China 2007 - Part 2

The flight northwest from Hong Kong to Guilin, in the northeastern part of the Guangxi province, took about an hour. Like all of the five flights we took in China, the plane took off and landed on schedule and the flight attendants were pleasant and gave you the feeling they sincerely wanted to be of maximum service to the passengers. I never for an instant saw any signs of grumpiness in any Chinese employee.

Guilin, by the banks of the Li River, is considered to be one of the most beautiful tourist cities in China. With more than 2,000 years of cultural history, Guilin has gained a reputation for its unique scenery: green hills, rocky cliffs, clear water, numerous caves, stones of various shapes. After breakfast we began a day cruise and saw the dramatic limestone peaks. I have never seen anything like this anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, it was a cloudy day and the pictures are not great. After a short tour of Yang Shuo village and what would be a string of traditional Chinese dinners, we headed to the airport again, this time to fly to Shanghai.

The flight from Guilin to Shanghai was nearly two hours. Shanghai -- second largest city with a popluation of 17 million people -- is on the coast of East China Sea about equidistant between Hong Kong and Beijing. It is truly a great city offering tremendous contrast between the "old" Shanghai and the "new". Driving and walking along The Bund showed us part of the city's elegant riverside promenade. The gardens in the old section were stunning. Equally impressive was the Maglev train which runs from downtown to the new Shanghai Pudong Airport -- in 7 1/2 minutes at 268 mph. It is the fastest train in the world. The maglev train floats about 3/8 of an inch above the guidway on a magnetic field. The magnetic field of the guidway changes direction continuously and "pulls" the train forward -- there is no onboard engine. The ride was smooth as could be and the acceleration and speed were dramatic. We got off the train, crossed to the other side and rode the Maglev back to the city and then took a cab back to our hotel. The Shanghai Museum contained jade, bronze, caligraphy, porcelain, and a history of the development of Chinese culture. Hundreds of school children in their uniforms paraded through the museum. Many of them enjoyed saying "hello" and then giggled when we said ni hao. We also learned to say boo yao xie xie.

The 90+-story sky scrapers all over the city were full of people. All seventeen million people were busy at something -- the Shanghai Stock Exchange continues to set new records. The Chinese acrobat show was something you would have to see to believe (a few pictures will be in photo gallery later). Next was a flight to Yichang.

Index for the trip to China (May 2007)

Travels     May 11, 2007 06:12 PM

China 2007 - Part 1

This week was the beginning of my fourth trip to China (see Asia travel section of photo gallery for pictures from the prior trips). The first three were alone and 90+% business. Eventually the day would come when I would be lucky enough to go back with friends and family and not do any business activity. The prior trips were to just a few of the big cities but this time it was many cities and villages -- there was an incredible amount to see and learn.

We were fortunate to be able to get a non-stop flight with Continental from Newark to Hong Kong where we spent the first two and a half days of the trip. The twin-engine Boeing 777 was able to make the journey in roughly fifteen hours. The GPS indicated that our hotel was 8,900 miles from home. There is much to be said about Hong Kong but the most memorable parts were Victoria Peak and the Buddha.

Hong Kong is 425 square miles in size and is located on the southeastern coast of China. The main areas are Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories. Hong Kong Island lies just south of Kowloon and the two are separated by Victoria Harbor. The New Territories lie north of Kowloon and include more than 260 outlying islands.

To get to the peak we walked along the waterfront to the ferry boat which took us to downtown near the convention center (where I had given a speech ten years earlier). We then walked through the city part way up the hill to the tram. The ride up the side of the mountain to Victoria Peak was very steep and the view from the top was spectacular. After a nice lunch we walked the 3,000 meter trail along the edge of the peak and could look down at Victoria Harbor and the beautiful skyscrapers below.

During the trip in 1999 it was a great pleasure to meet Karen and Alfonso. Karen worked for IBM at the time (she is now with HSBC). They were kind enough to take me on a day trip to see the largest Buddha in the world, located at Ngong Ping on Lantau Island. We got there by subway and then a boat. Eight years later we met up with Karen and Alfonso to see the Buddha once again but this time it was by subway and gondola. The area has been developed into quite a tourist attraction, complete with many shops and restaurants. We enjoyed a traditional Chinese lunch before heading to the airport to fly to Guilin.


Index for the trip to China (May 2007)

Travels     May 7, 2007 05:36 AM

Three days of music in New York

It was a joy to attend the 14,438th concert of The New York Philharmonic this past weekend at Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center. The all-Brahms program included the Academic Festival Overture and Symphony No. 1 in C minor. Twenty-four year old Julia Fischer performed the Concerto in D major. I now know why reviewers have described her as “not a talent, but a full-fledged phenomenal violinist”.

The other phenomenal part of the evening was watching Lorin Maazel -- Music Director since 2002. He has led more than 150 orchestras in more than 5,000 opera and concert performances around the world. This truly remarkable man uses no score yet seems to know every note and passage intimately. He not only conducts but he leads -- providing a queue just before notes and passages are played. (Having memorized six minutes or so of Beethoven and Mozart for my own conducting experiences, I have great respect for someone who knows countless hours of music). Maazel made his first conducting appearance at age six and I estimate he must be 77 years old. After seventy years of conducting, there are likely not many classical music pieces he doesn't know.

The following evening we attended the UBS Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall. Maxim Vengerov, Conductor and Violinist, added yet another dimension to conducting. He is less than half the age of Lorin Maazel but has the same potential. He conducted with a bow in hand and also performed the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4. He then conducted the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 2 and the great Sinfonia concertante -- all without a score.

An orchestra is only as good as the sum of it's great musicians and the conductor. The New York Philharmonic consists of many stars, each famous in their own right. Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster, has been winning numerous awards and competitions around the world since he was a boy. Stanley Drucker is the most famous clarinetist in the world. (See Marvelous Mozart). The list goes on but I was most impressed with Liang Wang, the twenty-six year old principal oboist. The principal oboist sits in the center of the orchestra and in many ways *is* the center of the orchestra, second only to the conductor. Liang Wang spends hours every day shaping the reeds for his instrument. As he performs he rises six inches out of his chair and provides strong leadership appreciated by all. Wang was born in in Qing Dao, China, in 1980 and comes from a musical family. He studied at the Beijing Central Conservatory, which has a thirteen acre campus, over 500,000 volumes in the Music Library, and more than 500 pianos. Needless to say, there is great appreciation for classical music in China. There are currently ten million Chinese children taking violin lessons, and 30 million are learning to play the piano.

Epilogue: On Saturday a lighter program was equally enjoyable -- Mama Mia. Not as far in the past as Mozart et al but a lot of nostalgia.

Other patrickWeb music-related stories

Music , Travels     April 23, 2007 05:34 PM

New Home for patrickWeb

It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site -- ibm.com/patrick -- was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York and then in 2003 moved patrickWeb over to Interland which was subsequently acquired and became Peer1. The dedicated IBM server at Peer1 in Miami has been very good for the past four years but managing it has become a bit complex and time consuming. With all the bad guys out there trying to hack into anything and everything there is a need for near constant surveillance -- even with all the automated tools. I decided that having a shared server with constant and professional monitoring was better than having a dedicated server with part time security inspections. patrickWeb's new home is at DreamHost.

DreamHost is an employee owned company. They seem to have a passion for providing solid web hosting at a very affordable price. For $7.95 per month you get more capacity than I can imagine using. They have no telephone support but the combination of a really good interface to their hosting environment plus a good Knowledgebase and normally responsive email support makes me feel confident. One thing I like is their status page where you can always see what is going on. Adding and managing databases is a piece of cake and Dreamhost includes full backup "snapshots" of your data at various regular intervals -- hourly, daily, and weekly.

Last weekend I bit the bullet and began the move of patrickWeb and other sites and related email that I manage over to Dreamhost. I changed the DNS servers at Network Solutions to point to the Dreamhost servers in Los Angeles instead of the Peer1 server in Miami. The change propagated through the Internet in a roughly a day and most everything works. There are a few glitches on patrickWeb that I haven't figured out yet. If you see some pages on the site that have a missing menu, that is one of the issues I am working on. Feedback on broken things is always welcome.

The cost, speed, and reliability of DreamHost is just one more reminder of how much the Internet is being woven into our lives. Not that long ago it was necessary to get a CD and install software on your PC to be enabled to utilize an application. Now you can get almost any application online. In the early days of dial-up modem connections to the Internet it wasn't practical to depend on the Net for applications. With "always-on" connections, high speed, dramatically low cost storage, and impressive new Web 2.0 interfaces (such as kayak.com), the Internet is really becoming the computer. The next phase is going to move that capability to our handheld and mobile devices. The Nintendo Wii with WiFi and the Opera browser offers a glimpse of the future that is right in front of us.

Home Automation , Internet Technology , Personal Computing     April 18, 2007 02:12 PM

Politics

Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. A key part of the political system -- and one of the many great freedoms we have in America -- is the ability to vote. We often don't think about it, perhaps, and some people don't take the opportunity, but voting is very powerful because it can enable us to determine who our leaders will be and what policies will be followed. Some people thrive in the political environment, some complain about it, and a few throw their hat in the ring with a commitment to make government better. That is the case of James Marlow.

I met James more than a dozen years ago when he was at Lotus (subsequently with IBM). Some years later James, a native Georgian, invited me to come down to Atlanta and give a talk about the future of the Internet. At that point and for another six years James worked for Yahoo!. He has had a passion for politics for a couple of decades and when a U.S. Congressional opening occurred in Georgia's 10th District, James decided to make a run for it. There is going to be a special election in June. It will be a crowded field of potentially over a dozen candidates.  James says that his focus will be on "common sense solutions and bringing innovation to government". The specific areas he is going to hone in on are to improve education (the high school drop out rate is over 30%), healthcare (electronic medical records), and achieving energy independence.

I don't know anything about Georgia politics or about the opponents that James will face, but one thing I do know is that we need more people in government that have experience in the technology industry. The U.S. Senate includes 53 (53%) lawyers and the Congress overall includes 211 (39%). Many people feel that the American legal system is one of the nation's top domestic problems. If you feel that way then the fact that the lawyers in Congress have such influence over the political system may keep you up at night.

We need innovative yet simple policies to deal with the major problems in education, healthcare, energy, immigration, and defense. What are the odds of getting simple legislation from our Congress? Currently, congress is seeking advice from the biggest accounting firms to help them rewrite the income tax laws. What are the odds of the result being a simpler tax code? The laws adopted by Congress are highly complex, written by lawyers. Then lawyers represent plaintiffs to sue based on the laws. Then the defendants hire lawyers. When taxes are an issue, both plaintiff and defendant hire professional accountants. Then the accountants hire lawyers to make sure their advise isn't subject to drawing a suit, but advise often does draw a suit and then another set of plaintiffs and defendants hires another set of lawyers and we end up with layers of lawyers. All of them charging $200-$800 per hour.

The legal aspects of the political system are important. Solid principles have be at the cornerstone of the system and lawyers are needed to write, defend, and prosecute in the legal system. It is a matter of balance. Currently, one might argue that we are out of balance. The key problems of our country require innovative technology solutions. People die because of lack of modern technology in healthcare. We don't need complex layers of laws to solve this. We need visionary political leaders with technology backgrounds and experience at investing in and deploying advanced technology solutions. I hope when people go to the polls in June in Georgia's 10th district that they will look beyond political parties and examine the technology experience of the candidates.

Other patrickWeb stories in the people category

People     April 9, 2007 10:48 AM

IBM Happenings: March 2007

The month of March at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. In the public sector, IBM will develop a data management system that will provide detailed information about student performance and progress for New York City's public schools. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here

IBM     March 30, 2007 10:45 AM

Royalty Free Music

I have to admit to my confidence that it would happen -- more than $1 Billion in sales of digital music in 2005, which was triple the year before. Revenues in 2006 doubled to about $2 billion. People are willing to pay for music if it is offered to them in a contemporary way -- i.e. digital. Consumers like choice and when it comes to music, they have access to many music sites with unlimited shelf space. It should not be a surprise to the music industry that if people are offered the choice to buy tracks of music of their liking instead of being forced to buy an album containing mostly songs they don't want, they choose the former. Apple continues to be the thought leader on this. Today they announced that if you like some tracks you have purchased and want to buy the entire album later they will give you full credit for the tracks from the album that you have previously bought on iTunes. In other words you don't have to pay twice for the same song when you purchase an album containing tracks you already own from that album.

Not only is choice a big thing for consumers but also for businesses. Stores and restaurants and companies of all kinds have been using "elevator music" for years and have paid dearly for it. Now they have some new choices. It is called "royalty free music". Operating as one of Jupitermedia's new companies, Royalty Free Music.com offers thousands of tracks of high quality music for every occasion and from every genre. Once a company pays an annual licensing fee, they are free to use the music they download on a nearly unlimited basis. After downloading their choices, they can connect their PC to their audio system and use iTunes, Winamp, or any MP3 player to shuffle and play the music whenever and wherever they choose. For example, rather than using "piped in" music a store can pick the music they want and can feature sounds and songs that may remind customers of things the store has for sale or sets the atmosphere they want to create in the store.

In case you are reading the patrickWeb blog via email, take a look at the patrickWeb homepage and try the music. Let me know if there is something else you would like me to add to the collection.

As for the music industry, I continue to believe the core problem is attitude. The industry group that publishes data on music sales calls itself the "International Federation of the Phonographic Industry". Does that give us a clue that they are not keeping up with the times?

Music     March 29, 2007 09:23 PM

Home Automation (update)

Thanks for all the feedback on the BusinessWeek magazine and video pieces. Seems to be a lot of interest in home automation. I will continue working on the series of stories that I promised. I just realized that BW has archived the video version of the story. It is still available and I have updated the link below. Unfortunately, you have to watch a short video advertisement at the beginning. I don't like this as you may have gathered from my various stories about advertising.

The story ran in the January 22, 2007 issue of the magazine, pages 82-83.The follow-on filming ended up on BusinessWeek Weekend (carried by ABC-TV) on the Sunday after Christmas. Here are links to the story and video.

King Of His Digital Castle (magazine)
Ultimate Wired Home: A look at a computer-controlled home (video)

Not so sure about "master" and I certainly don't think of my home as a "castle" but now that the cat is out of the bag, I have decided to write a series of stories to share the details about the home automation system in the hope that it will be useful to others. I will include what went into the planning, what technology choices I made, the design choices, and what I have learned. Stay tuned.

Home Automation     March 23, 2007 03:40 PM

Turning Silver into Gold

One day back in the late 1990's, Mary Furlong paid a visit to IBM to give us an update on what she was doing at SeniorNet, which she had founded in 1986. SeniorNet 's mission was to provide older adults with education about and access to computer technologies to enhance their lives and enable them to share their knowledge and wisdom. IBM was one of the corporate sponsors of the effort, and my interest was to offer ideas on how the Internet could take a larger role in the mission.

Mary had other ideas beyond SeniorNet.org -- namely SeniorNet dot com, which would later become ThirdAge Media. Her idea was that in addition to the non-profit mission -- which continues today -- there was a for profit opportunity in serving the needs of midlife adults -- generally those in their 40s, 50s and 60s -- and those who want to build a genuine relationship with them. ThirdAge has a vision to rewrite the rules of getting older and "transform the voice of aging from one of limitation to one of possibility". ThirdAge refers to the concept of lifelong learning, self-development and fulfillment, and the period of life following young adulthood. Some would say ThirdAgers are those who have gone from being a child to having children to becoming a grandparent.

In 1999 I joined the advisory board and worked with Mary as ThirdAge went through tumultuous growth to later be followed by the gyrations of "the bubble". During this time Mary visited the White House and appeared on CBS, NBC's Today Show, PBS, and NPR to discuss trends in aging and technology. ThirdAge Media was acquired in 2000 by MyFamily.com. In 2001, private investors purchased the company, which was then renamed ThirdAge Inc.

Mary moved on to bigger and better things, continuing to capitalize on the huge market opportunity presented by ThirdAgers. She formed yet another company, Mary Furlong & Associates, to help socially and consumer-conscious companies do a better job of reaching the ThirdAgers with their products and services. In her spare time she is Executive Professor of Entrepreneurship and Women in Leadership at Santa Clara University. Mary's latest book is called Turning Silver into Gold -- How to Profit in the new Boomer Marketplace and I highly recommend reading it. If you think you know what a "boomer" is you may be surprised.

America's 78 million boomers earn more than $2 trillion and own more than 77% of the assets of the country. They spent $44 billion on clothing in 2004. Prescription drugs have grown from $40B in 1990 to $250B in 2005. Guess who buys the majority of them? The boomers represent the first generation to have more than 50% with some form of higher education. They spend more than $150 billion per year on travel. Mary's book expands on the many new market opportunities that are emerging because of boomers. From clothing styles to exercise to food to financial planning, Mary details the key market factors and how to appeal to the boomer buyer. Mary operates on the principle that by focusing on the for profit business opportunity it can enable a financial return which can in part go back to the non-profit sector to meet the needs of those who are less fortunate.

Founders Hall blog

People     March 21, 2007 07:15 PM

Three Percent

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce has announced that U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the fourth quarter of 2006 were $29.3 billion, an increase of 4.6 percent from the third quarter and 24.6% above the fourth quarter of 2005. In fact, the year to year growth has been more than 20% for every quarter since it has been tracked back five years or so ago. The impressive double-digit growth rate is more than triple the growth of retail sales overall. E-commerce has now reached 3% of total retail sales

Why isn't it 20% instead of 3% ? There are many reasons -- most of them are not technology related. Other than the major sites, many web businesses have lame web pages that ask you to re-enter a date because you forgot the dashes, or re-enter the date because no dashes are allowed, or enter your favorite color and then tell you it must be at least five characters in length (nix red, blue, gray, tan, pink), or make bold statements about how their e-business is there for you 24x7 and then displays a page that says "sorry, our web site is temporarily unavailable", or "you can't there from here" error messages . When it comes to concerns about security, identity theft, and privacy, I am optimistic that these issues will be adequately addressed. However, the ease of use issues require a shift in attitude to solve. I must confess that I thought this would be well understood after a decade of e-commerce but we clearly have a long way to go.

As eBay and Amazon continue to grow and show real profits to the world, business leaders are paying more attention. The free markets are driving competition and innovation is beginning to kick into high gear. We have barely scratched the surface of what is going to happen. It will never be 100% of retail but I can see it getting to 25% which will make it a trillion dollar business.

e-Business     March 14, 2007 06:10 PM

ThirdAgers

For years I have been urging corporate executives to talk to "kids" so they could better understand the future. " Look over their shoulder", I have urged them. Ask them what they do on the Internet. Talk to them about their values. What do they think of intellectual property rights? What do they like most about the Internet? What do they like least? What sites are really with it? Which are brain-dead? What do they think the Internet will be like in five years? How do they expect they will use it after they get a job? If what they tell you makes sense, I have urged, then think about how you can incorporate some of their kind of thinking into your business or institutional planning. If what they say doesn't’t make sense or you don’t agree with what they say, talk to kids some more. If you don’t have any kids, borrow one! If you can’t find any kids to talk to then talk to some ThirdAgers.

If you can’t find any teenagers to validate your business plans for the web, look for some 60 year olds. When I visited the Heritage Village retirement community and went into their “web room” I saw a huge banner across one wall. It said “Keeping Pace in Cyberspace”. That is their motto. They are not intimidated in the slightest by technology. A petite elderly lady looked up from her keyboard to say hello. She was helping a friend learn how to send email to her grandchild. At their monthly meeting a seventy-year-old gentleman made an announcement that the “Hardware” special interest group (SIG) was going to start a new project whereby each participant would be building their own PC from scratch and he asked if anyone would be interested. Dozens of hands were in the air to join the group.

ThirdAgers are generally between the age of forty-five and sixty-four. The heart of the group is made up of those who Mary Furlong, founder of ThirdAge Media, described as being in their “transitional fifties”. Some are going through job changes or a divorce. Others have aging parents, health issues, or are experiencing the birth of grandchildren. These are all issues which change lives and create a desire to join a support group, go to a class or pick up a hobby. Where I live in Connecticut, people go to Founders Hall to spend a day with friends and just "hang out".

In many cases, Mary explains, people become more intrinsically motivated”. For all these reasons ThirdAgers are flocking to the web. They are not intimidated by the technology. They have goals and the web can help them cope. ThirdAgers are learning the web and are sharing family pictures and learning about genealogy. They are going to ThirdAge.com to get career or health advice or check the romantic tip of the day. There is no substitute for the loss of a loved one but web sites are helping people find others with similar interests and enabling them to create new friendships. In many cases these have lead to marriages.

ThirdAgers represent a fast growing segment of the economies of the world. ThirdAgers have time, motivation, and decades of experience. As the next generation of the Internet evolves into the new medium it will enable members of this highly skilled workforce to come back to work part time from their retirement via telecommuting. They may prove to be crucial in filling the huge skills shortage that is facing the information technology industry today. For those who don’t choose to come back to work the Internet will enable them to fulfill their lives in various ways and to find help in meeting the challenges they face, make new friends and continue the quest for lifelong learning.

Other patrickWeb stories

People     March 11, 2007 12:11 PM

IBM Happenings: February 2007

The month of February at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly pleased to see IBM introduce Jam Consulting Service. The new service will help drive innovation by initiating dynamic new forms of collaboration among employees, stakeholders, customers, and partners for many companies. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

IBM     March 10, 2007 05:23 PM

The Peak of Blogging?

The market research firm, Gartner, has reported that less than 2% of all Internet users are frequent contributors to content on the web. The Gartner researchers also said that 200 million people already have given up blogging and that the total number of bloggers will peak during the first half of this year at around 100 million. Quite a few journalists and bloggers picked up on the Gartner predictions and you can find a lot of different reactions. Mine is simple. Blogging is just beginning!

There are quite a few stories here on patrickWeb about blogging (you can see the list here) where I have shared my vision about the future of blogging but the bottom line is that it has grown to it's infancy. The folks at Gartner are very smart and I suspect that they are looking at the U.S. only and at people like me and others who write stories. To me that is a small subset in multiple ways. For openers, 100 million people would be less than 5% of China and India alone. Total Internet users in 2007 are estimated at 1.1 billion which is slightly less than 17% of the world. I think we could all agree that those numbers are going to continue to grow, especially with explosive growth of the mobile Internet being made possible by technology such as Opera Mini.

The other major factor behind my comment that blogging is just beginning is that blogging is not just about people writing stories. Blogging has now entered the phase where it is a fundamental technology -- one that is enormously profound and is altering how information is documented, distributed, syndicated, and archived. As with all fundamental technologies, there are a lot of myths in the early stages -- like "The Internet is free" or "The web is for documents, not for applications". Add to the list that blogging is a vanity tool for people to write about themselves or their hobbies. Sure there are many personal blogs. Someone may write a blog that is only read by the blogger's mom. That's ok. A volunteer parent on a school trip may write a daily posting for the other parents to read. Pundits may write a "column" that is read by very large numbers of people. Some people view blogging as a way to document and archive their activities or their thoughts over time with the thought that someday their children's children will find it interesting to read. The "diary" aspect of blogging is important, but there is a lot more to blogging than people writing their personal accounts or views.

Blogging is a very effective way for departments of companies to stay on top of what is going on. We all know that special person in the department who always knows who is working on what. That special person is now blogging and providing the departmental "news column". It is not a task that can be assigned to someone, it is a task sought out and enjoyed by that special person who loves to write, takes the extra time to add useful links to what she writes, and is a very effective communicator. Similar persons are providing customer support or valuable insight to customers and business partners. In every walk of life, the "authors" among us arise to share their skill with others. The old saying, "I could write a book", is true. Millions of people have a book in them but prior to the power of blogging they had no practical way to publish. And blogging is not just about individuals who are writing.

How about warranty expiration notices, product recalls, press releases, weather updates, shipment notices, doctor appointment reminders, auction completions, stock trading activity, and wine harvests? Blogging is not limited to traditional documents or notices. For example, a patient on a hospital gurney moving from the ER to the recovery room can generate important information as the patient is wheeled through the doorways of the hospital. An RFID tag could trigger a short blog posting which gets delivered to the primary care physician's Patients folder. A periodic glance at the doctor's blog reader would indicate whether there are any new postings advising of patients whereabouts. Primary care physicians today are too busy to go to the hospital and visit patients -- but they do care what is going on and want more data. The bottom line is that it will become very hard to justify publishing any kind of information in anything other than a blogging format. See BlogOn 2005 for more about the blogging format and other aspects of blogging.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

Blogging     February 24, 2007 02:34 PM

IBM Happenings: January 2007

The month of January at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly proud to see IBM surpass its own record and earn more U.S. patents than any other company for the fourteenth consecutive year. Many useful products and services will come from those patents over the years ahead. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

IBM     February 13, 2007 10:34 AM

Home Automation - Part 2 (Planning)

The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don't have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a money pit. The first step in developing a plan is to establish the scope.

Home automation is a broad term. I would define it simply as automating things in your home. The age-old and most trivial example is the "automated" coffee pot that comes on automatically at a certain time and when you arrive in the kitchen the coffee is ready. At the other end might be an automated home theatre. When you push the "Watch a movie" button in the kitchen, the lighting begins to dim behind you and light up in front of you on your way into the theatre. As the screen comes down from the ceiling, the projector rises from a cabinet in front of it. As the projector bulb warms up the lighting in the theatre synchronously dims until it is movie time. There is a wide range of things in between these two examples. I would break the scope into the following areas below. Any one of them can add a lot of fun and functionality.

System design
Security
Lighting control
Audio distribution
Video distribution
Universal remotes
Home theatre
Appliance control
Spa control
Sensors
Remote access

These are the nine areas I will be writing about and then will conclude with stories on project management and changes and upgrades. I don't mean to imply by the outline that I have all the answers on the topics. My intent is to share what I have learned in hope that it will be useful to others.

It is also important to think about what is not part of the scope of your home automation endeavors. One example that we decided to exclude is irrigation. The Irritrol Total Control system has four independent programs which offer concurrent operation seven days per week or only odd days or even days. It is totally reliable and totally flexible. It is tied to a roof sensor so it doesn't irrigate when it is raining. In other words, it does everything you could imagine and it is really easy to use. Why would anyone want to automate something that is automated? There actually are some examples that I will explain in the security and spa control areas but for something as self-contained as an irrigation system there is really nothing to be gained by tying the irrigation sub-system into an overall system.

You actually can tie an Irritrol system to your PC and do the control from there. Unfortunately, most sub-systems that are "PC Controlled" require Windows. One of the decisions I made as part of my scope was not to use Windows. Have you ever had to re-boot your PC? Would you like to re-boot your house? Me neither. If you decide to go with a Windows approach I highly recommend using a dedicated system. It doesn't have to be the latest or greatest and does not require a big video display. For less than $500 you can get a PC and put it in the basement or out of the way.

The other area that we excluded from the overall system is digital door locks. I investigated this quite a bit and found some interesting technology, including fingerprint activated locks. There are advantages to having a system know when a door was opened or closed but that can be accomplished in other ways that I will describe when we get to "sensors". Bottom line, based on the technology available and the appearance of the locks, I decided that getting into the house should not be dependent on a central system, no matter how reliable it is. We chose the Weiser Powerbolt Digital locks for all the doors.

Not sure how long it is going to take me to write the remaining dozen or so stories and there will likely be other topics and stories interspersed. Stay tuned.

Home Automation     January 26, 2007 10:07 PM

Home Automation

Home automation has been one of my hobbies for more than twenty-five years. In the early days it was mostly lighting control using X10 technology. There was a PC program written by a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center that calculated the precise time of the daily sunset and at that time signal went across the electrical wiring of the house and turned on some exterior lighting. At midnight the lights would turn off. Since that time I have learned a lot about home automation and after Year 2000, when I began to think about e-tirement from IBM, I also started planning a new "smart home". It became home at the end of March 2002.

I have not written about my home up to this point, somewhat out of modesty but also not sure how many people are interested in home automation. I ran into Steve Hamm from BusinessWeek last April in Rome at the Business Leadership Forum and he convinced me to open up about the subject. Steve visited in September and I was confident he would write something thoughtful. There was a follow-on visit by BusinessWeek TV and Greg Clarkin. Their filming ended up on BusinessWeek Weekend (carried by ABC-TV) on the Sunday after Christmas. The story ran in the January 22, 2007 issue, pages 82-83. Here are links to the story and video.

Ultimate Wired Home: A look at a computer-controlled home
King Of His Digital Castle

Not so sure about "master" and I certainly don't think of my home as a "castle" but now that the cat is out of the bag, I have decided to write a series of stories to share the details about the home automation system in the hope that it will be useful to others. I will include what went into the planning, what technology choices I made, the design choices, and what I have learned. Stay tuned.

Home Automation     January 21, 2007 11:14 AM

Visa 2000

The upcoming trip to China requires a visa and the visa application requires a passport photo. The instructions were clear that it should not be a "home photo". I was anxious to get the application in the mail and was confident that the processor of the application would not reject my photo printed from the Canon i960, but unfortunately it was out of one of the ink colors. No problem, I though, there is a CVS store nearby and they do passport photos. The $7.99 price seems high but I was in a hurry. I like CVS as a company but their customer service in the store is not that great. The photo department had a sign up saying to check with a cashier. The cashier lines were all long. A supervisor happened to walk by and sent someone over to take the photo.

In a minute or so a digital picture was taken and the CVS person then escorted me to one of their Kodak kiosks. Of the five kiosks, two were "out of order" -- reminded me of the early days of the airline check-in kiosks. Two of the other three were being used by customers who were sorting through the pages of pictures to pick the ones they wanted to print. I could see they were going to be there quite a while. The "available" kiosk was hung up. The employee had to unplug it to get it to re-boot. It took at least ten minutes for the kiosk to initialize -- it was running Windows 2000.

Why Kodak or CVS did not select Linux for this application is beyond me. Linux is perfect for "embedded" applications -- either embedded in a handheld device, a car, a digital audio server, home automation system, or a digital video recorder. Linux can also be "embedded" in a PC in a very nice way, especially on a PC like a kiosk which only runs one application. In all these cases Linux is quietly working in the background to enable the device or the application. It doesn't crash, doesn't give insulting or confusing error messages, "blue screens", or hang up. It just works.

Munir Kotadia at ZDNet Australia just wrote a story saying that the launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market.

Other patrickWeb stories about Linux

Personal Computing     January 16, 2007 10:43 AM

IBM Happenings: December 2006

The month of December at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly interested to see that IBM and Circuit City Stores, Inc. are exploring how to apply virtual worlds and 3-D environments to retail business models.The result could lead to new growth areas. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

IBM     January 15, 2007 12:06 PM

iPhone

A friend of mine who knows a lot about investing told me years ago to not confuse a great company with a great stock. Apple Inc. finished the day at $97 per share which is 42.79 times earnings and represents a market capitalization of $83.4 billion, roughly double the value of Motorola. So I am not so sure it is a great stock at $97 but it surely is doing great things -- things that investors and consumers really like.

Sales growth for the iPod dropped off to a mere 75% rate for the fiscal year compared to 409% growth the year before. The iPod has achieved 62% market share and the launch of Microsoft's Zune does not seem to have made a dent. Meanwhile Apple has sold two billion songs, 50 million television shows and 1.3 million movies through iTunes. Potentially even more significant is the new iPhone which Steve Jobs unveiled at Macworld in San Francisco on Tuesday.

There is a lot to like about the iPhone and it may potentially change the direction of mobile phones in a major way and give a lot of competition to Palm and Blackberry "smart phones". The iPhone features a 3.5 inch touch-screen display and it is really smart. Various sensors allow the iPhone to detect when you hold it up to your ear so it can turn off the display and to automatically change the orientation of the display depending on whether you are holding it horizontally or vertically. The iPhone has only one button. compared to more than forty on existing high-end phones. If it is as easy to use as an iPod, I think it will be a real winner, not only as a way to enjoy music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies but also surfing the web, looking up contacts and managing email and text messages.

There is one thing that I don't like about the iPhone and that is the exclusive arrangement with Cingular. A Cingular phone works in many countries around the world -- but it doesn't work where I live because there is no signal. I also don't like the fact that Apple has made an exclusive deal. Nice for them but it takes choice away from the users. The iPhone has a slot where you put the Cingular SIM (Subscriber Identigy Module) card -- looks like the chip in a smartcard -- that contains your Cingular account identity. People should have a choice to change from Cingular to T-Mobile or other GSM operators around the world. If you want to change to a different operator, you get another card and put it in the iPhone. (When I am in Norway I put a Ventelo card in my Palm 680). If a better iPhone comes along you take the card and put it in the new phone and your new phone then assumes your account identity from the card.

The iPhone also has a browser for surfing the web. This is something you can already do by using Opera Mini and you do not need a $500 high-end phone to do it. Most people don't spend a lot of time surfing the web with their phone but that is changing. Opera Mini already has millions of users and the hype of the iPhone will probably boost mini users even more.

All in all, the iPhone sounds really good and I can't wait to get one. Many of us are now accustomed to synching our music between our desktop or laptop and our iPod. Many of us also sync between a handheld device and our computer. In theory, the iPod will mean syncing with just one device. I would say Apple has just raised the bar in a major way.

Epilogue: The new Apple TV sounds pretty good also. More on that later.

Mobile     January 10, 2007 07:26 PM

Taxi, Please

If you have ever been to New York City or seen a movie with a taxi scene in New York City then you know what it can be like to get a taxi. This past week I learned about a totally different process. After a day of meetings at Opera Software in Oslo, Norway, it was time to head back to the hotel. I asked the receptionist if she would be kind enough to call a taxi for me. "No problem", she said. She then pushed a button on the counter. It was similar to a point of sale device used for credit card transactions -- out came a "receipt" with a confirmation number on it. "Just wait downstairs and the taxi will be there in a few minutes". Taxi on demand! The taxi was there in a few minutes and off I went to the Radisson SAS. Since this was my eighth trip to Oslo this year I was already quite familiar with the payment system. All taxis accept all credit cards. Ever use a credit card in a cab in New York or most other cities in the U.S.? Coupled with ubiquitous WiFi access at hotels and the airport, the travel time to and from Norway is not as hard to take.

Travels     December 26, 2006 10:08 PM

Power to the People

There has been a lot of discussion here in the blog and in Net Attitude about "Power to the People". The "power" discussed had to do with empowerment made possible by the Internet. To get connected to the Internet requires another kind of power -- electricity. Although some improvements have been made there are still hotel's that provide only one outlet on the desk and must not realize that travelers need to charge up both their laptop and their mobile phone -- and maybe an iPod and a few other things.

The USB ports on all laptops do conveniently provide five volts of power but at a fairly low current and hence a longer charging time than with the 120/240 volt charger. Airports have an even bigger problem. Many of them were constructed before people had laptops and it would have been unimaginable for architects to include outlets around the wall of an airline gate or even in the clubs and lounges. I have gotten strange looks as I walked around a gate or lounge staring at the floor looking for an outlet. Airport managers are no doubt planning for new outlets but the cost to retrofit them is very high and it is going to take a long time before we have enough to satisfy the demand.

How about wireless electricity? I have often heard people joke about wireless electricity. It is not as far fetched as it may seem. In fact, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say it is possible. They have developed a system, which in theory can power gadgets in the same manner as wireless broadband signals are received. The MIT system is very early in the development stage but uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy from a source of power to a device ten feet away. At some point there may be electric rooms where anything you have with you -- laptops, cameras, mobile phones -- will receive a fresh charge while you are there.

There is also great progress being made in the efficiency of the electrical use. For example, IBM has been working on an Adaptive Battery Life Extender to reduce the hard drive power consumption based on what the user is doing. For example, if you are working on a word processing document, most of the time you are typing and editing or maybe thinking. During that time, the hard drive senses what your level of activity and turns off the hard drive until you actually need it to save your document.

Personal Computing     December 18, 2006 09:40 AM

IBM Happenings: November 2006

The month of November at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly pleased to see IBM put it's money where it's mouth is with respect to innovation. The company announced it's intention to invest $100 million in innovation ideas that were generated by InnovationJam, an unprecedented experiment in online collaborative innovation held earlier this year. The result could lead to new growth areas. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

IBM     December 9, 2006 05:35 PM

Spam Arrest - part 2

Hormel Foods Corporation loves Spam. They say their SPAM Luncheon Meat is "the one in good taste". For the rest of us spam is something quite different and anything but in good taste. There have been quite a few stories about spam here on patrickWeb. Early in the debate -- years ago -- I took the position that the elimination of spam could be handled by technology and that laws would not work. Even though the spammers have gotten more creative and we are currently seeing a rise in spam, I continue to believe technology is the best answer.

Around August 1 I started using spamarrest. All email addressed to john@patrickweb.com gets automatically picked up from my mail server by spamarrest. For everyone in my contact list (2,800+ people), their email comes through to my inbox with no problem. However, if an email arrives for me from someone not in my contact list, an automatic reply is sent to them that says something like "Your email to John is pending delivery. Please click here to validate that you are a real person". When you click, you are presented with a web page where a word appears in a graphic image. Something simple like "cat" or "water". After you type in the word that appears you become validated as a real person -- not a robot sending millions of spam emails -- and you are added to the "ok" list just like everyone in my address book. Likewise, anyone that I send an email to for the first time is automatically added to the ok list. For anyone in the ok list their emails are never challenged -- and I answer all my email.

I had resisted challenge/response approaches in the past, but unfortunately today's environment forced me to make a change. I am really pleased with the results. No more spam or junk folders and daily trash emptying duties. Since August spamarrest has processed 17,433 emails addressed to me. The 4,261 legitimate emails were forwarded to me. The remaining 75.6% of them went into an "unverified" folder. I check this folder on occasion if there is an email I am expecting. Spamarrest is very easy to manage. You can add entire domains to your ok list. For example, any email from someone at ibm.com comes through unchallenged. I have added a dozen or so other domains to the ok list. Occasionally a spammer or recruiter will respond and verify their email address but I then click to add them to the "not ok" list. The bottom line is that I spend significantly less time managing email than I did before and I can spend more time communicating with colleagues, family and friends old and new.

The week before switching to spamarrest, I received an email from a person I don't know who had read something of interest in my blog and wanted to give me some feedback. This is really valuable to me. I asked her what she thought of the challenge/response approach I was considering. She said "I think that's a very good idea. People who are worth talking to, either personal or professional, will understand". From my perspective, I am really enjoying a 100% spam free world and yet still able to meet new people and learn from them.

Internet Technology , Public Policy     December 8, 2006 11:35 AM

How To Become A Fonero

When my La Fonera was registered, I became member number 95,495 of the FON Community. This could be the start of something really big. Perhaps a revolution. Fon wants WiFi to be available everywhere and they are doing a lot to make it happen. The idea is that FON members (foneros) share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi access wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

To become a "fonero" you go to the Fon website and order La Fonera ($29.95 plus shipping) which is a wireless access point about the size of a mobile phone. You plug in the power adapter and then connect La Fonera to a spare port on the back of your cable or DSL modem. La Fonera emits two wireless network signals -- a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy. The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This free signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point.

There are three kinds of Fon Community members. You can be a "linus" by offering your home La Fonera to anyone who can pick up the signal. In return you get to use anyone else's La Fonera signal when you are not at home. If you live in a metropolitan area where many people might be using your signal, you can be a "bill" which means that FON will charge a user $3 per day for the signal and give you half of it. An alien is a person who uses the signal but is not a member. You can visit FON Maps and see where all the signals are. Perhaps there is one next door to where you vacation or visit friends and family. Make your signal free and their's becomes free to you.

I think FON is a really good idea. They have some impressive people behind them and also have some impressive investors. As of November 21, FON says there are 20,000 Foneros who are waiting to receive their Foneras. They are shipping 5,000 Foneras per week and manufacturing Foneras as fast as they can.

Other patrickWeb stories about WiFi

WiFi     December 3, 2006 12:09 PM

Oslo via Stockholm

The best way to Oslo is a direct flight from Newark on one of Continental's new Boeing 767's but on this particular trip it was not available. The Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) Airbus 330 followed the instrument landing system approach into Stockholm early Tuesday morning with just 500 feet visibility and only a three-hundred foot ceiling. This is when all of us appreciate the ILS the most. Something I noticed that morning for the first time was that each gate at the airport had a sign showing the exact latitude and longitude of it's location. I have never noticed that anywhere else in the world and not sure how they use the information. Since all planes have GPS these days, perhaps it is a way to confirm to the crew that they are at the right gate.

The 9:00AM SAS Boeing 737 to Oslo took off at 9:00AM and landed in Oslo (the best airport in the world in my opinion) on time at 9:50am. The 10:06 Flytog (airport train) left the airport at 10:06. Timely trains and planes in Europe are just how they are. Seems like the U.S. should be able to do that also. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics tracks flight performance in great detail. For example, in September at JFK in New York, 23% of all flights were late. I am sure there are studies on why things run late in the U.S. I suspect it is a combination of labor rules, over commitment of routes, and poor integration of information systems. Some flights are actually early but then the plane sits on the tarmac waiting for a gate. This is now a decades old problem where the flight arrival system does not communicate with the gate scheduling system. When a plane leaves California for a 4+ hour flight to New York, it knows within a few minutes what time it will arrive but the systems can not communicate in order to accommodate an early arrival.

The good news is that the air safety record is superlative and, even though there is a lot to complain about, it is truly amazing what airlines can do. On the one hand, fifteen hours from home to the hotel in Oslo is a very long time, on the other hand it is quite amazing. Imagine what the vikings would think about getting from Norway to the U.S. in 8 hours! A visit to the Viking ship museum helps to understand what travel must have been like for them one thousand years ago.

aviation     December 1, 2006 03:29 AM

The Proxy

According to the wiktionary, a "proxy" is an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person. You can find many variations on this theme in the wikipedia. If you belong to a club or association that is having a vote on something at a meeting which you are not able to attend, you can give your proxy to a friend or neighbor to vote for you. In the old days of Europe, a monarch could be married to someone by proxy -- without the bride being present. In trading card games, a substitute card used can be used when a player does not own the substituted card.

As you would expect, the proxy has found it's way into the world wide web. A "proxy server" allows a user to make indirect network connections to other network services. For example, if you have a mobile phone -- who doesn't -- you can use Opera Mini to surf the web. Top of the line "smart" phones such as the Palm Treo, have a browser included but the vast majority of mobile phones are not robust enough to include a browser. Opera Mini has changed that. It works using a proxy server. Opera mini looks like a browser, works like a browser (and a very good one) but when you make a request for www.whatever.com, Opera mini actually sends that request to a server in Norway and your desired web page appears on your phone.

The ultimate proxy server may be Psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”) which is going to become available this Friday. Some countries have become very restrictive and implemented censorship to prevent citizens from accessing certain web sites. The wikipedia, for example, provides the scoop on many subjects that these countries would rather their citizens did not know much about. Universal access to blogs is a clear threat in certain countries. The idea with Psiphon is that people in an uncensored country download a program to their PC which becomes a proxy for people in a restricted-access country. A relative in a far away country enters a web site address and the browser takes them to the PC of a relative in the U.S. or elsewhere which in turn retrieves the desired web page and delivers it in the browser of their relative in the censoring country. According to the New York Times story this morning, the program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material -- after they erase their Internet history after each use, which is easy to do. This is just one more example of how the Internet has provided "power to the people".

Note: I would provide a link to the NYT story but they require registration in order to read their content. Their day will come.

Internet Technology     November 27, 2006 05:03 PM

Book Update: 3Q2006

So many great books, so little time! I read a number of blogs like most of us, but it is still fun to sit back and read a hard-cover book. Every once in a while I post a list of books I have been reading. They all have reviews at Amazon that are much better than I could write. Speaking of blogs I saw that my friend Irving's blog got a well deserved mention in BusinessWeek today. So, here is the list of what I have been reading lately.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. Perhaps his best.

A Short History of Nearly Everything -- by Bill Bryson. If you have a curious mind you will love this book.

Benjamin Franklin - An American Life - by Walter Isaacson. This one is a hard read. Interesting but tedious. I still haven't finished it.

Forever Odd -- by Dean Koontz. Koontz has an incredible imagination. I have enjoyed many of his books. This one doesn't dissappoint.

Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation's History and Future by Newt Gingrich. You either like Newt or you don't. This book is not deep but presents an interesting view of last two hundred years and raises important questions about the years ahead.

Play Piano in a Flash! Play Your Favorite Songs Like a Pro--Whether You've Had Lessons or Not! - by Scott Houston. A friend gave this to me. Interesting approach to the piano. One of these days when I grow up and find the time I am going to learn how to play.

The Husband - by Dean Koontz. One of his best.

The Kite Runner -- by Khaled Hosseini. Awesome book but things in Afghanistran.

The Only King Who Died on the Battlefield: An Historical Novel Based on Truth -- by Faisal Iftikha Mohammed Faisal Iftikhar. I met the author one day in a taxi in Danbury, Connecticut. He was the driver, a student at a local college, and as it turns out a young author.

Understanding Careers: The Metaphors of Working Lives -- by Kerr Inkson. Professor Inkson interviewed me for this book and included some things about my career at IBM.

Other stories from the "favorites" category of patrickWeb

Favorites     November 25, 2006 03:59 PM

Back To DACS

On December 5th, the Danbury Area Computer Society will hold it's monthly meeting and it will be my honor to give a talk (at 8PM) about The Future of the Internet. (This will be the fifteenth year in a row that I have done this). The meeting will be open to the public and will take place in the auditorium at Danbury Hospital. The talk will be an update on how the next generation of the Internet is unfolding and how it will affect our personal and professional lives. I will discuss recent developments that are fueling the rapid evolution of the Internet and enabling more than a billion people to experience a Net that is fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted. The potential for information technology to improve healthcare will also be discussed. See this link for comments made about prior DACS presentations.

Conferences     November 19, 2006 10:41 AM

The EMR

Last week's story about healthcare got some reactions. At a high level there is both concern for privacy and on the other hand hope that paperwork, healthcare costs, and medical errors can be reduced. It is no slam-dunk for sure, especially in the short run. Most people agree that electronic medical records are a key element in the overall solution. There are many potential benefits including not having to fill out a clipboard of paperwork every time you go to a healthcare provider and not having to get repeat blood work or imaging because the doctor can't get access to the data from tests you recently had. EMR's also have the potential to increase collaboration among doctors and other providers resulting in better outcomes. Longer term, the electronic medical records can lead to "information based medicine" which has the potential to base prescriptive care on the specifics of each patient combined with a large database of what worked and did not work for people who have the same condition. Ultimately we will have medications based on a DNA analysis of the an individual patient. There is much to hope for in an electronic world.

Larry Medina in Danville, California is more than skeptical. Medina, who has spent decades working with information related technologies, is concerned about EMR implementations -- especially if managed by a large tops down government program. (See his story called Are you ready to risk YOUR LIFE on "Electronic Medical Records"?). I agree with many if not most of Larry's points. Big projects are always risk prone. Larry points out a good example of this at Kaiser Permanente (See Problems abound for Kaiser e-health records management system where an internal report details hundreds of technical issues and outages). If there is one thing I have learned over past forty years it is that the best projects are the small ones. My motto is "think big, act bold, start simple, iterate fast".

The role of government in healthcare is important -- not to implement big ideas but rather to foster the creation of standards among IT companies, healthcare providers, and the payers (insurance companies). It is really critical to our health that all the "players" can interchange data. Larry has expressed valid concerns about security, privacy, systems reliability, and project management. The question becomes what to do. Some would say don't do anything until you can be sure you can do everything and do it right. To me that means we never get to the starting line let along the goal line. A better approach is to start simple, build pilots, try something with a small number of patients in one department, extend it to a second department, connect with the payers, add some more patients, and another clinical area, etc.

The best proof point of start simple, iterate fast is the Internet itself. The Net is a global network operating in nearly every country on Earth and connecting millions of computers and a billion people. It did not start that way. I can remember when email was about all you could do and only between a handful of universities and government labs. The Net did not get to what it is in big steps. It was continuous evolution through a huge number of baby steps. In my opinion, the same approach needs to be taken in healthcare. I agree with Larry. We don't need big steps. We need a lot of little steps and we need them urgently.

Healthcare     November 16, 2006 04:32 PM

Reminders

It seems that the term "On Demand" is not being used as much in advertising as it had been, however the concept is certainly still valid. On demand is closely tied to customer service and we have a long way to go before customer service fully meets our expectations. The concept is simple -- give customers what they need, when they need it, with whatever kind of device they may be using to connect to the Internet. I have had two instances of on demand shortfalls today.Both had to do with "reminders".

Something I purchased this morning had a special discount if I paid the bill in full before December 18. Their system, however, is unable to track this so it would be up to me to remember to call back before the due date and supply my credit card number. The second instance was an insurance matter. No transactions were available via their web site. I spoke to an agent and we agreed on a certain transaction to be effective January 14. The person said they would enter it into their "system" -- hard to imagine a system in the twenty-first century not having web transactions -- and everything would happen from there. An hour later, I received a voicemail message saying that the system was unable to handle a date that far "out" and that I should call them back right around the middle of December. So the bottom line was that their system can't remember something sixty days away and the responsibility was delegated to me, the customer. Fortunately, Quicken can remember things I enter even if they are years away.

The only good news here is for IBM. These examples show how far behind many companies are and how badly they need the latest technologies to integrate their systems and extend them to the web. The bad news is that it all starts with a Net Attitude and there are signs that there are quite a few businesses that haven't adopted that yet.


Other patrickWeb On Demand stories

On Demand     November 15, 2006 03:16 PM