Figure 1

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.

Time, Distance, Price, and Priority

This post is not about attacking Uber. I love Uber. It changed the way I move in Cairo, & it saved me few times in Amsterdam. It is about an edge case where the API didn’t provide the best price for the customer, and how to prioritize when there is a conflict.

The Story

Two week ago, I forgot my keys in the office and couldn’t go back to get them. I had an extra key with a friend so I went to his house to get it. I went with two of my friends and after we got the key, it was too late that there was no public transportation anymore. No transportation, no problem. Uber to the rescue.

I requested an Uber and we took it from my friend’s home to my home, then from my home to my friends’ home. The first part was easy, the second part I entered the address of my friends’ home  and I saw the recommended route on the map as in the screenshot:

Screenshot_20160218-004844

If you know me, I am an optimization freak. Being a fulltime taxi user back in Egypt made me paranoid about optimizing my route for both time & price. One wrong decision can make you pay double the price & not save much time. That’s why I highly take care of which route I am taking and how much it will result in payment.

What struck me in the above screenshot was, assuming it is a square from where the car now to the destination point, why move with the edges when you can cut it diagonally and save much more distance which means paying less?

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