About Health Media Marketing
| 05 February 2010
The history of Health Media Marketing parallels the development of the Internet. HMM was founded by John Barson and Victor Lam in 2006 to meet the needs of the natural health community by applying the best technology to developing a network of websites dedicated to empowering consumers by helping health professionals get their messages online.
John and Victor met in 1993. John was producing and hosting two radio talk shows on am1040 in Vancouver. One of the shows was The Computer Program, Canada's first weekly talk show on technology. The other was The Changing Family, a show discussing relationships in a workshop format. That was the year Mr. Barson discovered the Internet. The spark came as a result of a radio interview with Frank Reiter, founder of Mindlink Internet. Mr. Barson, with his background in technology and his passion for helping the community, realized the Internet was the most important social revolution since the printing press. Mr. Reiter offered/donated his company's services to help Mr. Barson deploy a web server to put the family organizations Mr. Barson worked with online.
John started looking into the requirements for deploying a web server and that was when he met Victor Lam who was a server expert with Compucon in Richmond, BC. They built the first web server that year and it was deployed at Mindlink Internet in New Westminster, BC. At the time the Internet was very rudimentary. Mosaic was the tool of choice until Netscape 1.0 hit the scene. Everyone was very excited about Netscape because it had the capability of tables and better font management. The biggest challeng was educating people about the web and its capabilities. Between 1993 and 1996 Mr. Barson focused on putting organizations like Family Services of Greater Vancouver, BC Council for the Family and many others online
By 1996 Mr. Barson realized a great need for continuing education for companies and individuals looking to take advantage of the Internet. Mr. Barson met Rob Donald, President of Langley College, at a Chamber of Commerce function. He proposed a diploma course for Webmasters. Mr. Donald saw the value of such a course. At the time there was no such course available and he saw how Langley College could take the lead. Over the next 6 months Mr. Barson developed the course modules and the course was launched in the fall of 1996 with a full class load.
In the fall of 1996 Mr. Barson founded Savingsplus Internet with David Leeder. The company's goal was to develop web-based tools and applications with Foxpro. Over the next 4 years SI was instrumental in developing the first credit card interface for CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce), one of Canada's largest bank, a telephone billing system for AT&T's multiquest system in the US, and deploying a supply chain solution that rivaled any technology of the day. In addition SI created an ecommerce catalog/website solution that is still running today for many companies. You can see a sample of it on OmegaHealthStore.com
It was 1996 when Mr. Barson built his first health food store website for Semperviva on West Broadway in Vancouver. That led to the first publication website for Healthy Living which was Canada's #1 newstand health magazine. Yahoo rated the website the #1 online health site on January of 1998. Over the years his company has built many health-related websites.
In 1999 Mr. Barson volunteered his computer, network and web services to a group of people who had a dream of creating a naturopathic college in New Westminster, BC. The Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine was founded that year. It was originally located on Carnarvon St. in the old courthouse. In 2006 the school purchased the Columbia St. Skytrain building and renamed it the Boucher Centre. The school provided Mr. Barson with studio space and he built and launched Total Health Radio. Mr. Barson started a program to teach the students media skills to give them the confidence to work with the media once they graduated and set up practises in their respective communities.
The result of that effort was Naturopathic Radio and eventually the Naturopathic Health Network. Now Mr. Barson is focused on helping health professionals take advantage of the Internet by helping them deploy their own websites as part of a large network dedicated to empowering consumers.
