Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm launched in 2004 by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, has led a $3 million Series A round for ZocDoc, a service for locating and booking doctors' appointments online.
ZocDoc is sort of like a cross between Yelp and Lifebooker--but with its focus on physicals, not facials. Members can search for nearby doctors, filter by insurance plan matches, find out what other members have had to say about them, and book the appointments through the site. Currently, it only serves the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but has plans to expand nationwide--that's what the funding is for.
"ZocDoc is addressing a real need in health care," Khosla said in a release Monday. He won't be joining the start-up's board of directors, but his partner David Weiden will. "The Internet has the potential to fundamentally improve access to care, and the company has gained initial traction towards this long-term vision," he said in the statement.
Plenty of much bigger names have been getting on the online health care bandwagon, but most of them have been focusing on medical records, not appointment booking.
Correction: This post initially misstated the type of cancer Lance Armstrong survived. It was testicular.
Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist who was everybody's hero until he dated Mary-Kate Olsen, is taking his LiveStrong brand to the Web much in the way that MC Hammer did with DanceJam.
Armstrong has formally partnered with Demand Media to launch LiveStrong.com, which debuted in full on Tuesday. It's a site for keeping tabs on fitness, wellness, and weight-loss goals, along with discussion forums, editorial content, and videos--other sites in this space are Wellsphere and SparkPeople.
It's a for-profit spinoff of Armstrong's non-profit Lance Armstrong Foundation, or LiveStrong.org, the cancer awareness foundation best-known for those bright yellow bracelets that were ubiquitous in the summer of 2004. Armstrong himself survived prostate cancer before going on to win seven Tour de France titles.
LiveStrong.com is operated by Demand Media, modeled off The Daily Plate, a site the company already runs; Armstrong and his charity have stakes of undetermined amount in the new site.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media also owns several domain naming services, a handful of knowledge sites like Answerbag.com and eHow, as well as health and fitness sites like Trails.com, Run The Planet, and entertainment sites like Cracked and a number of online gaming titles.
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