Medullan, Inc.

02/12/2009 - In this newsletter, we are excited to share with you our recent work in developing a social networking application for the New England Venture Network (NEVN). The application will serve to promote collaboration and information sharing among a network of 400 investors.

This is just the beginning. The value of this social networking application can be applied to many other industries and offerings. Within healthcare, which is Medullan's primary industry focus, social networking can become a valuable part of any application that seeks to integrate peer support and motivation, leverage community driven activity and content, and create application stickiness. We look forward to leveraging the power of social networks in consumer oriented, personalized solutions for wellness, disease management, and more.

If you are interested in using social networking to leverage your business or application please contact us. We'd love to hear from you.

Applying Social Networking to the Business of Venture Capital

New England Venture Network (NEVN) is the largest association of young individuals in the venture investment arena and is committed to building relationships and to creating active networking opportunities among young venture capitalists on the East coast. NEVN approached Medullan to design and develop their VentureNetwork.vc website to support this mission. This website is the first professional and personalized social network built to foster collaboration across venture capitalists that have similar investment preferences.

Look out for the new and improved VentureNetwork website to be released in Spring 2009.

An Inside Look at the Remaking of a Professional Social Networking Site

NEVN wanted a solution that was very low-cost, easy to maintain by NEVN in the future, and provides a "Web2.0 look". The team selected Drupal as the backbone of the new web site. Drupal is an open source Web Content Management Framework which has a large development community. Many developers have created modules for Drupal that support specific features, such as discussion forums, member profiles, etc.

In the process of choosing a suitable application, Medullan evaluated several options including Joomla and PHPboard. Drupal was selected because of its wide development base and readily available supporting documentation. In addition, Drupal has a wider range of plugins (called "modules") - Medullan was able to leverage several existing modules and create new ones to realize NEVN's vision.

Drupal is php-based and is often used on top of free software such as the Apache Web server and the MySQL database. This helps to reduce the total cost of ownership and support for NEVN. Also, since those software tools are widely used, resources to perform any maintenance and upgrades are easy to find.


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