We're rolling out our slate of eHealth Innovators. Lefora is the 2nd of 10; see the whole list in coming weeks on our blog, to the right.
Here we interview Vincent Lauria, co-founder & VP/Product of Palo Alto, CA-based lefora.
Remember Usenet? The top 2,000 forums still boast some 200m registered users.
What lefora does is take the friction out of setting up and running discussion groups. With COMMUNITY (connecting patients/their families to each other, and to experts) as the fastest-growing part of eHealth, lefora arrives on the scene with exquisite timing as vendors look at forums as make/partner/buy ... and hospitals and even doctors seek to project their presence more cogently.1. What flaws did you see in traditional approaches to forums, and how do you address these with lefora?
ANSWER: We saw that forums were not keeping up to date with many of the features common across 'social' websites. For instance, you can't paste youtube embed code into most forums, you can't type in rich text like most blogging platforms, admins are bogged down combating spam, the list goes on. We also noticed nobody was going after the problem, so we decided to tackle it head on.
We also think it's ridiculous for an average person to spend a weekend installing software on an ISP somewhere to get a forum up and running. We take the hard-part out of forums.
2) How can doing a lefora forum help with SEO?
ANSWER: We optimize every post so that google has an easy time indexing it. We provide sitemaps to google and automatically extract keywords from the page to put into the page title and url so that google considers the page highly relevant on the keywords.
3) How does lefora make money?
ANSWER: We do have ads on the forum, but try to keep them non-intrusive like other forums. We have plans to offer premium services so that admins can put their own ads in, or remove ads entirely.
4) What fit do you see with eHealth, and do you have any partners yet in this space?
ANSWER: Forums are vitally important to any online community because they enable many-to-many communication. There are a few health and medical related forums we have on our site. Currently, we're talking to one university's medical program that would like us to host their forums.
5) What will we see next from lefora?
ANSWER: Up next are fully 'private forums'. The features we've built so far address the needs of communities that benefit from publishing their data. We're now building some features for communities that need to take either all, or part of their discussions private. We're also working on making our forums embeddable in other sites and translating the site into other languages.
6) How is lefora funded?
ANSWER: We have a group of private investors, mostly from silicon valley, that have funded our development and ongoing growth. Our team is a small group of serial entrepreneurs that have worked very closely together for many years.
Read more in our 150-page SPOTLIGHT REPORT, updated each month. We carve out four discrete segments in eHealth, and tell you what's happening, how and why, including detailed revenue projections:
a. News/Search/Community
b. EMR
c. PHR
d. Digital Home Health.
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