Medtechnorati
October 21st Week
Tools
In the tools section, I found an interesting article this week about a group out of RMIT and Australia, who had discovered a nano itching technique for Titanium that appears to be able to kill viruses and bacteria. This might have an interesting application for the surface of medical devices, which have continued and ongoing problems regarding post-insertion infection. It's a theoretical finding so far, so not translated into real life yet but seems promising and an interesting local find.
There's also a very interesting device released out of MIT. It is an ultrasound scanning sensor for use in detecting breast cancer in a home setting. As the device has the ability to scan as deep as 8 cm, one can imagine this sort of deeper tissue sensing will develop into some very interesting applications for all sorts of other organ diagnostic sensing.
Online Course Build-Out
This week I have been exploring building out an online course on communication skills in dental practice, something I used to see a lot of the younger grads have issues with. There seems to be a plethora of online course platforms available. I felt empowered to stop after reviewing 11 of the available options. I think I'm going to start with one called 'Thinkific' which looks pretty well put together and seems to be around the US$40 a month price. Is it worth it? Hard to tell. If your course does hundreds or thousands a month in revenue, I'd think so. It might be an expensive place to experiment though if you didn't know if you'd get any demand for your course. We will see how much hand-holding is available.
Lifescience Investing
Interesting article this week in Australian Business Review by Charles Williams of Biotech Capital flagging the 'unsophisticated approach' to capitalising on research.
Australia seems doomed to miss out on the biotech boom potential according to Charles despite having productive Biomed research facilities, because of the limited finding and lack of depth in quality management available for biotech start up's and research initiatives.
The article also quoted Martyn Myer of listed entity Cogstate who commented about those who might put the lack of capital down to size, of the poor parallels with smaller countries like Sweden and Switzerland, and the flourishing ecosystems there. Perhaps we need to import some Texan type possibility thinking, rather than put up with the naysayers who have a 100 reasons why it can't be done here?
Best interview
Tim Spector interview on YouTube where he talks about debunks some of the protein minutes that's worth a watch. He is an interesting researcher and a good independent thinker as far as I can tell.
And Kevin Ryan on the Hustle was also pretty engaging. Interesting this 'Billy' with zero social media. Often the hustle/audience / podcast / YouTube/ IG. Twitter thing seems to be trading privacy for a small bit of recognition. Kevin's goal - you walk into a restaurant and no one has a clue who you are - that kinda resonates with me somehow.
Reading
Am reading Bob Moesta & Greg Engle's 'Demand Side Sales' and am really enjoying it. Fabulous framework for his JTBD foundations, which nicely nails the intersection of value creation and sales, in which sales isn't really selling, as much as it is just helping people make progress in their lives. Bob’s approach seems very complementary to that of Ash Myuara from Lean Canvas in terms of their understanding of what makes people thiunk about buying any product or service. Great book so far.
Tunes
This new tune of the week off of an old album of Les McCann's. The track is called to ‘hustle to survive’. I'd rather object to the West Coast hustle culture nonsense but it's pretty funky old tune and I'm sure the hustle that Les intended was of a different kind.