Why we're building Loom
blog.loom.com
blog.loom.com
Is keeping a handle on your cat pictures and food shots really that big a deal, something that keeps Joe Sixpack up at night?
Here's an idea: instead of helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos into the cloud, do something that matters.
For example, go after the giant clusterfuck that is medical image sharing. Again, it's cloud data storage of images, it's sharing on all kinds of devices, and it's technically challenging (privacy concerns, etc.)--and it actually helps people.
Why don't you take this tech and use it to help patients move their medical images between practitioners?
I weep for our generation of engineers.
Holding startups to the criterion of helping the poor, unwashed masses is, however, rather unreasonable.
AWS and Rackspace have both hinted that they are considering becoming BAA compliant, but they aren't today. Azure (Enterprise) and pricier services like Firehost are.
It is possible that you could make a legal case for storing encrypted patient data on S3, but this is still a gray area, especially when some states (like Mass.) have enhanced patient privacy laws that trump federal laws. And before anyone replies, note that it's a LEGAL question of possession of data, not a technical one about encryption algorithms. We have very expensive HIPAA attorneys who do understand how encryption works but are still undecided on this.
Turns out that in many parts of the world, there's a lack of specialists to read and interpret these images (radiologists, pathologists), even though there are technicians skilled enough to generate them. Fewer still are specialized to handle cases effectively. Thus patients wait long periods of time for diagnoses as slides are transported to places where they can be read, suffering throughout.
Teleradiology and telepathology are burgeoning fields which are necessary across the globe, with the potential to save lives and make money. There are quite a few aggressive players in these spaces, and we're excited to see what they do.
I'm working in an extension of one of these spaces; feel free to reach out if you're curious...
The amount of visual information we're collecting nowadays is vast, and I think the idea that it's cute but that it's value ends at individual nostalgia might be shorting it's potential quite a bit.
Further, I'd love to see sharing of medical information get easier, in fact that's literally what I do at the startup I work for... but a big part of what makes what we build possible is the enormous amount of technology in the form of other people's ideas and software (most of it open-source). Loads of that tech came from people working at shops taking shots at problems you might consider first-world.
Yeah, it'd be neat if more people were geeked about working in healthcare. (I'd sure love it if we could find it easier to hire!) But to suggest that everyone else is wasting their time is ridiculous.
Look, I agree it's awesome and all, but consider that I can still hold the physical photographs of myself from five years ago, of my parents thirty years ago, and my grandparents fifty years ago.
I can't get at the images I uploaded to Facebook two years ago.
So, while I agree that the data is great, I don't exactly think that turning all of it over into the cloud is going to do much for permanency.
Gee, that sounds like a pretty solid defense for someone trying to do it better :) Of course, I did notice you also concluded that because we haven't gotten it right yet, we should give up. That's even better. When people say that, that's when I really start to believe there's a problem worth working on here.
If a good number of people don't think it's impossible or silly to do (or that it's already been done poorly and that's the best we can hope for), it's probably gonna be boring to work on.
What does Hey do again, anyways?
I have strong opinions and knowledge about what I'd want from a photo sharing service. A medical image sharing service? Not a clue.
Nice alliteration, btw.
I don't know either way, but I sure wouldn't assume its designed for the exclusive purpose of "helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos" (nice alliteration btw).
Switching systems for a major enterprise is hugely expensive. In addition to retooling and retraining, there's the cost of paying someone the often thousands of hours to import all the existing records. Plus six months (optimistically) of dealing with lost records, transcription errors, and learning curve errors from staff unfamiliar with the inevitable quirks of the new system. Not that this is good for any business, but in a hospital setting that can mean dead patients.
Remember that "I'm to entrenched to make major changes" is emphatically not an engineering problem. Neither, for that matter, is "I don't have the money or political power to get access to technology". They are real problems and need real solutions, but throwing more tech at them is not an effective strategy.
b) We did fund a startup for managing medical images: Clariso, in the last batch. You don't hear as much about b2b startups as consumer ones, because unless you're e.g. a radiologist, they're not trying to reach you. Which means if you try to estimate the number of consumer focused startups based on which ones you happen to hear about, you'll overestimate.
My comment was more rooted in seeing a rough area of application for what I presume their tech and backend must be capable of, and then thinking about where else it could be put to use outside of the consumer market.
How'd the Clariso folks end up? Still around, I hope?
How much interest do you gauge for these sorts of things (better tech in medical, which is admittedly a whole can of worms)?
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Limited in ie, firefox and mobile.
angersock also touches on a higher level, fundamental need here: the ephemerality of human memories.
Technology should be able to help and this is exactly the problem that Jan and his team at Loom are trying to solve.
Our memories- of our grandparents, our parents, our loves, our children, our grandchildren- they should last forever, and not be ephemeral like clouds and the Cloud.
Technology should help them endure like the cave paintings in Lascaux France. They were created by the earliest, most primitive human technology and remain to inspire awe in all of us.
More than that, our memories- the visual stories of our lives- should be available on any device: any iPhone, any iPad, any Android. And even any TV, Windows or Glass- wherever we are, and wherever we go.
Memories should be memorable and shareable with those we cherish most. An heirloom of us.
There are some big players in the PACS space that major medical institutions are pleased with, and there's considerable lock-in/inertia associated with these types of products.
As someone working on a medical imaging product who decided that building a PACS was not a good starting point, I'm curious to see what others are doing to sell PACSs.
It'd be great if everyone's ambitions and efforts were grande and noble, but that's not the world we live in.
Some people need to care about the first-world problems. One reason the first-world is so comfortable is because people have put effort into solving such problems.
Fact is, products and services like this will impact peoples' lives - otherwise it wouldn't be very successful in business.
The difference is that people in the third world will likely only have cell phones and no desktops. So I would think that making photo sharing work well on mobile (particularly with low connectivity) counts as a third-world problem. And hey, this might even be useful for medical practitioners in remote locations too.
"Is photo storage really broken as the post says? Do we really need more of this kind of technology? I know of some real inefficiencies in medical image sharing which seems like it'd be a similar problem to solve, but to my eyes much more valuable. What would it take to convince people problems like that are worth tackling?"
Medical image sharing has more red tape, it's more challenging.
Short answer, because it's easy. Any developer can build a photo management app. It's a known quantity.
I've been traveling a lot over the years and it is such an uplifting feeling to meet somebody again after some time, to share some "good old times" pictures and reconnect. One of the things about Loom is that it stores a low res. version of your pictures on your phone and allows you to stream full res. in no time, so I have pretty much all my pictures of the last 10 years on my phone. I've also found some really interesting use cases at work lately...
Do you remember the Pirate in Monkey Island I in the Scumm Bar, whom you could ask about LOOM?
The only one I still remember was the button in Space Quest I escape pod that when pressed ejected you through the time-space warp into Kings Quest I and then killed you on impact :)
This also made me end up reading wikipedia articles on the SCUMM language/engine for half an hour, so that's fun.
I still want to get an Arduino and build a real-world "distaff". Not sure how to properly model the inputs...
Smile Son of Signa, It is the dawn of your 17 years. The Elders are awaiting in the sanctuary. (From memory)
E.g. I have ~180G of photos on Loom, but I can still access them all on my SSD MacBook, even though it's only got a few G free. Selective sync FTW.
Looked at loom.com/about and read wall of text, still not sure.
I'd suggest finding a more efficient way to communicate what this site is to newcomers.
"We're making it fast for you to access and manage your entire photo and video library on every device without taking up local storage space. "
I came to the conclusion this is a Dropbox with extended managing tools for pictures- it wasn't that hard.
The end result is that, aside from the one-off shares to Instagram or Facebook, I don't do anything with my hundreds of photos at all. But I really want to. If Loom helps me do that, it's a very valuable service indeed.
Which is to say, I think this is an interesting company, but very likely to face a serious challenge if/when Apple comes out with an update to iCloud that does the same things. Competing against stuff built into an OS is very, very hard - not impossible (see: Chrome, Firefox), but definitely hard.
Are you sure? Really really sure? There are countless photo management web, desktop and mobile apps.
After searching for a couple of years for solution my needs, I finally found Everpix, which is really really good, but it still doesn't handle sharing as well as I'd like to.
There is a lot of room for innovation or just plain good execution left in the photo space.
To be a bit more specific: please be more specific! How is this any different than dropbox? Are you building 'Adobe Lightroom for the cloud'?
Sigh. Everytime someone makes things "easier" for me by removing my ability to manage my content, it ends up being way more frustrating than if I could just get the files with a file manager.
what's your favourite way of interacting with your photos? organising them in a folder hierarchy on disk and having them mirrored/rsynced to some remote location? would you prefer a no-nonsense poweruser interface? we'll in all likelyhood open up our api soon so there could be a flurry of clients for all wants.
or shoot me an email on daniel loom com
Good name for a mobile / cloud app though.