We have just been confirmed to present NextWidgets shopping widgets at the first Health 2.0 conference in Europe, which will take place on the 6th and 7th of April in Paris. Health 2.0 is an amazing group of forward thinking experts in healthcare and we can hardly express how grateful we are for their continued support over the years as we have worked to get our idea to market. This year we will be presenting on the ‘Health 2.0 Tools’ panel which will take place on the morning of the 7th and will also feature such amazing companies like 3G Doctor, American Well, Google and Microsoft.
Our fond history with Health 2.0 started in late summer of 2008, just as we were making the first plans for what would later become NextWidgets. Through a stroke of luck, James Mathews, who was at that time working at Sage and organizing a panel at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, became aware of our online pharmacy platform project in Romania and contacted us to find out more. During the course of our first call, James became convinced that our idea of trying to intertwine e-commerce, content publishing and social networking into one platform and to use e-commerce as a revenue generator for the other two, was interesting enough that it would be worth showcasing during his ‘Health 2.0 Around the World‘ panel. That was one of the driving forces that pushed us to work day and night for the next months to turn our widget idea into an alpha-demo reality that could be shown on stage. Almost up to the last minute, our entire team was feverishly working on the alpha version and just managed to get it ready on time for the presentation.
The conference itself was amazing and seeing all the demo’s and so many hundreds of people all motivated by eHealth increased our own motivation. For the next year we set about to take all the lessons we had learned and start from scratch in developing a completely new platform using the latest .NET technologies. By the summer of 2009 we had launched our first HTML based widgets on a couple of test sites. The results were positive and showed us that a shopping widgets could generate sales on a publishers page. Around the same time, Health 2.0 was coming around again and so we applied to present the finished HTML widgets. The organizers felt that we had made sufficient progress to make it interesting for the audience and so once again we found ourselves in San Francisco.
Following the conference, we accelerated the pace of development on a Flash version of the widget which allowed us to design it in IAB standard sizes. This was quickly followed by a Facebook and iPhone version as well. It is these latest developments which we will be showcasing at Health 2.0 in Paris.
If you would like to see our widgets in action, please visit the Health 2.0 website and order your ticket today.