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thedoctor

907 karma · joined July 9, 2009

I'm a physician, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur. Previously, I co-founded the VC-backed Bitpass micropayment system. Most recently I've been working on a "Mint for Health" called Mozart Medical.

Feel free to ping me at my HN handle at gmail(dot)com.

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thedoctor··on Associative Search: The Brain's REPL
Video version by Hofstadter on "Analogy as the Core of Cognition": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk
thedoctor··on Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says
Here's the journal article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
thedoctor··on How Wikipedia and Flattr can together change the World
Agreed. That's what we found at Bitpass, a micropayment system for digital content in which people were asked to buy a prepaid "phone card" for digital content. The minimum prepay was $3 and people were still complaining.

So, based on our experience at Bitpass, we recently launched a cashless micropayment system, ThankThis.com. Instead of a Flattr button, there's a ThankThis button. Clicking it shows you a small sponsored message (i.e. an opt-in ad), which pays the publisher and gives you points for your favorite charity or nonprofit, which could also be wikipedia.

thedoctor··on AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me
How many people were curious enough to sign up today? I think that speaks to how compelling the concept is. Of course, it also has a lot to do with the desire to name squat to protect your brand. Personally, I signed up but may never use the service. But I don't want someone else using my name as their handle.
thedoctor··on AOL Acquires Personal Profile Startup About.Me
Apple could do something like this in a heartbeat with me.com, but about.me is likely to be device- and network-agnostic, i.e. you won't need to own an Apple product.
thedoctor··on Why the Kids Don't Blog and Grandma's on Facebook
Is Tumblr a blog? It's growing like crazy. OTH, Posterous growth as a blogging platform seems to have peaked, which may explain their pivot to Groups, which is a social networking and media sharing play, the heart of Facebook and instagr.am.