AED4EU and the Power of Twitter

Yesterday I posted a video in which Lucien Engelen (@zorg20) interviewed me about social media in healthcare, which he shot while I was his guest in the Netherlands earlier this month.

I interviewed Lucien that same day, asking him to tell the story about the mobile phone application for iPhone and Android that he had gotten developed and launched. It’s an augmented reality app that shows where the nearest automated external defibrillator (AED) is located, using the phone’s location awareness. In the case of someone experiencing cardiac arrest, the ideal would be for one person to administer CPR while another bystander uses a smart phone to locate an AED that could shock the heart back into normal rhythm.

AED4EU

I could talk more about the application, but Lucien demonstrates it briefly in this video. More importantly, he tells the story of how Twitter enabled him to find a programmer to get the project done, and how much time that saved in development.

Twitter is an amazing tool for finding information, but more importantly making connections with people. Three weeks from first Tweet to completed iPhone application is pretty amazing. In the way of the Web 1.0 world, Lucien’s analysts would have had to identify a list of companies with programming capability, build a list and then send candidate companies a request for proposals. In the Twitterverse, he could just tweet the question, directed to no one in particular, and the answer found him in less than 30 minutes.

That’s serious productivity ROI!

How about you? What’s your best story of how Twitter helped you find information quickly?

Update: Here is the AED4.EU site.

Putting the “Global” in SMUG

When I first named our august institution of social media higher education, calling it Social Media University, Global was a bit of overstatement. Yes, through the world-wide Web it did have the potential for global reach, and I did already have some visitors from other continents, but clearly our institutional naming (and my self-designation as “Chancellor”) was, as the English say, “cheeky.”

Over the ensuing months the “G” became more deserved, or at least less ridiculous, as we reached the point at which we had SMUGgles from every continent (except Antarctica). We have continued to grow, with now more than 700 people having joined the SMUG group in Facebook.

But it’s one thing to have a global reach via the Web; it’s another to personally visit other parts of the world. Starting tomorrow, SMUG will officially become a little more global in reality, as I am at the airport in Rochester right now traveling to the Netherlands for two presentations. I will be arriving in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. Sunday morning and taking a train to Nijmegen, where I will participate in a series of events led by Lucien Engelen, including Reshape09 and the Health 2.0 Challenge. On Thursday we will go back to Amsterdam, where I will be presenting at the first international E-Mental Health Summit, and then I’m spending the night in London, where I will be visiting British media on Friday morning before returning to Minneapolis.

I look forward to an interesting adventure, and will be regularly reporting on the events here and via Twitter if you follow me.

If any of you have tips for international travel, or about the places I’m visiting, I would appreciate any guidance.

Taking the Dutch Health 2.0 Challenge

I’m looking forward to my first trip to Europe in about 10 days, where I have been asked to speak at REshape 2009, the second Health 2.0 conference and the first international E-Mental Health summit.

The organizers of these conferences have set up an interesting contest, called the Dutch Open Health 2.0 Challenge, that will run during that week, from Oct. 12 to 15, with winners announced Oct. 16. They have a catchy video to introduce it:

This is one of those “need not be present to win” contests. I’m helping to organize a Mayo team, and looking forward to getting the full details on Oct. 12. Meanwhile, check out the challenge and consider entering a team of your own!