Twitter’s revolution blues

That’s the trouble with announcing a revolution. If you fall short of your lofty ideals, you’re left looking somewhat exposed.

And while Twitter didn’t explicitly proclaim the music service it launched last month to be revolutionary, it certainly sailed pretty close on its official blog:

We7 moves on (again)

Pity poor We7. First the UK-based streaming music service was aiming, not entirely unsuccessfully, to be a browser-based Spotify, then it shifted to something more akin to Last.fm, and now it’s moving on again.

Or more accurately, Tesco has decided to subsume the company into its online film and TV download and streaming brand Blinkbox, nearly a year after taking a majority stake in the company for £10.9m.

Health apps – bringing order to chaos?

There’s rarely a shortage of mobile health news these days, but a couple of developments over the last month transcended the general noise about mHealth.

A new NHS online library of health apps and promises from the US FDA that guidance on medical smartphone apps will arrive before the end of this year threaten, as my column in the April issue of PME put it, to bring some order to the chaos of mHealth apps.

That said, initiatives like the NHS library, Happtique’s mobile app certification programme, Apple’s new lists of apps for healthcare professionals and my own pharma mobile app listing in the Digital Handbook, to name but a few, could soon have us asking who will curate the curators.

Elsewhere the April issue’s features included an interview with Novo Nordisk’s Peter Meeus and an engaging look at some emerging models for pharmaceutical businesses.

• Read April’s PME online

Feedly as a Google Reader alternative

In the first 48 hours since the recent announcement from Google that it would close its Google Reader service on 1 July Feedly claims more than 500,000 users of the suddenly-doomed RSS reader signed up to its service.

It would certainly account for the occasional slowness of the Feedly app, though it seems pretty much back to normal now.

Having found Feedly earlier this year in a bid to make it easier to access my Google Reader subscriptions I may inadvertently have found its replacement.

I’d already dismissed Summly (complicated, not intuitive – though clearly lucrative), Taptu (‘DJ your news’ … seriously!) and. for my work feeds at least, Flipboard (though it has a lovely interface).

Escaping conventional pharma marketing orbits

If I had to précis my latest Digital Intelligence column, which this month covered our forthcoming Velocity event, it would probably read something like: come to London, learn a lot from a bunch of digital experts.

The slightly longer version would perhaps mention that sessions at the day-long event in May will include:

• Health and social search by Google

• Customer analytics by Adobe

• User experience (UX) by IBM

• The future of pharma digital by GSK

And the full length version of the column can be read in the March issue of PME. Meanwhile, full details of Velocity, which we’re running in partnership with Digitally Sick, can be found on PMLiVE.

The March issue also marked a change in my role at PMGroup, with a promotion to editorial director, some 14 months after I joined the company.

The BIA’s Steve Bates and Pfizer’s Man MOT (PME February 2013)

The new issue of PME (Pharmaceutical Market Europe) was out last week and with it my interview with the BIA’s chief executive Steve Bates.

His great analogy of pharma-biotech relations in the 1990s being ‘a bit Blur and Oasis‘ didn’t make it into the feature, but there was plenty of room to focus on the ecosystem pharma and biotech share nowadays, the state of UK biotech and the sector’s funding challenges.

This month’s Digital Intelligence column looked at a rare example of a pharma campaign with a definite exit strategy in the shape of Pfizer’s Man MOT online male health clinic, a campaign I’ve covered right from its early pilot stages.

In contrast to the interview the column did have room for a couple of musical references, Radiohead in the headline and a short Leonard Cohen misquotation at the end.

• Read the February 2013 issue of PME