There's more: it can tweet indie rock lyrics or your feelings on the new microbrew you just discovered. It can upload Twitter pics of the sexy 20-somethings you met on your journey through the Gotham night. What happens if one of your friends is at the party CouchCachet selects for you? Not going to happen, because the app uses a Foursquare parameter that lets you search for locations your friends have never visited. And if all your friends start using the service? "This is fine, we have robots talking to robots," Mr. Fountain said. "This is the future."

On the other hand, who needs friends. Unsure whether the cute guy you just met is ignoring you, or just really busy? Post the specifics to dating advice service HeTexted, and let 40 strangers break the bad news. Make that hundreds of strangers. At the prodding of HeTexted cofounder Carrie Henderson-McDermott, an audience member named Victoria recounted a scenario: She'd met a guy at a party, he asked her out, then texted days later to say he'd come down with something. By an overwhelming show of hands, the audience agreed: Sorry, Victoria, he's just not that into you.

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, Fred Wilson and Gollum have in common? They all showed up in RunGold CEO Vivian Rosenthal's demo. The company earned notice in 2011 when it helped shoe seller Airwalk create something called an invisible pop-up store in Washington Square Park. Now it's using its augmented reality chops to help users create and share images with branded content. Photo-bombs away!

Also virtual, these days: your medical care. At least, if you work for Tumblr, Percolate or another company buying employee health plans from Sherpaa. Companies pay $1,000 to $4,000 per employee; in non-emergency cases, employees enter their symptoms over Sherpaa's online platform; doctors are on call 24-7 to dole out advice and certain treatments, and route patients to the appropriate specialists. How does the company suss out drug-seeking behavior, an audience member asked? Sherpaa doesn't prescribe narcotics, founder Jay Parkinson said. "If you're overdosing on amoxicillin—well, I've never actually seen that."

Mr. Parkinson

Last August, Betabeat profiled Jay Parkinson, the Williamsburg doctor who first won over New York techies in the late aughts by reinventing annoying doctors visits. The hipster doc hacked together his own system--trading insurance premiums and wait times for a Google Calendar, Skype, and PayPal. He eventually formalized the system under a startup called Hello, Health until he parted ways with the company in 2009.

Now, Mr. Parkison is back at it with a similar venture called Sherpaa, a concierge health service he was just developing when we spoke. Sherpaa works with directly with employers to give company staffers 24/7 phone and email access to Sherpaa's physicians, which the startup refers to as "guides." (Get it??)

Imagine consulting an expert instead of WebMD when you have that weird nagging pain in your jaw, but no time to leave the office. Or opting to email a picture of an injury instead of visiting the emergency room. Sounds well-suited for a heads-down office culture.

The company officially launched earlier this year with Tumblr as its sole client. (Perhaps they were attracted to Sherpaa's excess of vowels.) In recent weeks, Fast Company reports that the healthcare startup has been signing up other clients. But the most telling detail is a stastic Mr. Parkinson shared with GigaOm: so far, 80 percent of Tumblr's employees have used the service.

GigaOm says Sherpaa charges employers a flat-fee per month per employee, but Fast Company describes the business model a little differently:

Sherpaa cuts out wasteful spending by going to companies, analyzing their health care, and securing them a plan that is more in line with how their employees use medical services. They generally recommend a deductible of at least $2,000, and then ask companies to give employees a $2,000 debit card for health care. Whatever they don’t use goes back into the company coffers. In the end, these companies can save $2,000 to $4,000 per employee, even with the debit card.

Sherpaa doctors only work remotely, but can assess whether patients need a prescription or specialist referral. The startup currently has one doctor on call, but 100 specialists and plans to expand to 150 to 200 New York City doctors in the future.

We've reached out Mr. Parkinson for more details and will update you when we hear back.

Not pictured: Fitbit and Withings scale. (via @Naveen)

Don't call it a startup--at least not yet--but Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai dropped some hints about an upcoming personal project at an event at Union Square Monday evening, as Erick Schonfeld revealed on Twitter.

The de-Crunched tech blogger was at the VC firm for an event about "Networked Health," and Mr. Selvadurai's proposition, taken straight from the Quantified Self rule book, sounded like it fit right in:

Former 4SQ founder @naveen talking about "personal analytics" and how observation c@ Union Square Ventures instagr.am/p/KoAA2XJHlN/

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

How @naveen hacks his body: No alcohol, no carbs, no sugar

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

What is @naveen's current project?"Google Analytics for everything I know about my body" have to track 3 things: exercise, food, sleep

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

As Owen Thomas points out on Business Insider, Mr. Selvadurai and his cofounder Dennis Crowley always tried to pitch Foursquare less as a check-in app and more as a "a data-driven recommendations engine which analyzes and rewards real-world behavior."

That worldview dovetails nicely into the "Quantified Self" movement, which presumes that by measuring and analyzing behavior, one can improve it. (You're less likely to splurge on french fries, say, if life is a game of improving your fitness and all the apps on your homescreen are keeping score.) The target market for QS is somewhere in the Venn diagram between Ray Kurzweil fans and people who keep an Excel doc of their bicep girth. With iPhone apps that can take your blood pressure or sporty spice bracelets that measure "your entire athletic life," you can take that treadmill monitor with you.

Mr. Thomas argues that Quantified Self movement is "a big deal in fitness-obsessed Silicon Valley," but wonders if "the idea may be fresher in New York City." Psssh. You think we don't know from optimization? We invite Mr. Thomas to check out the Betabeat archives where we've explored how #4HB techies have opted for QS as the life-hack du jour. It looks like our old friend Jay Parkinson, Tumblr MD, even made an appearance at the USV event.

Potential incubatees.

Betabeat has been trying to warn you that the healthcare revolution was coming to tech industry. But Blueprint Health might finally be able to get you out from behind your standing desks and pay attention. Xconomy reports that Blueprint, a member of the TechStars Network, is opening an incubator in January and already taking applications for health-related ventures.

The TechStars connection comes in because members of the network  share best practices across accelerators. In keeping with that model, startups get $20,000 in seed funding and Blueprint takes 6 percent equity. Partner Brad Weinberg, who started his first company, Shape Up, in 2006, says Blueprint, which expects to get 300 applications for 10 spots in the inaugural class, has raised $400,000 and is setting up "a really cool space”  in Union Square. But like TechStars, the big draw seems to be the mentors. They include two techies Betabeat has profiled recently, ZocDoc co-founder Oliver Kharrza and Future Well's Jay Parkinson, as well as experts from Pfizer and VCs from Bessemer, Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and Spark.

This reminded us of an interesting conversation we had with Cornell's Daniel Huttenlocher, Dean of Computing and Information Science. He said Cornell picked "health informatics" as one of the interdisciplinary hubs the school wanted to focus on for its tech campus proposal because that's where the market was headed.

The Bose radio in the kitchen piped soothing Dixieland standards past the verdant rose bushes. Dr. Parkinson went sockless in his loafers. He wore navy seersucker shorts and had his chambray shirt unbuttoned to somewhere around his fourth rib, revealing a tight, tanned torso. Life seemed swell.

“I was the doctor of the tech community,” the 35-year-old Dr. Parkinson recalled of his emergence on the scene several years ago. “It was just my first practice, but I got a ton of press and a lot of hits. So, like, anybody young and creative in New York would call me up to be their doctor.”

At the time, Dr. Jay, as he’s known around town, used tools like Google Calendar and Skype to redefine the conventional office visit for the web age. In lieu of humorless receptionists and cumbersome insurance claims, he offered to meet patients anywhere and accept PayPal. With lower overhead and no margins lost to the insurance companies, he could offer a concierge service to patients—house calls and hour-long appointments—and still pay off more than $200,000 in med school loans.

The slew of articles that followed focused on Dr. Parkinson’s start-up Hello Health (also based in Williamsburg), which attempted to formalize the system he’d hacked together into a streamlined social platform. Light-weight technology, meet the creaky old American health care system.

The idea was to build something that could scale nationally, enabling any small practice to join the digital revolution. But Hello Health quickly ran into problems when it tried to incorporate doctors who wanted to accept insurance and navigate the attendant maze of regulations and guidelines. Dr. Parkinson had given up his medical practice after just six months to become Hello Health’s chief concept officer in January, 2008, letting his license lapse after deciding he could not longer offer his patients the flexibility they deserved. A year and a half later, he left Hello Health  in the hands of his co-founder.

The peripatetic Dr. Parkinson has a new scheme, of course, and it’s even more ambitious than what came before. Through a new start-up, The Future Well, launched last year, and a collective that he started a few months ago called Doctors of the Future (a reference to his own magazine profile), Dr. Parkinson aims to position himself as the Michael Pollan or Jamie Oliver of “health consciousness,” he said, changing American priorities through his enlightened philosophies of lifestyle and design.

“I’d like to be one of those people,” Dr. Parkinson acknowledged. “Michael Pollan has to stay within food. I’d like to say—from a doctor’s perspective, from a health expert’s perspective—it’s food, movement, relationships, environment, work. It’s essentially just sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s fun, it’s enjoying sex—doctors never talk about that, but it makes the world go round. It’s a consciousness about these components of your life that you should be optimizing.

“If you enjoy your life better, I think you’ll be healthier,” he concluded, while adding quickly, “but I don’t know if there’s any proof of that.”

So what exactly is the Future Well? The website’s tagline reads, “We design, speak, and consult to inspire health,” which is a touch vague, to say the least. But if it’s hard to define just exactly what Future Well does, that hasn’t stopped blue-chip clients like the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi, the National Institutes of Health and the Freelancers Union here in New York from requesting samples.

In each case, Dr. Parkinson’s treatment has been different. For Sanofi, he and his Future Well partner, Grant Harrison, created a Tumblr-inspired app that lets doctors “favorite” online resources about various health issues and then offer patients access to those curated lists. For the Freelancer’s Union, Future Well suggested strategies like creating a prize network of “mission-based” independent doctors and offering boutique services to the expensive outliers in the union’s insurance pool to keep them out of the hospital and taking their meds.

The flow of ideas seems to have increased now that Dr. Parkinson, like so many of New York’s growing contingent of entrepreneurs, has pivoted away from his original plan. “I’m trying, basically, to stay out of the medical world and focus more on health,” he explained. “I think the medical world is an intractable problem. I do not want to engage in any sort of system where I have to engage with the health insurance industry.”

In practical terms, that means he’s targeting those who are already either healthy enough or wealthy enough to sidestep some of the most trenchant problems in the health care system in favor of a boutique approach.

“Boomers are too far gone, diabetes is too far gone,” said Dr. Parkinson, who will deliver this message in upcoming speaking engagements at Google, Stanford and the Mayo Clinic. “All we can do is focus on people who are young, really well or relatively well and get them to be conscious of the fact that their behavior today influences their life 10 years from now. I like to talk about that. I like to talk about the standing desks.”

Dr. Parkinson was referring to research that shows that people who stand all day have a 65 percent lesser chance of cardiac events than those who sit at a desk. “That’s waaay better than what Lipitor would do and it’s a simple thing,” he said. “Plus I lose 300 calories a day from standing up and working. I mean, that’s like three glasses of wine.” Through his influential Tumblr, he’s already inspired a change in start-up offices around the city. Which is sort of the point. By seeding his ideas with the type of people who made up his short-lived practice, he hopes to watch the influence roll downhill.

“Everything good starts in Williamsburg, in New York City,” Dr. Parkinson said in soft-spoken, drawn-out cadence that sounded vaguely surfer-ish, until he told The Observer he's from St. Louis. “A couple years later, it trickles down to the rest of America. A couple years later, it trickles down to the poor in America, you know? So to me, you always have to start with the innovators and the ones that have the means to adopt early. Look at what Michael Pollan has done to McDonald’s. Happy Meals replacing their fries with apples—you can’t say that’s Michael Pollan, but he’s part of the ecosystem that’s encouraging them to do that.”

He offered another example. “Whole Foods when we were kids was like something that a bunch of hippies in California did. Now it’s a whole industry,” Dr. Parkinson said. “Jamie Oliver didn’t exist. Rapha, which is really kickass bicycling gear in London, teamed up with Paul Smith to design clothes that you can wear to a business meeting. I think that’s absolutely amazing.”

AMONG NEW YORK’S CREATIVE SET, Dr. Parkinson already has a few followers and friends who think he can pull it off.

“When you talk about good design and what kind of audience you can find through that, in a certain sense, quality is elitist,” acknowledged Benjamin Palmer, CEO of the interactive agency Barbarian Group. “But Whole Foods or Starbucks, it was just a way to convince everyone that coffee should be pretty good, actually. In 2008, Facebook was an elitist hipster little thing and now everybody is doing it.” That said, he added, “I’m not sure how quickly anything Jay’s working on could achieve that.”

Mr. Palmer is a regular attendee at Dr. Parkinson’s popular backyard parties, which attract a number of prominent techies. “He’s got this eclectic, intellectual geekdom,” noted Aubrey Sabala, who heads up Facebook’s consumer marketing team in Palo Alto. In addition to the tech set, Ms. Sabala said, you’ll see folks like comedian Reggie Watts show up. “The conversations that are happening are not just nerdy coding stuff,” she added. “It’s the theory of technology and how it could be applied to—it sounds nerdy, but there’s wine.”

Friends and followers of Dr. Parkinson’s, who devotedly comment on and “heart” his daily Tumblr posts, buy the Michael Pollan vision, even if they’re not exactly sure how he will get there.

“I just see him as a household name,” Ms. Sabala said. “I’d love to see him on a White House Council for Health or influencing decisions in Congress.”

Others are hard-pressed to envision how a prescription for better health that fails to grapple with the poor or infirm could have any real effect on the problem. “I think it’s viable for those that can afford it, but there’s a large base of people who can’t—people who aren’t making $100,000 a year,” said Leslie Ziegler, creative director of Rock Health, an accelerator for health start-ups based in San Francisco. “We’ve seen the wealthy go out of pocket for a long time already.”

Dr. Parkinson shrugged off the criticism. “You can beat your head at trying to figure out solutions for, like you said, a creaky system,” he acknowledged, “or you could design things that people want, and if they can afford it, they can afford it.”

As it happened, that was one of the challenges for Hello Health: while patients seemed willing to pay the subscription fees, doctors balked at the cost of a social platform that didn’t allow customers to pay with health insurance.

Having shuttered its incubators in Williamsburg and Manhattan in 2010 and largely stopped courting media attention, Hello Health’s software is now both HIPAA-compliant for insurers and designated as “meaningful use,” which means Medicare and the federal government will subsidize the cost of adoption. “The idea that Jay had sounds so simple, but health care is a land mine,” said Hello, Health CEO Nathanial Findlay, who counts BlueCross BlueShield as an institutional investor. “You have to be very, very careful about which toes you’re stepping on.”

That doesn’t seem like a big worry for Dr. Parkinson. He said he’d recently met with Tumblr about the possibility of creating a concierge medical service for the start-up’s staffers. “A doctor friend for their employees that they can call, email, text questions. We’ll set up appointments with our favorite groups of doctors in the city.” He described the plan as “a layer on top of insurance that would work within their insurance network.”

As for the physicians, Dr. Parkinson has been building a list via Tumblr, posting a call for “forward-thinking creative doctors” to join his tribe. (He said 1,500 signed up to be Doctors of the Future.) “As in everything there’s a technology-adoption curve,” he explained. “If you gather together all these really innovative, creative, young, earlier-adopter types, something interesting can happen.”

If the Tumblr arrangement gets approved, he imagines it will be duplicated by other start-ups around the city. If not, he’ll try something else.

Toward the end of the afternoon, The Observer migrated inside Dr. Parkinson’s railroad apartment for a tour. Next to a mini bedside filing cabinet, containing curios from his medical antiquities collection, stood a tall red industrial cart with an iMac monitor on top. “That’s one of the other things that I would like to do—start a company that makes handmade, beautiful standing desks,” he said. “They’re all geeky and gross, made in China. Or sort of do-it-yourself, bad looking things. I want to make a whole, like, really beautiful standing desk company.”

-ntiku@observer.com