter followers, GoPro has huge potential to bring its strong brand name in hardware manufacturing industry to the front of the advertisers, and in further to the media industry in the future. 

Besides creating new revenue streams, GoPro also has a way to optimize its cost structure. Social networks enable GoPro to save a lot in sales and marketing cost and channel more efforts into research and development, which is the core of an innovative company. GoPro encourages users to share photos and videos on social platforms virally, which actually turn into a story-telling and life-style sharing ads for GoPro. Indeed, it is a effective, influential and economical way to do marketing. Shown in the Q3 preliminary earnings results statement, the cost of sales and marketing only accounted for 2.5% among its operating expenses in the Q3 just up 2.7% in the same period of last year.  

After delving into the business model canvas of GoPro, it can be concluded that GoPro's future is not gloomy. Instead, it eyes the future in a insightful way through integrating its strong brand, good hardware products, supporting software and user-generated contents into a innovative media corporate. Under the trend of "every company is a media company" and the growth of advertising market, it is wise for GoPro to decide to evolve into a media company.