Alensa Online

200 calories compared

2008-08-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

Sally over at InDenialHealth stumbled upon this great post which shows what 200 calories worth of various foods look like. It's very interesting to see the comparisons.
Pic by : Officially a Mom

SeedCamp

2008-08-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

We did a video pitch the other day for SeedCamp. Unfortunately the winner will be picked based on voting rather than on the quality of the pitch so if you think we had the best pitch please vote for it here.

Our pitch for SeedCamp

2008-08-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures, reminded his blog readers today that the deadline for SeedCamp, a UK meet-up where European companies have the opportunity to pitch Venture Capital funds from all over the world, was fast approaching. In fact the deadline for the new video-pitch section was closing today so we quickly went and posted this short pitch.
If you were a VC, what would you think ?

The gridlock big pharma created for itself

2008-07-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

For years the large innovator drug companies have been suing generics manufacturers over patent protection, attempting to block the early entry of generic medicines. Their argument has always centred around the claim that without a strong patent system there would be no incentive for them to continue to invest in ever-costlier new drug development.

It's therefore with great interest today that we read Michael Heller's article in Forbes Magazine in which he argues that not only do patents stifle generics competition & innovation, but that they are now actually harming the large pharma companies themselves. He bases his theory around these simple observations :

a) Biotechnology represents one of the most promising avenues for new drug developmet.

b) Since the US supreme court allowed for patents on living organisms in 1980 over 40'000 have been filed.

c) This staggering number of IP claims on the building blocks of life are making it impossible for researchers, be they academic or from big pharma, to conduct any meaningful work without bumping into a mine-field of these biotech patents.

He notes that some pharma companies have given up entirely on promising leads because they realized how difficult it would be to get the necessary patent licences.

So has big pharma now outwitted itself in its zealous quest for strict patent protection? In any case a very interesting take on another angle of this multi-faceted debate.

Shocker! : quarter of Americans are obese

2008-07-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today in its Health Blog that over a quarter of all Americans are clinically obese. The quality of life and health cost implications of an ever increasing obesity rate are dramatic and unfortunately this trend is being seen all around the world, not just in the USA.

It seems that there must be a much more concerted effort towards education and coaching regarding healthy eating habits that produce real behavioural change. Too much educational material is read and then just forgotten.

Smaller portion sizes and regular exercise are of course the simplest ways to start a healthy weight program.

Finally it's becoming critical that a more focused effort is placed on examining school meal programs which have been a primary cause of child obesity in recent years.

Belgrade : Team meet-up comes to an end

2008-07-17T00:19:00.001-07:00

Today is the last day of our programming team meet-up in Belgrade. It's the first time that the entire virtual team met up, after more than one year of working together. It was a really great experience and helped everyone to build a closer working relationship. It also helped us to set the development strategy for the next six months so Alensa Online users can look forward to a lot of excellent new features and improvements.

The team: (from left to right)
Alex, Radu, Milinko, Buda, Vuja & Milos

Nice Twitter from Serbia

2008-06-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Better Search

2008-06-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

We've recently improved our search bar to allow users to narrow their search to only specific product attributes or inside our health articles archive. We've also improved our results ranking system somewhat - let us know what you think.

Launch in Serbia

2008-05-30T01:16:00.000-07:00

Today we've launched the Alensa Online platform in Serbia together with our first serbian partner Pharmanova.

We hope to make a positive contribution to the online healthcare space in Serbia and build out this location in anticipiation of Serbia's accession to the European Union in a few years.

Thanks to everyone at Pharmanova as well as the Alensa programming team for putting in maximum efforts to realize the completion of the site on time.

Update : This launch makes Pharmanova the first internet pharmacy in Serbia.

Alensa Online amongst top ten eHealth Innovators of 2008

2008-05-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

MarkteIntellNow, a eHealth consultancy and leading eHealth blog has selected Alensa Online as one of its top ten 'eHealth Innovators of 2008'. As part of the feature they have posted a interview with Alensa CEO on their blog.

Many thanks to the team at MarketIntellNow for taking their time to find out about Alensa Online.

Discussion Group launches

2008-05-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Today we've launched the discussion groups forum on Alensa Online which allows any user to launch their own discussion group around a health topic of their choice.

The system allows for subscriptions to groups, comment voting, user profiles and RSS.

We hope you'll find this a useful tool in creating discussion around topics that interest you and hope to hear any feedback you may have.

New features, new launches

2008-05-08T11:27:00.001-07:00

We haven't posted since April because we've been burning the midnight oil coding exciting new features for Alensa Online. Last week we launched product voting, and over the next two weeks we're upgrading our community features with an exciting new forum/discussion board system. More details on that to follow...

By the end of the month we'll also be launching the platform in Serbia with our excellent partner Pharmanova and starting a fresh campaign there.

Last but not least, we have over 1000 new products being added to the platform by one of Bucharest's finest nutritional health store's, Ki-Life, which will begin retailing on Alensa Online in June.

Traceability or the lack thereof

2008-04-17T02:33:00.000-07:00

In the pharmaceutical industry it's all about traceability. The ability to track batch numbers of all the compounds in a product so that if somewhere down the road a quality issue is discovered, that batch can be recalled and not be allowed to enter the marketplace.

Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and Good Distribution Practice (GDP) standards regulate the industry right from the starting chemicals all the way through to production and distribution up until…. the pharmacy, and that’s where the chain ends ! At least in our part of the world, traditional pharmacies keep no control over which batches have been sold to which customers (is this different anywhere else?).

The reason for this is simple, the traditional pharmacy model can not keep track of who comes into their store to purchase a product. So in case of a recall, the customers which have already bought that product later have no way of being contacted to be informed that the product has been recalled. This suggests that the traceability system is insufficient at best or at worst broken and dangerous, depending on how you want to look at it.

This is definitely one of the strong arguments why online pharmacies that use electronic systems with built in batch number tracking are safer than the traditional pharmacy retail process. An online system such as ours can track exactly which batch have gone to which customer and on notice of a recall immediately contact those specific customers to inform them.

So do our partner pharmacies use this system yet ? We wish they did but so far none have taken up this built-in feature in our system due to the fact that a) they are not used to this and b) it’s highly time-consuming to input all the batch numbers considering that they themselves don’t receive batch number information when they purchase products from their suppliers. However we will continue to try to convince all of our partner pharmacies to adopt this very exciting safety feature in the system.

It would be interesting to find out if any of the online pharmacy certification bodies use this as one of the criteria before certifying an online pharmacy with their seals. In our part of the world there are no such organizations and when we wrote to PharmacyChecker in February we never got a reply from them. Insights or comments from anyone in the community on this subject would be highly appreciated

Compare and contrast - Romania vs. Serbia

2008-04-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

We're launching in Belgrade in the next couple of weeks with our excellent partner Pharmanova so it's been really interesting to compare and contrast with Bucharest. Here's a simple status check :

Twitter users (a good indicator cause these twitteroos are so damn on the cutting edge):
search for 'Bucharest' = 378
search for 'Bucuresti' = 90
Total = 468

search for 'Belgrade' = 64
search for 'Beograd' = 12
Total = 76

How about no. of sites :

On Trafic.ro Health category : 151 sites
On Hitrang.com Health category : 9 sites

And traffic :

Top rated health site in Romania : www.sfatulmedicului.ro with 771'000 monthy visitors
Top rated health site in Serbia : www.psihoterapija.co.yu with 14'000 monthly visitors

What's the conclusion : Serbia has a long development road ahead ! Until a few weeks ago the laws here prevented anyone or any company from registering more than one domain name. Terrible policy - luckily with the introduction of the new .rs domain this restriction has been lifted. The other barrier to entry is the credit card processing, currently serviced only by Bank Intesa which has such restrictive internal policies on who they will grant their service to that it becomes almost impossible for anyone but the largest companies to obtain.
In any case a long way to ge here, on all levels... hopefully we can be part of that positive change.

Twitter

2008-04-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

You can follow us now on Twitter - @alensa

Alensa posters around Bucharest

2008-04-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Since October we've been running a poster campaign around central Bucharest, we're really happy with how these turned out so here's a little collage...

You can still see some of these in the tube stations.

Wikipedia adventures

2008-03-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we unfortunately incurred the wrath of the Wikipedia admins through an honest mistake, and admittedly a lack of prior research on our part.

We've never posted anything on Wikipedia before but noticed that a lot of the major online shops and online pharmacies had complete profile pages on Wikipedia. Believing that it would be appropriate to post factual information on Alensa as well, we created our own article, logging in under the name Alensa so it would be clear that we had created the page ourselves.

Promptly a number of reviewers marked the article for deletion, commenting that it was advertising for our company and getting upset that someone affiliated to the company had written the article. We immediately blanked the page so as not to antagonize the admins any further. But naturally we kept wondering why the large players were allowed to have article pages while an upstart like ours would not be allowed to post an identical article.

One of the helpful admins pointed us to the Wikipedia policy about 'Notability', basically stating that unless your company is large and notable enough, it has no place having its own aticle page ('notable enough' seemingly being quite a subjective interpretation).

While we respect the Wikipedia system and don't intend to post any more articles regarding our company, we wonder whether there is not some conflict in the differing treatment for large and small companies as well as the idea that a person affiliated to a company can not post a neutral factual article on the company they work for. After all, why would someone not affiliated with our company be able to post a more accurate factual article on us than we would ourselves ? Where would they even get the historical data from ?

For now we'll just have to wait until somebody else in the community believes us to be notable enough to create a Wikipedia article about us which we can then have the pleasure of editing for factual correctness - any volunteers? - or would that be soliciting.... ;-)

Which of these three designs do you prefer?

2008-03-14T02:03:00.001-07:00

The background : Our partner company, Rominko, is launching a line of healthy milk and juices. We are trying to pick the right design. Please help us by voting below on which design you prefer best (you can click on an image to enlarge it):

3. (only milk design here, juice design you have to imagine :-)

You can vote on the right hand side of the blog. You can also leave specific comments in the comments section.

Alensa Online - Welcome

2008-02-19T07:34:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Alensa Online blog !

Alensa Online is a health portal integrating health research, community and e-commerce.

This blog is intended for communicating with our valued clients and stakeholders about the latest news coming out of Alensa Online.

Users trust and their feedback is of paramount importance to us, therefore if you have any comments you can e-mail us directly on support (at) alensa.com

Thanks for visiting and don't forget to check out http://www.alensa.ro/