The former head of Google Health, Adam Bosworth, officially unveiled his much anticipated health-care start-up today at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, showing off a site that will offer step-by-step and personalized “care plans,” as well as many kinds of online tools to better understand the data and tips on how to stay healthy.

It’s perfect timing, given the health-care debate now raging in Washington, which is about how people make health-care decisions–or, more precisely, how they usually do not.

Here’s a video interview with Bosworth.

Read More »

Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video interview with Scribd CEO Trip Adler about the online publishing start-up.

Now, here is a video of a chat I had with Kemble Scott, an author who has made use of the service in an innovative backwards effort at traditional publishing.

Read More »

Yesterday, BoomTown checked in with Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar about the document sharing start-up.

Today, it’s Trip Adler, CEO of its much larger rival, Scribd.

Launched in early 2007, the San Francisco-based online publishing company allows customers to share a wider range of documents, including books and manuscripts. It now claims to have 10 million documents.

Read More »

This week, BoomTown has found an interesting chart to peruse about the loyalty people have for their smart-phone apps.

The takeaway for developers: Try to stay in Quadrant I!

In other words, Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars territory–it’s where they love you, they really love you.

Read More »

BoomTown went to visit the HQ of Adobe in San Francisco several weeks ago to have a chit-chat with its CTO, Kevin Lynch, for a lovely discussion about the future of its Flash online video technology and more.

But he somehow did not mention the then-pending purchase of Omniture by Adobe for $1.8 billion. Go figure.

Read More »

Today, BoomTown has traveled to England to see the Queen, but mostly to attend and speak at a conference at the University of Oxford, titled “Oxford Social Media Convention: Assessing the Evolution, Impact and Potential of Social Media.”

In other words: What is up with this Twitter thing, but in a British accent.

Read More »

When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up.

Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked. Now Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter.

If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

Read More »

Nokia is set to announce today that it has acquired Plum, the San Francisco “microsocial networking” start-up, for an undisclosed amount, sources said.

UPDATE: Nokia confirmed the purchase, but gave few details.

The small company was founded several years ago by Hans Peter Brøndmo as a social-bookmarking site. He then shifted its focus, trying to make a business in the places big social networks ignore.

Read More »

Here’s a lovely video BoomTown did last night at our All Things Digital annual BBQ, at which the crackerjack team at our little rogue operation inside Dow Jones goes analog, gnaws on some ribs and trades tech tales.

Last night, of course, much of the chatter was about what went down at the Apple event in San Francisco yesterday, at which CEO and Supreme Leader Steve Jobs made a grand reappearance onstage after a liver transplant.

Walt Mossberg and Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski were there and give their spicy reports.

Read More »

BoomTown could not resist posting this photo for posterity’s sake, taken by All Things Digital Webmaster and master photog Adam Tow.

It pictures a quartet of the tech media’s heavy hitters, all attending at the Apple event in San Francisco today.

Read More »

Eric Boyd (pictured here), a high-profile techie from Yahoo who left the company for a start-up last year, is now headed to Microsoft to work for its digital group, now run by another ex-Yahoo, Qi Lu.

UPDATE: Microsoft confirmed the hiring, although declined to provide further details.

Boyd–who is well-known for his card-counting team exploits while at MIT (which was later made into a movie)–had been VP of platform engineering at Yahoo and worked on a variety of projects there.

With the addition of Boyd, sources said, Microsoft has acquired a huge swath of the top tech talent of Yahoo, many of whom came to the software giant because of Lu and to also escape the turmoil at Yahoo.

Read More »

It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

Sources said MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

In June, Time Warner online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media, a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics.

Read More »

Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

Read More »

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently.

In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its exploding popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers.

Read More »

Twitter seems to be like one of those toy Bozo Bop Bags for cyber-attackers, as it temporarily went down again today.

In a post on its status site titled “Responding to site downtime,” Twitter wrote:

“We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more.”

Twitter is now back up, noting that it is “analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.”

Read More »