In an interesting move by Amazon.com, they recently announced their agreement to acquire the popular audiobook provider Audible.com for $300MM.

To me, this makes sense in a way, as we have all come to associate the Amazon.com brand with books of paper kind, so why not extend the brand to include books in the audio format as well?

Moreover, Audible’s audiobook service will  nicely compliment the contents of Amazon’s recently launched AmazonMP3 music download service (which competes with iTunes), as well as their audiobook capable Kindle e-book reader.

I guess this could be Amazon’s answer to Apple’s iTunes WiFi Music Store, which allows an iPhone or iPod Touch user to download songs using an iTunes interface with a WiFi connection. Similarly, the Audible service could allow owners of the WiFi enabled Kindle to download Audible books to listen on demand.

Here’s a portion of the press release:

“Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry,” said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com’s senior vice president for worldwide digital media. “Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience.”

“This deal brings together two pioneering companies that share a long history of ceaseless focus on improving the customer experience,” said Donald Katz, founder and chief executive of Audible.com. “We are very excited to be joining a company as innovative as Amazon.com.”

In recent months, Amazon has announced a number of innovations in the digital space, including Amazon Kindle, a revolutionary wireless portable reader that provides instant wireless downloads of more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display.

Just when you thought I would break my new year’s resolution to post at least one blog a week in 2008, here I am getting getting an entry in at the 11th hour (the week’s not over yet, folks!)…

So, if you’ve been following the Med 2.0 space over the last year or so, you will probably be very aware of the Cambridge, MA based startup called Sermo — “…the fastest-growing community created by physicians, for physicians“.

There’s been no shortage of press coverage on Sermo over the past year or so and it’s even been called the ”MySpace for Physicians” (which IMHO is an unfortunately misnomer, but gets the point across). Currently, Sermo currently has around 50,000+ members and they’re growing at a rapid rate; both in terms of subscribers (something like 2,000 a week) as well as partnerships (AMA, FDA, Pfizer, etc.).

On JAN 15th, Sermo announced their latest partnership deal with Nature Publishing Group (the renowned scientific/medical journal publishers). Here’s a synopsis from the press release:

In this collaboration, NPG will add “Discuss on Sermo” links to the online versions of articles in 12 of its leading medical journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, and Leukemia. These links will allow US physicians reading the journals to create or join discussions of the articles in Sermo’s physician-only knowledge-sharing community. On Sermo, discussions of research articles include both free-text comments and user-generated surveys, capturing the depth of individual observations and opinions as well as aggregating the collective wisdom of its 50,000 physician members.

To best facilitate information sharing, NPG will make the full text of all articles from a selection of its medical journals freely available to registered users of Sermo, which is itself freely available to all licensed US physicians. In return, Sermo will allow NPG to use the Sermo community to better inform and extend the relevance of its articles. The partnership is Sermo’s first with a commercial publisher.

I think this is going to be a great partnership for Sermo and really complements NPG’s commitment to science communication and collaboration as well, including challenging the traditional peer-review process. And with NPG allowing free access to it’s medical journals, I can only imagine what this will do for Sermo’s already popular sign-up rate.

Not exactly a Med 2.0 application, but definitely in the same direction.

MM&M is offering a webcast on the topic of “innovative and creative training tools”, including such applications as gaming. Here are the Webcast details:

With the continued downsizing and restructuring of pharmaceutical sales operations, the pressure is on to turn out smarter and more efficient reps in the field. This event will examine how innovative and creative training tools, such as gaming, can help engage and equip reps with the skills to succeed in the physician’s office.

Featured speakers
Ken Begasse, Jr., partner, director of client services, Concentric Pharma Advertising
A guest expert from the pharmaceutical industry

Moderator
James Chase, editor-in-chief, Medical Marketing & Media

Sponsored by

In the JAN’08 issue of PharmaVoice, Craig DeLarge – my friend and co-panelist from the 2007 Digital Pharma Conference – wrote an interesting article about “Web 2.0 — Opportunities and Drawbacks“. Here’s a brief quote from the article:

In the last month, I have been intensely researching the Web 2.0 phenomenon with respect to its healthcare manifestations… It revealed a set of opportunities and threats whose successful navigation will require a different way of thinking and operating on our part as pharma marketers… this phenomenon holds the potential for enhancing customer relationships, collaborations, and trust building as well as leading to a product and service co-creation environment that we have not witnessed in the history of this industry. If we fail to navigate well, there is the potential to do more damage to our image as an industry.

In brief, Craig shared three rules to help pharma marketers apply Web 2.0 principles within the environment of the healthcare/pharma industry:

RULE #1: Share control of the communication.
RULE #2: Earn your community-cred.
RULE #3: Don’t just communicate, “conversate.”

While these ‘rules’ may seem simple and obvious, particularly to those already entrenched in the world of Web 2.0, the application of these ‘rules’ within the pharma context is probably far more difficult to execute. Indeed, questions surrounding legal and regulatory review, adverse event reporting, and negative publicity risks were very common questions at the Digital Pharma Conference that Craig and I spoke at in OCT’2007.

So, while Craig doesn’t seek to resolve these key issues in his article, he does offer some nice examples and plenty of resources that one can use to develop ideas for how to implement  some basic Web 2.0 principles and ’culture traits’ within the highly restrictive pharma and healthcare industries. Moreover, he also discusses why it’s important for us to do so.

It’s a short and simple article (PDF), which I definitely recommend giving a quick read.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE!!!

I can’t believe 2007 has already flown by and it seems like only last week that I was writing about CES and Macworld 2007 and it’s already come around again for 2008. If you’re looking to keep up with CES 2008 (JAN 7–10), CNET has a great micro-site here. As for Macworld (JAN 14–18), there’s lots of Mac rumors and predictions going around (e.g. the iPhone 2) and you’ll likely find it live-blogged at MacRumors, TUAW, and/or Engadget.

Anyway, as you would have probably noticed, 2007 has been a tough year for me in terms of blogging and podcasting, as I struggled to keep a balance between work (the “paying job”), travel for work (lots of it), and keeping up with publishing content for the blog/podcast.

So, my new years resolution for 2008 is to keep up with publishing and try to post to the blog at least once a week and the podcast at least once a month. I’ve actually got a backlog of content for the podcast that needs to be edited and uploaded, so look out for that soon.

Well, I hope 2008 brings you much happiness, joy, and all things 2.0