So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product, caregiving marketplace, or caregiver advisory service.   Or other. Your new company gets ready to travel into battle for west coast networking, or you're back from Orlando or Boston, consider this guidance, now that cards have been exchanged and follow-up emails sent. Soon your new or existing company will officially launch a new product or service, or a much-anticipated offering will finally ship. You read AARP and Pew survey research reports, used a magnifying glass to see the vendors identified in Caregiving Innovation Frontiers. Now look over this November 2017 updated checklist. Are you ready?

Maybe Best Buy has an idea worth copying from Amazon. In 2015, Amazon introduced Amazon Home Services, which fairly recently added tech services, including sending a local tech professional to your home. The work might be setting up a router; connections for 4 devices; password protection; and use and troubleshooting instructions. Recently, Best Buy launched Assured Living, a service to help long-distance adult children monitor older family members’ well-being, including setting them up with smart home technologies (costing as much as $1000 for all of them), possibly some of the list is in the ‘official’ definition. Oh yeah, and there is a service charge of $1/day.

Aging in America – hosting innovators and technologists for helping older adults.  The conference seesaws between west coasts (San Francisco 2018) and the windy city of Chicago, where it was this year – offering up a full program of sessions across the week of March 20-24. Bookending this conference, which offers Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for social service professionals, was What's Next Boomer Summit and the Aging 2.0 Chicago Pitch Event.  The Pitch winner was i65, a tool to help professionals provide guidance on Medicare. That event also included TeleCalm – an intriguing telephone service to help block unwanted calls, including a tool for caregivers to create a trusted list of callers.

After the long, long, long HomeHero goodbye – was the analysis correct?  HomeHero, based in LA, was one of the three dubbed here as 'Home-egos' to launch within the past 2-3 years -- along with Honor and Hometeam -- and the first to shut its home care business down.  But, unlike most shutdowns, this was a moment for founder Kyle Hill to recap the 'tech-enabled' home care firm’s life and closing story in exhaustive and exhausting detail, complete with pictures. Considering its $23 million of investment, it should have landed on the same Forbes page as the other home care investments –overlooked perhaps because its investors were not typical VCs.  But HomeHero’s example illustrates the enthusiasm and limited business analysis of startups in the older adult space, Lively being one of the most recent, but there are many more which were publicized loudly and then disappeared quickly without even a puff of smoke – or a founder post-mortem.