Apps – Mostafa Nageeb

I am trying to settle in Berlin. So my blogging frequency has gone down. I have lots to talk about and share. Hopefully I find an apartment soon, settle, and get back to life.

I recently heard about Anchor App from GaryVee. He described it as “the twitter of voice”.

The app idea is simple. You create an account, follow people, get followed, and create waves.

A wave is a shorter than 1:59 minutes audio.

You say what you want in less than this duration and your followers can listen to, reply with other waves, and echo (retweet/repost) your waves.

I like the idea and the execution. It is simple and using voice only lowers the pressure that video puts on one to be in good look and share thoughts with other format than text.

Here are my first two anchors:

Arabic: المواصلات والكراسي المتحركة بين هولندا وألمانيا: https://anchor.fm/w/A456B9
English: The Berlin housings crisis. Brace yourself!: https://anchor.fm/w/A456DC

The app is available for iOS and Android. Download it and follow me at Mostafa Nageeb (There are no usernames yet!)

I was born with a rare disease that causes bones not to form properly making them very fragile and easily fractured. Growing up in Egypt with our medical system in pre-internet era made it harder to diagnose me correctly until I became 4 years old.

Fast forward 25 years, 20+ surgeries, and tens of fractures. I was watching a session by Andy Wiseman, the partner at USV ventures (I am an avid reader of Fred Wilson’s blog and a big fan). Andy was talking about one of their portfolio companies “Figure 1”. It is a medical photo sharing app for medical professionals where they can post pictures of patients or their reports (hiding the patient identity) and get immediate feedback from other doctors.

While I am not a medical professional, I wanted to see the app in action and searched for my case. I started reading the interactions and for example I learned that the types of my case are not sorted by severity but rather by when it was discovered.

Since my disease is rare, there is a bias in the medical community for not researching it, which is why in my opinion there isn’t much advancement with finding a cure.

Figure 1 would be great if the patient can be part of the doctor’s learning process. I don’t mind sharing my x-rays on the app. I already tried but it said uploading only allowed for medical professionals. I understand this is important to keep the platform as professional as possible and not slip into becoming a patient-doctor medical community.

However, I think allowing doctors to tag their patients upon their consent so that other doctors can reach out to the patient and ask questions. A disease doesn’t only affect the person body parts, but their whole life and the lives of their surrounding ones which is important learning for doctors.

I am always happy by what technology is making us capable of doing. I wished this app existed when I was getting fractured and no one knew what I had.