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.

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

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.

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.

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

IBM Happenings: October 2006

The month of October 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 China as it announced a plan to jointly invest there with Lehman Brothers. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

The Chisel

The AOL Instant Messenger has been a part of my daily life for quite a few years. It has been a very effective tool for communicating with family members, friends, and colleagues around the world. This past weekend it was necessary to install the latest version of AIM as I migrated to a new ThinkPad T60p. I quickly became aware of the customization of AIM that I had done previously and now had to do again. Although extremely useful for instant messaging, the initial installation of AIM bombards you with advertising. Since AIM is "free" they have a right to advertise but in my opinion, as I said in "The Future of Advertising", users should get a choice. Some would rather pay a modest monthly fee than be hammered with ads.

The most insidious part of the AIM advertising relies on software from Viewpoint. The Viewpoint software gets installed on your system as a "by-product" of installing AIM. You don’t get asked if you want it and you don’t get told you have it, but when you start AIM you may see and hear rap music blaring from your system. It comes from Viewpoint. The company says they have "highly integrated online marketing solutions" which "extend a message across the web quickly, easily and with results that speak for themselves". Viewpoint says their "Internet Marketing Technology (IMT)" is "an amazing platform" that brings together Viewpoint’s technologies to deliver "the most visually powerful, immersive and engaging rich media applications on the web". In fact it is so "amazing" that it is hard to get rid of. I tried to uninstall it and it required a lot of steps and re-boots to do the job. Viewpoint is so embedded that it took awhile to figure out what it was and where it was. I would call it spam.

Marketers are becoming desperate. They will chisel into your system, install things without asking you, and then use it to blast you with things you don’t want. The Internet is about choice. Web sites such as Google, Amazon, eBay, and countless others take that seriously. It is often the "old media" companies such as Time Warner and Forbes that seem to put their goals for advertising in front of their goals to deliver what consumers want. In the long run that is a losing strategy.

The Future of Advertising

WiFi Update No. 14

A WiFi update is overdue. The first WiFi story here at patrickWeb goes back more than five years. I was bullish then and and remain bullish. Like most thing related to the Internet, we are still at the early stage with new things being announced every day. According to a survey by the Wi-Fi Alliance, roughly 80 percent of us would rather give up our iPod than do without WiFi and do away with our home telephone before our home WiFi. The same survey showed that 38 percent of us work regularly from all over the house. WiFi is on the way to ubiquitous. Using WiFi with our laptops is a given but there are many other things as well.

New WiFi devices are bursting into the market. Sony has announced its first WiFi broadband communication and entertainment device. In addition to web surfing — it includes the Opera browser — and media player functions, the Mylo has WiFi and so you can make Skype VoIP phone calls at any hotspot. You can call your friends or colleagues from the airport for close to free instead of paying $1.49 to Verizon Wireless. Sony is even throwing in a year of free access for the Mylo at T-Mobile hotspots. Another entrant is Netgear’s Skype WiFi Phone. It will join Belkin, Edge-Core and SMC. There is going to be a lot of competition in the WiFi phone arena as size and price go down while battery life goes up.

WiFi is not limited to computers and phones. There are also WiFi projectors that eliminate passing the projector cable around the conference room table. And of course, cameras. Kodak’s new EasyShare-one 6MP WiFi camera allows you to email or upload pictures directly over the Net — no computer required. Mobile real estate and insurance agents are good candidates for this.

Music players with WiFi are now on the scene. At the Demo conference I saw the new Sirius Stiletto, a satellite radio receiver that also has 2GB of storage for music downloads *and* the ability to tap into the satellite feed via WiFi when you are at an ariport or otherwise out of range of the satellite signal. The Stiletto can automatically record what you are listening to and allow you rewind or play it back later. WiFi TV streaming will be here soon.

One issue with WiFi has been the antenna range. Ruckus Wireless has developed claims its “Beamflex” smart antenna technology will enable wireless to work anywhere in your home. Another company, called Vivato, has a new antenna that can deliver WiFi over a range of four miles. Stay tuned.

JiWire WiFi site