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Curatio, a social networking platform for patients, launched Wednesday. (Curatio Photo)

For peoplestruggling with a disease or a chronic health condition, more than just their physical health is at stake. These experiences can also take a toll on patients mental and emotionalhealth, and those can have a huge impact on how well a patient deals with their condition.

Thats somethingLynda Brown-Ganzert learned first hand when she struggled with fertility and a complicated pregnancy.

It was really isolating, and really difficult to find what I needed, she told GeekWire.

Brown-Ganzert had spent her entire career in digital media, but she found herself struggling to find resources on hercondition and connect tosocial support from other patients.

She thought to herself, woah, wait a minute. Ive worked in tech my entire life if Im not able to find this easily, what about folks that are notlike me?

In 2013, Brown-Ganzert teamed up with developer and entrepreneurAlireza Davoodi to found Curatio, a social networking platform for patients looking to connect with each other and with trusted health information. The platform officially launches today, andBrown-Ganzert said she hopes it will help patients around the world improve their physical health by improving their social and emotional health.

The platform relies on machine learning for its two main purposes: connecting users with each other to help form social support, and connecting patients with validated information about their condition. It can also be used by caregivers of patients.

Unlike other online resources, such as Facebook support groups, Curatio is also designed to protect patient privacy and ensure the content they are accessing has been validated by medical experts.

Brown-Ganzert said Curatios services fills a huge hole in the patient experience.

There are plenty of casual support groups out there, but what we havent seen is that type of proprietary matchmaking that weve built both matching people to people and people to content along with some of our initial work in AI, she said. I think its pretty exciting in terms of democratizing healthcare, so that you can come into a platform like Curatio and have the type of concierge service where we can help you find people you relate to and content, all on a private platform.

Curatios combination of privacy and personalization is its secret sauce, and studies of the platforms first users show that it has a real impact on patient health. A clinical study found that 75 percent of Curatios initial users were already showing improved health behaviors and 80 percent showed increased interest in personal health management.

Brown-Ganzert said the startup is also considering expanding the platform to be used for other communities, like those with mental health and the LGBT community. The company is also taking part in the Canadian Institutes of Health ResearchseHealth Innovations Partnership Program.

The startup has raised $1.5 million in investments so far, she said, andeven went on Dragons Den last week, receiving offers from all of the investment shows star judges.Curatio is headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., with about a dozen employees based in that office and around the world.

Curatio will be licensed to healthcare providersand is free for patients to use. It is currently available as a web application and on iOS and will launch on Android devices soon.

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Curatio aims to improve health through first-ever social network for ... - GeekWire

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Microsoft social network, Socl, is set to shut down by the end of the month.

Microsoft has announced that it will be permanently shutting down its social networking service, Socl, next week.

Socl, developed by FUSE Labs, will cease to be on March 15th, according to a blog post on the much forgotten social networking site.

The social network was launched in 2011 and was designed to be a collaboration tool as opposed to a communication platform. Initially targeted towards students, before a wider roll out, the platform allowed users to share creative content such as picture collages or short videos in a method not dissimilar from Pintrest.

In a farewell blog post the social network said: Soclhas been a wonderful outlet for creative expression, as well as aplace to enjoy a supportive community of like-minded people, sharing and learning together. In supporting you, Socls unique community of creators, we have learned invaluable lessons in what it takes to establish and maintain community as well as introduce novel new ways to make, share and collectdigital stuff welove.

When details of the service first emerged in 2011 many believed it would be a competitor to Facebook as many large tech companies, seeing the potential of facebook, began dabbling in social networking, such as Google with its Google Buzz platform in 2010.

The social networking site fell into relative obscurity after failing to gain significant traction among its audience. One of the more bizarre features of the system is that it required a Facebook login to use the service, essentially making it a Facebook add-on.

After 6 years, 5 years longer than Google Buzz, the social network will go offline permanently next week.

The blog post ended on an optimistic note that said: From the very beginning, weve been amazed by your creativity, openness, and positivity. Thank you so very much for sharing your inspirations with us.

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Anti Socl Microsoft kills social network - Computer Business Review

Parentune.com, an online social networking platform for parents, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount in its second round of funding from existing investor Kae Capital Management (P) Ltd.

Along with Kae Capital, the funding round also saw participationfrom Singapore-based Segnel Ventures Pte Ltd. The capital raised would be utilized to upgrade technology and launch the network in Hindi and other regional languages.

The company has not revealed any financial details of this round. Prior to this round, the start-up had secured around $500,000 in funding in 2014 from early-stage venture capital firm Kae Capital.

Talking about this investment, Nitin Pandey, founder of Parentune.com said,

We have raised this round of funding to continue building a highly personalized support (platform) for parents, with technology, data and intelligence at the centre of Parentunes scale-up.

Founded in November 2012, Parentune is an online community of parents for real-time advice and support through its website, mobile site, and app. The platform helps parents connect with like-minded parents, access useful applications, and find relevant information validated by fellow parents or experts.

The start-up claims that each parent on Parentune is verified and has real-time access to personalized content and support relevant to their childs age. It also claims more than 3 million sessions take place every month across its website, mobile website and the app. The company recently crossed the one million verified parents milestone.

Further, as per the company, the Parentune Mobile App is growing at a pace of over 50% month-on-month, mainly through parents referrals and word-of-mouth on social media. The app is spearheading the companys growth and has a user engagement of over 9-10 minutes per session.

In recent times, many startups have launched a social networking platform targeted towards parents. Last year,BabyChakra raised Series A funding to enhance its social parenting platform. Other such platforms, such as Parentlane and Tinystep, have also raised funding for expanding their technology and operations.

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Parentune, social network for parents, raises funding from Kae Capital and Segnel Ventures - The Tech Portal

Like bizzaro Facebooks, Tagged and Hi5 launched in 2004 to help you meet new people instead of connecting you with friends you already know. Through social games and paid dating features, they earned a surprising amount of revenue despite being relatively unknown. Tagged bought Hi5 in 2011 before branching out into standalone social app development and renamed the parent company If(we).

But after Taggeds newer apps fell flat, its now decided to sell for $60 million in cash to MeetMe, a fellow social discovery network formerly known as myYearbook that went public in 2014. Tagged and Hi5 will remain their own distinct brands.

Tagged had originally planned to go public itself before the shift to mobile led to a precipitous drop-off of its desktop properties. If(we) managed to pull in $44 million in revenue in 2016, with mobile revenue up 56 percent in a year as it began to follow its users to smartphones. If(we) ended the year with 5.4 million monthly users. It says its still adding 18,000 users per day. The startup had raised $28.7 million, including a $15 million round in 2012 from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank.

Taggeds old homepage, courtesy ofAppAppeal

By joining forces with MeetMe, the combined company will have 10.6 million total monthly users, and nearly 1.1 million daily users in the U.S. MeetMe expects If(we) to add $9 million in adjusted EBITDA to its earnings over the next 12 months. MeetMe will fund the buyout with cash on hand, revenue, earnings and a $30 million loan from JP Morgan.

The markets responded favorably, sending its share price up 19 percent in after-hours trading to hover around $6.

We believe this combination provides a clear pathway to $150 million in annualized revenue with adjusted EBITDA of $50 million for our combined company, saidGeoff Cook, CEO of MeetMe.

MeetMes mobile social discovery app

Greg Tseng, Taggeds founder who stepped back from daily operations, tells TechCrunch, They did a great job with the Skout acquisition so that gave us confidence in combining. MeetMe bought the location-focused social discovery network Skout in June. He says MeetMe also plans to invest in live video.

Given that Tagged, Hi5 and MeetMe all try to turn strangers into friends or more, bringing them together rather than competing could save them money on product development and marketing.

All three companies were/are doing similar things so it makes a lot of sense to combine and the market is reacting very well to it, Tseng concludes.

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Old-school social networks Tagged and Hi5 bought by MeetMe for $60M - TechCrunch

There were 203 Russians reportedly convicted for online speech crimes in 2015, and roughly half of those were for posting, sharing, or liking something on Russias Facebook clone, VK.com.

As a result, many Russians seem to be moving into a post-social-networking era. Specifically, they are turning to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service founded by Pavel Durov, the same person who started VK but was later forced out and became an open critic of the Kremlin.

Despite being developed as a messaging service, Telegram has been able to approximate a very basic social network. The services channels have been compared to newsletters, where authors build a subscriber base and following for their missives. Users cant chat in a channel or interact directly with its authors unless the author explicitly shares their Telegram username, which means less noise in the channels. Users can still share posts, however, which means memes and popular posts can still spread fast. Authors can grow a substantial following similar to YouTube or Facebook, although much smaller Telegram claims to have 100 million users, but even recommended channels have fewer than 50,000 followers. The ecosystem is also disjointed, with no central search engine and no good way to discover new channels without following a bot or looking at lists on the web.

Telegram isnt completely secure. There has been at least one report alleging that the Kremlin cracked Telegram, and its certainly not the most secure messaging app on the market. The Russian government also reportedly collaborated with a cell phone operator to take over two activists accounts in 2016.

So why do Russians prefer Telegram to the widely trusted encrypted messaging app Signal, or other messaging services that are more secure? The reason is the emphasis on publishing.

Anyone can log in and start a channel, but the interface is extremely minimal basically, it looks like crap. To make up for this, Telegram invites developers to make add-ons for its platform, including clients, and bots that let users add stickers, font styling, links, and polls. Authors can also use Telegrams service Telegra.ph, which is essentially a clone of Facebook Instant Articles.

Journalists and people working in media were the first to start posting in channels some anonymously, most by name. In some cases, their individual following is higher than the number of people subscribed to the official accounts of news organizations, many of which have their own channels on Telegram.

Today, Telegram has a great variety of channels. You can subscribe to skill channels and learn Excel in GIFs or find out about digital-marketing from professionals working in the industry. There is even a channel for a guy working as a surveyor and looking for oil in the Arctic, and one led by an aspiring doctor writing about medicine for millennials.

The app also supports a number of channels around delicate topics including drugs, raving, sex, and politics. Traditional shakedown near the Rodnya club, be ready, one techno channel posted, alerting its users.

There is also support for those dealing with mental illness. Psychostory is a channel allegedly run by a 25-year-old woman struggling with depression. I met with one of my subscribers today, she was in a state psychiatric clinic in her childhood, a recent post read in Russian. She told me that no one really cared about the kids with suicidal tendencies there, they just took all the sharp things away from them. Those children found rough walls lacked renovation and rubbed themselves to blood which sometime stayed unwashed for days. The author of this channel announced in February that she has a book contract with one of the biggest publishing houses in Russia. This is the first book from a Telegram channel, she wrote.

Even if you dont get a book deal, its possible to monetize a channel on Telegram with ads. The service doesnt have an official ad network, but it does have a primitive black market. Advertisers contact the owner of a channel to negotiate, and at least anecdotally, the clickthrough rates are good.

For many, Telegram is primarily a source of news. The information there is sometimes reliable, often not, and its difficult to tell but the app has been praised for circumventing the traditional state-controlled media.

Telegram hasnt escaped the Kremlins notice. In January, authorities were reportedly exploring ways to identify users of messaging apps including Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber by regulating SIM card contracts. Then in February, some channel authors reportedly attended an unofficial meeting with Roskomnadzor. Afterward, one of the channel authors, who specializes in the intersection of politics and information technology, said that officials wanted to know more about how exactly Telegram works.

If anonymity is truly compromised on Telegram, much of its appeal for Russians will go away. Even though there is no way to vet sources of information on the app, its a thriving alternative to the increasingly censored web, where a user can go to jail for sharing a meme.

Andrey Urodov is a freelance journalist and the publisher of the magazine Russia Without Us.

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Russians are using Telegram like a - The Outline