Another variant of Health Vault, and another bad domain name. This time it’s keas.com, an online medical records play from Adam Bosworth, who left his position as head of the Google Health team. Of Bosworth’s choice of domain name, The New York Times says: “The name “kea” refers to a species of alpine parrot, which he spotted on the South Island of New Zealand”
The name of an alpine parrot? From New Zealand? A homonym of “keys”? Confusingly similar to the car company Kia? Or does it mean “Killed In Action”?
I can imagine the excuses made at pitch meetings.. it’s short, and we need a short name so people can remember it. Or It was “available”. Or perhaps even “we’re a startup.. we’ll re-brand later” which is always my favorite. Rebrand later? Are you serious? And then there’s the “our exit startegy is to be bought by some big company or conglomerate, and they won’t care about the name“. Or maybe “we’re not really independent, but just set up that way so that we could do things that big established companies would not be allowed to do. Like a skunkfarm. So the name didn’t matter“.
Not to be overly critical of just the domainname, this play seems to be all about locking up a community and keeping them away from searching for themselves. Rather than rely on healthcare search marketing, the business of reaching consumers who need need specific health information by appearing prominantly before them when they search Google or Bing, this play is about locking the consumer into a medical records database system. Once your data is in there, they own you. It will know everything about you. It will know you are 47, overweight, diabetic, and that you play fantasy football 7 hours a day on the weekends. From there, it can pretty much predict the rest (including your liklihood of drawing on health insurance coverage in the near term, mid term, long term).
It’s backed by both Google and Microsoft, so far (according to the report)… those same players who were so widely criticized when they tried to lock up medical records last time. Criticized because, well, their initiatives are completely driven by profit and corporate power, while our governments remain almost completely inert on the front of “helping people because they need help and it’s the right thing to do (and also cause we took their tax money)“.
Keas. Not a herd of small Korean cars… not those little metal things you use to start your big American car. It’s your interface to your medical records, sponsored by the companies that want to know everything about you. In order to help you. Sure.
Is it time to revive the concept of domain name consultant?