… At least in the minds of people.

Marketing is a powerful persuasion tool and you sometimes need a few early applications to create the impression that something radically new came and is changing an area.

I like to listen to podcast while doing repetitive activities that don’t require my brain too much. One of the podcasts I listen to is the Clinical Air from the Pharma Talk serie. A few weeks ago, I listened to episode #14 about consumer electronics in clinical research. It was all about the Apple HealthKit. In a sense it was very interesting to hear about it as it contained more details than its Wikipedia page for the moment ; another top-level summary of its capabilities is found in this Rahlyn Gossen’s blog post (Rahlyn was one of the guests of this episode). Episode #14 was published on July 21, 2015.

Tonight I listen to episode #12 about digital startups and applications for clinical research. It struck me that the discussion was more serious, more focused on actual startups and apps, what they try to solve, how they would/should evolve in the future, etc. Apple was mentioned only once, as part of provocative titles of articles in the press at that time. Because “that time” was August 29, 2014 (when episode #12 was published), one month before Apple announcement.

For some things, we’ll have to dig for information before big marketing campaign, in order to find out interesting content that explore various areas instead of being funneled in the same direction …

Photo credit: Birds: a tragedy by Shannon Kokoska on Flickr (licence CC-by-nc-nd).