DEMO in Santa Clara – 2011

Demo has always been my favorite conference, and this past week in Santa Clara proved valuable once again. I believe this was the twenty-first year I have attended Demo. The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, key influencers and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. There were excellent speakers, as always. Take a look at the list.

Eighty companies were launched in two days. I view Demo as a barometer of what lies ahead and each year I comment not just on the companies but on the key trends I observed. Last year it was mobile, social media, and cloud. This year it was mobile, cloud, social media, and HTML5. There are now 5 billion cell phones in use around the world. In the U.S., 96% of people have one, and half of them are now smartphones. That is a big shift and it validates that the moible Internet is here. Cloud computing was as clear as a bell. Nobody wants to buy an application that requires having a server, as has been required in the past. Everything is in the cloud. Dropbox continues to be the best way to get an understanding of what cloud means. If you don’t have Dropbox yet, I highly recommend it. Social media is here to stay and most of the startups were offering some new way to exploit it — collaborative shopping and sharing content continue to loom large. The biggest shift is HTML5. I try to keep technical jargon out of patrickWeb, so sorry for the technical term. HTML is what makes the Web work. It is a protocol that makes Web pages accessible and useful. What is new is that HTML5 takes the Web to a much higher level than before. It means that a Web page can now be much more intelligent and, most importantly, the page can be truly cross-platform. That means that a page can be rendered on your PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, Tv, or anything that uses a standards-based browser. It is going to revolutionize the Web. To get a taste of this, get the Amazon Cloud Reader. HTML5 also means that–once fully adopted–you will never see a message that says “You need the latest version of Flash” or “You need the latest Real player” or “You need the latest Windows Media Player”. Audio and video will be able to be embedded in any page and enjoyed on any device. I love it!

Only six of the 80 companies were of special interest to me, although all of them were interesting. Three of them were related to healthcare. Here is my list — the links from them will tell you more. You can get a complete rundown on all 80 at the Demo Alumni Page.

LumoBack has a bandaid-like patch that you put on your back and it sends data to your iPhone about your posture.
Oh my meds provides a way to keep a track of a lot of meds in one convenient place–even if they were fulfilled at multiple pharmacies–and provides a lot of useful information about the medications.
SenseAide monitors what is going on at the residence of a senior. If the door has not opened for a long period of time or there is a fall, a call to a wall-mounted video phone is placed and automatically answered so a caregiver can ask if everything is ok.
Iconfinder has a slick model for selecting an image for use in your blog or website.
Upverter is a cloud-based electronic design tool. It breaks a lot of new ground and it is quite impressive what it can do without any desktop software.
Zirtu Virtual desktop takes virtualization to a new level. It does not virtualize the operating system — just all the desktop apps. It provides a virtual desktop even if the network connection is lost.

See the rest at demo.com, or better yet, head out to Silicon Valley in April for DemoSpring2012 and see the next batch of startups.

Tags: ethanol, find a doctor, health care, Healthcare, mac, vmware, windows

Travel Woes

There are quite a few stories here in patrickWeb about my travel woes (see travel category). There are many things people complain about including security, paying to check bags, late departures and arrivals, and grumpy service. My report from this past week is much more sanguine. I left Connecticut last Saturday for Dublin, Ohio to attend a board meeting at OCLC. On Sunday night, it was down to Orlando, FLorida to give a keynote speech at the opening of Data Center World. That afternoon took me to Minneapolis, Minnesota and then on to San Jose, California for the Demo conference and finally on Wednesday from San Jose to Salt Lake City, Utah to JFK in New York, and on home to Connecticut.

I have more than a million miles with Delta, but I am sure the attendants I encountered did not know that. Service was friendly and efficient. Things are more spartan that in the past, but they seem to have the processes working pretty well. All the flights were on time. They were all full also, which bodes well for them from a business perspective. The web site has come a long long way from the early days. It is easy to checkin from home or a hotel and they are exploiting the quick response (QR) code for use on your mobile phone for checkin. Nice to not have to have scrunched up boarding passes in your pocket. More on QR codes another time. They are becoming ubiquitous. That is mine there on the left. You can scan it with an iPhone app.

The next big thing for aviation is the FAA plan for NextGen. NextGen is a comprehensive overhaul of our National Airspace System to make air travel more convenient, dependable, safe, secure and hassle-free. The heart of NextGen is replacing radar tracking with GPS that can guide and track air traffic more precisely and efficiently to save fuel (more than a billion gallons over the next seven years), reduce noise and pollution, more predictability, fewer delays, less time sitting on the ground and holding in the air, and more flexibility to get around weather problems. The only thing standing in the way is–you guessed it–congress. There doesn’t seem to be much they can agree on.

Tags: delta airlines, faa, national airspce system, nextgen, qr, quick response code, travel

Back Pain

Back pain is something experienced by nine out of ten people in America at some point in their life and five out of ten experience back pain every year. Years ago, I found a very helpful book by Robin McKenzie called How to Treat Your Own Back. You can find the book and other related items at a site called OPTP. I have had three back surgeries and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the subject. I do 50 McKenzie back stretches every night and rarely encounter any back pain. I highly recommend the book but, of course, see your own doctor for advice. Another useful resource is the Back Pain Health Center at WebMD.

I am at the Demo conference in San Jose (more on this to come) and met Dr. Charles Wang, a young physician with an MBA who has a great vision for using mobile technology to address back pain. The concept is to use a stick-on sensor similar to a bandaid which you place on your back. The sensor can tell when you are following good posture or when you are slouching. The sensor sends data to your mobile phone and an app alerts you to your bad posture and keeps track of your habits. The theory is that looking at the data with your app will lead you to more healthy habits and less back pain. If you want to follow the startup’s progress, visit LumoBack.

Tags: apps, back pain, demo, lumoback, Mobile

e-Government

e-Government is a really good idea and there are many initiatives underway to make it happen (see Government 2.0). In some respects the U.S. Government has been a model for using the Internet. The IRS e-file program, for example, has been very successful with nearly 99 million individuals filing their federal income tax returns electronically during 2010. Of the 141.5 million returns filed so far this year, almost 70 percent were filed electronically. There are other parts of the government that just don’t seem to get the idea of “electronic”. When I joined the Medicare program a year ago, I signed up for the Easy Pay program where the monthly Medicare premium is deducted automatically from my checking account. I have now changed my bank and so it was necessary to update various parties that either put money in or take money out of my account electronically. Except for Medicare, I was able to update them all online and have the changes take effect within a few days. Medicare said it was easy to change Easy Pay. Just complete an Authorization Agreement for Preauthorized Payments (Standard Form 5510). No problem. Where do I get that form online? Not available online. The authorization agreement may be obtained by calling 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227). Upon request, 1-800-MEDICARE will mail a Medicare Easy Pay Packet directly to the beneficiary. The Medicare Easy Pay Packet includes a Medicare Easy Pay brochure, an Authorization Agreement for Preauthorized Payments, instructions for completing the authorization form, and a pre-addressed return envelope. All Authorization Agreements must be signed by the account holder and returned in the pre-addressed envelope to the address specified. Processing of the authorization form may take between 30 and 60 days. I called two weeks ago and still have not received the “packet”. Of bigger concern is that somebody thinks this is ok. Electric utilitiy companies have not always been known as model e-businesses, yet the three that I deal with all have an online application that takes just a minute or two to enter a new routing code and account number. Three to six minutes versus 30 to 60 days is not a small difference. Think of the cost of creating, printing, stuffing, mailing, and processing the contents of the Medicare “packet” compared to the electric company’s few mouse clicks. Think of how many employees have to touch the contents of the package. I am not making a political statement, but it is quite obvious that reducing the cost of government by hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions should not be difficult.

Meanwhile, the post office continues to operate 5,000 or so offices that are unprofitable and deliver mail six days per week. They have seen a huge drop in mail because of Internet applications such as e-file, e-billing, Quicken BillPay, electric and telecommunications companies taking credit cards and sending e-statements, etc. Unforutnately for the post office, they haven’t seen the worst of the dropoff. Netflix now offers unlimited streaming for $7.99 per month. They spend $700 million per year with the post office distributing DVDs. The holloywood producers are fighting a losing battle to protect their old models. The $700 million revenue stream to the post office will go to zero. And then along comes Zumbox.  There is still a lot of mail that gets sent, not invoices, but notices of privacy policies, service updates, account information, etc. Billions of pieces of mail. This mail will soon be going to the cloud — to Zumbox. To get a Zumbox account you sign up and provide your email address and your snailmail address. Zumbox goes to AT&T, Charles Schwab, Comcast, JC Penney, and the rest and gives them the addresses of people who have signed up for Zumbox. The companies then send all their mail to those members to the members mailbox at Zumbox. As a Zumbox user, you just login to the Zumbox website and check your mail. The mailers save a bunch of money, we save time from retrieving, opening, and throwing away the paper mail. Unfortunately, the post office revenue decline accelerates. It will not be too long before the post office will not have any mail to deliver.

Tags: e-billing, e-file, irs, medicare, post office, zumbox

The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia

The first time I visited Slovakia, it was part of the former Communist nation. At the border crossing there were soldiers with machine guns. They rifled through our luggage and put a large mirror under the car to see if were attempting to bring something bad into the country. The country joined the European Union in 2004 and today, according to Business Week,  it is considered to be a high-income advanced economy with one of the fastest growth rates in the European Union A Bloomberg Businessweek story a few days ago described how a Bratislava company is organizing a national pay wall and has signed up the country’s top publications (See Online Media: The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia – BusinessWeek). This seems like a really good idea to me. U.S. publishers should pay attention. I am not suggesting a national paywall, by any means. But how about a business publications paywall, or maybe one for news, or for sports? The publsihers are fighting with Apple, Amazon, and others trying to preserve their models of the past. (I was really pleased to see Netflix stand up to Starz and not cave to the old model). The Slovakia model has subscribers paying roughly $4 per month (or $40 per year) to gain access to nine different publications. Publishers want us to pay $5 per copy for each of their magazines. Not going to happen. How about $5 per month for access to Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Smart Money, and the Harvard Business Review? I think millions would go for it. Nobody will read all the content of all these publications. Some will read all of one of them, others will read a little of each. The publishers will have to face the music at some point (no pun intended) or they will be disintermediated completely. I pay for WSJ and BW because I read them both cover to cover, but I won’t pay for the New York Times. I read the key stories they publish through the NYT blogs. The NYT gets no money from me. However, if there was a news paywall and for $5 per month I could have access to all the major news sources I would consider it. The NYT would get a slice of the $5 based on how many pageviews they got out of the total for the paywall offering. Another way for the NYT to get money from me would be for them to include their business section as part of the business publication paywall. The Slovakians are onto a really good approach. It takes cooperation from competing entities but I don’t see anything other than greed standing in the way. A tech company in Bratislava called Piano set up the infrastructure and promised nine publishers that they would not have to make any capital investment. Piano’s chief executive officer said it took a year of meetings to persuade the nine publications to get on board. Piano takes a 30% commission and the 70% gets split among the nine publishers proportionate to readership. I don’t know how they handled mobile devices, but clearly they should be included as part of the offering. Publishers, network operators, and platform providers including Apple et al want a share of the pie. Whatever they can work out is fine but from a consumer point of view, I think most of us would agree that what we want is simple. Pay once and read anytime, anywhere, on anything for an affordable fee for substantial content.

Tags: bratislava, media, paywall, publishers, slovakia

My Doctoral Journey

The summer was over and the grandkids had their backpacks loaded up. I hated to see them bent over hauling many pounds of books, and look forward to the day when they have just a Kindle and some wholesome snacks in their backpacks. The four grown children are gainfully employed, and two of them are back in school to advance themselves. Believe it or not, Pop Pop is also in the mix.

Back to School
My Doctoral Journey – Part 2
My Doctoral Journey – Part 3
My Doctoral Journey – Part 4

Tags: doctoral, e-learning, education, learning, university of Phoenix

My Doctoral Journey – Part 3

I really appreciate the support from my friends and family for my decision a year ago to begin the doctoral journey. I promised periodic updates and that is the purpose of this posting. I have now completed 19 credits of coursework out of the rquired 62 — approxmiately 30%. After the first four courses, I attended the first residency in Atlanta this past December. The second residency is coming up in November. It will be an important step as it is the launching point from which I will be able to submit a proposal for my research study and dissertation. The last two courses have been preparatory for the residency — Fundamental Principles of Sound Research, and Research Design. These have been intensive courses focusing on both quantitative and qualitative research.

The goal that every doctoral learner shares is to successfully complete a dissertation as the final step in earning their degree. Some say that at least half of doctoral learners never complete their dissertation because of the incredible detail required to get a research topic developed and approved for research. A typical dissertation is 200-300 pages in length. Some consider the process more than challenging – a friend of mine told me he had an ABD degree – all but dissertation. A visit to Amazon and you can find a lot of books on how to “survive” a dissertation. I still remember the meeting with the academic review committee when I had to defend my masters thesis forty years ago. It seemed challenging at the time, but I can now see that it was nothing compared to what lies ahead for the doctoral dissertation.

I have just completed a concept paper, which is the precursor to a proposal for a quantitative research study I have in mind that relates to the cost of care and lives lost due to congestive heart failure (CHF). My mother passed away from CHF a few years ago and I learned a lot about the disease during her final months. As a member of the board at Western Connecticut Health Network, I can also see the impact from a hospital point of view. The concept paper is eleven pages long. Following are a few excerpts from the paper to display a few of the things I am considering.

Chronic heart failure (CHF) is the leading cause of hospitalizations and readmissions for the elderly, and accounts for a large share of developed countries’ healthcare expenditures. Although CHF is a condition for which hospitalization is often avoidable, nearly 20% of Medicare patients discharged from hospitals are readmitted within 30 days at a cost to Medicare of $15 billion annually.

The problem is that the frequent readmission of CHF patients to the hospital has a negative impact on the patient and the hospital. For the patient, it results in a reduced quality of life and a negative impact to their psychosocial and financial condition. For the hospital, it means using extra capacity for care while facing the risk of not receiving reimbursement for the associated cost. The purpose of my proposed quantitative research study will be is to answer the question of whether home-based telemonitoring with coordinated care could improve mortality and reduce hospital readmissions for patients with CHF.

Experimental research attempts to identify cause-and-effect relationships between variables by conducting a controlled experiment. The proposed research method I am considering would use a randomized controlled experiment in which patients are randomly allocated into two groups; one that receives pharmacological treatment with coordinated care (control group) and the other, which receives pharmacological treatment with telemonitoring and coordinated care (enhanced care group).

Telemonitoring makes it possible to gather daily data from patients in a consistent and automated manner. A wireless gateway device similar in size to a cellular telephone can automatically capture data from other wireless devises such as a weight scale, a blood pressure cuff, and a pulse oximeter to measure pulse and the level of oxygen in the blood (oxygenation). Around-the-clock access to a patient portal could display patient data and enable caregivers to care proactively for the patient. For example, if the data from telemonitoring shows a sudden increase in the patient’s weight, a nurse might make a dietary suggestion or obtain authorization to make a change in medications.

There have been a number of similar studies but none have shown a significant benefit from telemonitoring. The research I have in mind would be focused on whether the right combination of healthcare delivery and technology can improve outcomes. The result could be improved quality of life for patients and, if the care plans are implemented in a cost-effective way, reduced financial risk for hospitals and the ability to invest more in their community healthcare mission.

I will have a further report on the proposal after the residency in November. In the meantime, I will be continuing with more course work. Since the program began one year ago, I have written 34 papers. Many more to come and then the big one! If everything goes right, I could be just a little more than two years from completion.

Index of stories about My Doctoral Journey

Tags: doctorate, e-learning, scholar

Who Uses Google Plus?

Jon Mitchel, over at ReadWriteWeb, has reported the results of a stuy about the first 10 million Google Plus adopters (see Who Uses Google Plus Now? Yep, Male Students & Geeks From the US). Big surprise, it turns out that the users were mostly young American men working in technology. About 70% of Google Plus users still identify as men, and the bulk of them are American. The major shift from prior studies was that students have overwhelmingly displaced tech workers. I would say that it is too early to put much validity behind the study. I remember the early days of the Web back in the mid 90s when the average user of the Internet was a young white techie living in Northern California. It took some time, but the demographics of Internet users (in the U.S.) today is pretty much the demographics of the people in the United States.

I continue to believe that Google+ has developed a superior social networking alternative to Facebook. Facebook clearly got the wakeup call and has made improvements in their approach to privacy settings, but G+ is much more intuitive. I don’t even think of “settings”. If I write something that I want to share with my family members, I just post it to the family circle and that is it. I don’t have to think about privacy settings. I have a friends circle too, and only I know exactly who is in it. I just click on any one of my 15 circles and I can see who is in it. Any of the 215 people who are in one of my circles can see that they are in one of my circles, but they don’t know which circle or circles. A person could be in my “Never ever want to run into these persons again as long as I live” circle. Meanwhile 169 people have put me in one or more of their circles. There are a number of these 169 people that I have never heard of before. Some of them have thousands of people in their circles. Why they want me in one of their circles I don’t know, but I don’t care either. If I post something public, anybody and everybody can read it. If I post to my motorcycles circle, only my fellow biker buddies can read it. It is all very logical and intuitive.

The next turn of the crank for G+, in my opinion, is for them to become integrated with the various blogging and social media tools. Like millions of others, I use WordPress to write my postings. I have a plugin for WP that automatically adds my posting to Facebook and Twitter. I have not yet found one to do the same for G+, but I am certain there will be one soon, if there is not one already that I have overlooked. Tools like ShareThis provide the icons to allow readers to share something they read with others through email and various social networks. G+ will surely become part of tools such as this. I expect that G+ will become at least as ubiquitous as Facebook, but more private at the same time. I have just added a G+ button on my blog so that anyone wishing to put me in one or more of their circles (and I won’t know which). The link to do this uses my Google+ ID which is the string of numbers in the following. Cleck the link and you can add to your circles.

https://plus.google.com/112262067079518502679/

Tags: circles, google, google plus, social media