Amazon, Boxee, Cloud

The pace of announcements from the media and technology industries will certainly be fast throughout the rest of the year. A couple of important developments this week were things that I had expected, and was very happy to see. First, was Boxee’s announcement (Boxee Blog » Boxee for iPad and more goodies) of their new app for the iPad. I have been following Boxee for years — see story from June 2010. I don’t know for sure they will be successful in the long run, but I really like what they are doing. Boxee is trying to become the TV Guide for video from the Internet. The free iPad app gives you a good view of this — just flip through many video choices and enjoy. As you would expect, a lot of their content is from YouTube, but not all of it. You can also watch video from Vimeo, Netflix’s Watch Instantly library, VUDU’s new Hollywood blockbusters, or critically acclaimed and foreign films from MUBI. There’s something for everyone. Boxee’s philosophy is to offer whatever content you want on a Boxee device connected to your TV, or with the Boxee app on your iPad, and I am sure other apps to come. Boxee provides a single interface to all the video on the Internet, regardless of who it is from. What they are doing is an important step to breaking free from the TV-Cable model of the past.

The other exciting development of the last few days is the announcement by Amazon of the Kindle Cloud Reader (see Amazon, Skirting Apple, Announces Cloud for Books – WSJ.com). The philosophy is similar — more choice for the customer, not trying to lock you in to a proprietary model from the past. Amazon believes you should be able to buy a book once, and then read it everywhere. Up until now, “everywhere” meant on your Kindle, the Kindle app on the iPhone or iPad. You could read a book on the PC or Mac with the Kindle app but that is not quite the same as the handheld devices. The breakthrough with the Kindle Cloud Reader is that it enables your Chrome or Safari browser (on any device) to look and act like a Kindle. That means that on any piece of hardware that supports one of those browsers (and no doubt more browsers to come), you can have instant access to your Kindle library and continue reading even when you are offline.

The breakthrough was achieved by Amazon developing a software version of the Kindle using HTML5, the new and evloving standard for how Web applications are developed. People like “apps” on the iPad and other devices because they are responsive and have a nice look and feel to them. They don’t feel like you are browsing a Web site; they feel like they are doing something locally on your device very specific to the “app”. If you are using Kayak to find flights or OpenTable to make a reservation, or eBay to check your auctions, these apps seem very natural. With HTML5, anyone will be able to build a Web app that is just as natural as an “app app”. The subtle and profound aspect of this is that now you can go to Amazon.com, buy a book, and read it on your Kindle Cloud Reader on your iPad. That means you don’t have to go through anyone’s app store — you just go to the Web. Apple will surely not like this since they take a 30% commission when you go through their store. Amazon will like it a lot! So will the rest of the world. HTML5 is the biggest change in the Web since the 1990′s and it will reeult in better apps and more choice for all of us.

Tags: cloud, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle cloud reader

Plus for Google

In a previous post, I provided a link to a set of steps that enabled running the Google + iPhone app on the iPad. It did in fact work, but when I next synced with iTunes, it caused problems. I uninstalled the app from the iPad, apologize if anyone had the same problem, and withdraw my recommendation. I found another native iPad app called Plus for Google that works on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. It works well. I am certain the native iPad from Google will be superior once it arrives, but in the meantime this one is very nice for browsing through Google Plus posts on the iPad.

Index to patrickWeb stories about Google +

Tags: google, google plus, ipad

Apple Event – June 2011

The annual Apple worldwide developer conference opening keynote drew a crowd of 5,200. It would have been much larger if the auditorium had the capacity. The extraordinary video is a “must see” if you are interested in either the Apple products or the marketing that surrounds them. The two-hour video is an exemplary model for how to communicate. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. Not a new idea, but executed by the Apple executive team with incredible precision, enthusiasm, and clarity. They also added an important element to the classic three-element communications model. Demo it to them. You get the feeling that the executive team knows exactly what they are talking about and are passionate about it.

Next month we get to see Lion and I for one can’t wait. It sounds like Apple is really listening to what customers want. For the iOS 5 update, we will have to wait until “the Fall”, but it also has a large number of exciting features. The big one is integration with iCloud. The immediate question many people have is what does iCloud mean for Dropbox? There are many unanswered questions. Google, Apple, and Amazon are at war to win our hearts, minds, and bits for their clouds. Some will say that iCloud is a makeover of MobileMe but I believe it is much more than that. iCloud will be continuously streaming billions of bits to all of our Apple devices — songs, photos, emails, web page and reading material bookmarks, calendar updates and reminders, contact information, tweets, and much more. While Google, Apple, and Amazon will strive to get our more and more of our loyalty, there are many parts of our digital lives that they don’t touch.

Every Saturday morning, I update my Quicken data on the MacBook at the kitchen counter. After I close Quicken, the file is immediately updated at dropbox.com. A bit later, I head into my office and access Quicken on the iMac. All the data is there, updated and ready to use. The same file is also on the iPhone and iPad and a handful of ThinkPads that are scattered around the house. Cloud computing does not mean putting everything in the cloud instead of on your computer — it means putting data in the cloud so that it can be replicated to all your devices. Your data is no longer where you PC is — your data is where you are. Some photo afficianados will prefer to use Picasa instead of iPhoto. Some will use Google Docs instead of Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Some will use Amazon for their music. For me it will be Pandora. I plan to try iCloud as soon as possible and will surely use it for my purchased music, probably for photos, and probably not for documents. Definietely not for Quicken and various specialized files like my web site content, GPS data, etc.. All the boards I serve on distribute materials via pdf files. When I receive those by email I detach them to dropbox.com folders. I then synchronize Goodreader with dropbox on the iPad so that all the pdfs are local on the iPad for use at board meetings. I am enthusiastic about iCloud but I do not see it taking over my digital life, at least not yet.

Tags: amazon, apple, cloud computing, dropbox, google, icloud, imac, ipad, iPhone, lion, mac osx, twitter

The iPad Is Tops With Doctors

Bertha Coombs at CNBC reported that there are two things Dr. Larry Nathanson can’t work without when he’s on duty in the emergency ward: his stethoscope and his iPad. Early adopting physicians have been embracing the iPad since day one and now the trial stage has moved to a rush. Not only can a doctor scroll his or her list of patients to be visited, but they can also share information with patients. Dr. Henry Feldman, a surgeon at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told Coombs that when it comes to treating surgical patients, being able to pull up diagrams and x-rays at their bedside has been a real game changer. Feldman said that he has been told more than once “That’s the first time I’ve understood my disease”.

Does this mean that Apple will dominate healthcare tablet computing like they do music? What about the Blackberry and Android and the many other tablet entries? The market is certainly large enough for a lot of players but Apple has some distinct and relevant advantages including ease of use and a vetting by Apple before apps are made available. CNBC reported that in February, four out of five doctors surveyed by health marketing company Aptilon said they planned to buy an iPad this year. The major push by healthcare information technology currently is on the electronic medical record. This is in part because the federal government has declared this to be “meaningful use” of IT and has put billions of dollars of incentives in place to accelerate adoption.

I see a major shift ahead similar to what happened 30 years ago when enterprises were focused on solidifying their mainframe computer applications but department chiefs wanted their own solutions and they opted for local area networks of PCs. It took chief information officers a couple of decades to regain control of IT.

Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at B.I. Deaconess, summed it up for CNBC. “I would call this a perfect storm for medicine,” he said . “You have alignment of funding; a cultural change where doctors want to use devices to improve quality; you also have new devices and new software that is much easier to use.” One of the big unknowns is how federal regulators will respond to the grass-roots demand. There are many questions to be answered. If a doctor takes a picture of a patient with the iPad, does that make the iPad a medical diagnostic device? A similar set of questions were raised in the field of aviation but the demand from pilots was so strong that the FAA found a way to certify the iPad for paperless flight charts. The FDA has already cleared a handful of apps for the iPhone and iPad including a remote patient cardiology monitoring system and a radiology app for reading of medical images.

It is common knowledge that errors are made in healthcare and patients can be harmed. A major contributing factor is imperfect information communication. Can a handheld device such as the iPad improve communications. There is no doubt about it when it comes to patient interaction. The missing link is connecting the iPad to the “backend”. For music the backend is iTunes. For healthcare the backend will be the health information exchanges that are springing up around the country. When that linkage is made, the iPad will become the window into our health and be a tool for improved outcomes. The sooner the better.

Other healthcare stories at patrickWeb
Other healthcare stories at Health Discussions Forum

Tags: apple, cardiology, emergency medicine, Healthcare, hospital, ipad, radiology, surgery, tablet

iPad 2 Launched

The iPad 2 announcement was mostly as expected. Ordering it at 7 AM this morning was also as expected — easy, fast, pleasant, enticing for extra goodies, followed by immediate and precise confirming communications from Apple. The order status shows: Ships: 5 – 7 business days and Delivers: Mar 22 – Mar 29. I ran into a friend at lunch who ordered around noon and his confirmation showed April 8, so that implies a large backlog already created. Not surprising. I have heard many people say that the iPad 2 will cause them to order because of the cameras for FaceTime. I agree with them — that is going to be a really great feature of the iPad 2. I can’t wait to see my grandchildren on it. Not a substitute for seeing them in person but a great experience in between visits. I read today that a manufacturer of private aircraft is including an iPad with each airplane that will include the POH (pilot operating handbook) and all documentation associated with the plane. This is just one of many thousands of ways that the tablet computer will integrate with our business and personal lives. Even if the price was the same, who would want to buy an airplane and get a PC included with all the documentation? Nobody. It would never be considered. There are many implications of tablets. One of them is that physical media is history — disks, tapes, diskettes, CDs, DVDs, USB memory sticks, external hard drives, etc. When you combine an iPad with Dropbox you have it all — a powerful computer connected to the Internet and a cloud computing repository that will sync all of your data between the iPad, the iPhone, your Mac, your PC, Windows, Linux, whatever. Although Bill Gates’ PC is moving toward history, he was right when he envisioned information at your fingertips!

Tags: apple, cloud computing, dropbox, facetime, gates, ipad, ipad 2, pc, tablet

iPad 2

The iPad 2 announcement was mostly as expected–thinner, lighter, faster, two cameras built in, and a gyroscope! A new dual-core processor, branded the A5, is included and promises significantly faster performance. The positive surprise is that all the new features come with the same great battery life as the first iPad, and an innovative new magnetic cover with a choice of two materials and ten colors that helps keep the glass clean and doubles as a stand to elevate the iPad for typing. The only disappointment was that an upgrade to the brilliant retina display of the iPhone 4 was not included.

The new iPad comes in various models based on storage size and networking preference. As far as storage goes, I always recommend getting the maximum available for two reasons. First is that the shift toward more video in our lives requires a lot more storage. Secondly, assuming you want to get an iPad 3 as soon as it comes along, you can get more value on eBay for your prior device with the larger storage capacity. As for network options, if you want WiFi only, the iPad will work in most places but not everywhere. If you want it to work more ubiquitously, you can select a 3G model which will work with your favorite network operator– either AT&T or Verizon. Too bad there is not more competition in the network operator space as neither of these giants is great. The good news with them is that you do not need to commit to a contract. It is pay as you go. If WiFi is available where you are, then that is what you use–automatically. If there is no WiFi then the cellular connection kicks in. The cost is $15 per month for 250 megabytes of data from AT&T and $20 per month for a gigabyte from Verizon. There are significant differences between the two operators as far as what happens when you use more than your initial limit. I have found 250 to be adequate to get email in out-of-WiFi-range and to use the web moderately. If you plan to stream Pandora music or Netflix movies you will use up the 250MB in a hurry. For very heavy use of 3G, the Verizon offering looks better. I plan to stay with AT&T.

There are going to be many thousands of apps spurned by the iPad2 that will take advantage of the faster processor, the gyroscope, and the two cameras. I think the built-in FaceTime app is mot significant because of how easy it makes it to connect with friends and family. It will work with another iPad 2 or with an iPhone 4. If you have grandchildren, you need FaceTime! I view FaceTime as profound. We have a remodeling project going on right now more than 100 miles from our primary home. The builder has an iPhone 4 and can call not just to ask about a bathroom fixture but to show us the wall and point his finger at where we want something installed. He marks the wall with an X while we are looking at it. If you have an injury and need your doctor to look at it, the iPhone is the perfect way to show him or her. There are issues of scheduling time with the doctor and the doctor getting reimbursed for time spent with you on FaceTime but I am confident these issues will be worked out. FaceTime can extend our lives into other places and other’s lives into our space — if any of us so chooses to do so. As for the other apps, I can’t wait to try the new GarageBand for iPad 2.

If you haven’t watched the keynote where Steve Jobs introduces the iPad2, I found it an enjoyable 63 minutes. He is justifiably proud of this latest Apple innovation. I don’t know where the limit is, but at the current price of Apple stock, the company has a market capitalization of 1.5 times GE, IBM, or Microsoft and is catching up to Exxon, the world’s most valuable company.

Tags: apple, facetime, garageband, ipad, ipad 2, jobs, WiFi

SIIA Conference – Buzz on the Panels

John Blossom took pictures and notes at the SIIA Conference last week. He did a really good job at it! If you want to get more insight to what some really smart panelists had to say, you can get it at John’s Buzz. He covered two panels.
Jim Kollegger’s panel
CEO Outlook: Winning the Platform Wars – Betting on the Next Digital Wave

John Patrick’s panel
Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target


Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, Jim Kollegger, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi

Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target

The SIIA Conference marked its 10th year of bringing together an audience of senior executives to address important strategic issues and to network. The theme was”Moving from Wired to Wireless”. My role was to moderate a panel named Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target. The distinguished panelists were Bill Godfrey, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Electronic Product Development at Elsevier, Oke Okaro, General Manager and Global Head of Mobile, Multimedia at Bloomberg L.P., John Paris, Sr. Director, Mobile Strategy at Time, Inc., and Bob Sutor, VP, Open Systems and Linux at IBM’s Software Group. See their bios on the speaker’s page. It was an honor to lead the discussion.

I set the stage with a few comments about the big picture. The mobile Internet is taking off because of a supporting takeoff in three areas. First, the smartphone is becomine a bigger share of mobile phones. It is still mostly dumb phones out there but the mix is changing and soon smartphones will be in the majority. Seondly, the Cloud is gaining a lot of momentum as an efficient way to store information. Dropbox is an interesting model to follow as it allows replication of your data from the cloud to all your devices. The third factor I cited is the explosion in social media. The comgination of these three areas is resulting in an Internet that is where you are, not where your PC is Lastly, the mobile environment is very personal. Power to the people! More on my big picture view from the Genesys Partners dinner that was held on Monday evening.

The panelists offered the audience a lot of insight. Although they were not able to provide specifics of time and price, it was clear that there is a strong commitment to get magazines on the iPad and other mobile tablets. There are magazines there now but not in a desirable way. The obvious change coming is the subscription model instead of paying $4.99 per copy. More profound is the commitment I heard to make tablet magazines compelling by merging the social media experience with the e-zine content. Imagine reading a Time Magazine story about electric cars and simultaneously see how many other people are currently reading the story, how many have read it and liked it or did not like it, and how many of them own an electric car. In the case of a Business Week story, imagine seeing live data about the industry or company you are reading about. When it comes to Elsevier professional and research journals, we can expect big changes with them also. Tablets are ideal for reading journals with the ability to take notes and add bookmarks. You can also imagine drilling down from a Google search to a Wikipedia article to a medical journal to a particular intervention to live data from a clinical trial that may be underway. All these things can be done in a browser on a PC or Mac but the experience is not as real or personal. The mobile Internet lets you have your content with you wherever you are and with whatever device you may want to use. You may read on the train with your iPad and then read with your iPhone or Droid phone while you are in line at the deli waiting for a sandwich.

Bill, John, and Oke were all bullish about the potential for the mobile Internet to extend the reach of their content and all are actively working on their delivery mechanisms and business models. Some say information wants to be free but good content developers and journalists and subject matter experts need to get paid. Advertising may continue to foot a significiant part of the bill, but the upcoming subscription model may be preferable to readers who prefer not to be tracked or blitzed with advertising. Bob was not as optimistic about an end to the format wars as the publishers were about their business models. It looks like HTML5, the new standard for web content, including video, that has the potential to subsume all the competing formats. Bob said the odds of Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Adobe, and Google all agreeing on a single standards based approach are slim. The good news is that the technology for developing the content is getting sophisticated enough that the publishers will be able to create compelling content and then push the button to produce multiple versions of the content so that it can be consumed on all the various mobile platforms.

All in all, it was an enlightening conversation with four very knowledgeable experts. There was a consensus throughout the conference that 2011 will be the year that the mobile Internet reaches the tipping point.

Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi

Dropbox

When I became a student again in August, I decided to upgrade my computing capabilities and bought an iMac and a MacBook Pro (I don’t play golf or tennis so I have rationalized that whatever I would spend on these sports would be more than I spent on new computers). I’ll have more to say about the Macs in another posting, but suffice it for now to say that they are incredibly easy to use than Windows PCs.

There is quite a bit here in patrickWeb about Cloud Computing, and the evolution away from the desktop to the cloud is well underway. One of the more clever and useful cloud applications that I have found is Dropbox. Dropbox provides file synchronization that simplifies many of the things I do. The initial motivation to get Dropbox was my use of Quicken. Quicken for the Mac is unfortunately inferior to Quicken for Windows, so I installed VMWare Fusion and Windows XP on the Mac. This allows me to run a Windows app side by side with Mac applications in a seamless way. VMWare calls this the Fusion view. Fusion solves the issue of being able to run Quicken for Windows on the Mac but it doesn’t solve the other issue which is the location of the Quicken data file.

The location of the file would not be an issue if I only used the iMac or only used the MacBook Pro, but when you use them both, depending on where you are, the location of the file becomes a major issue. Dropbox solves the problem. Here’s how it works. You install Dropbox on each of your computers. It takes a few minutes at most. The result is you now have a folder on your computer called My Dropbox. Anything you put in that folder is automatically uploaded to the Cloud (a server at Dropbox.com). The file is then automatically synchronized to any other computer you have that has Dropbox installed on it. The usage scenario is as follows. I run Quicken on the iMac using the local file which is in the Quicken folder in the My Dropbox folder on the iMac. After I finish using Quicken and close the program, the file is automatically uploaded to Dropbox.com and then downloaded to the MacBook Pro. No login is required and no actions need to be taken – it is all automatic. The next day I take a trip somewhere with the MacBook. I start Quicken and it automatically opens the latest version of the Quicken data file from the Quicken folder which is in the My Dropbox folder on the MacBook Pro. It may sound complicated but it is actually elegant and simple.

Drop box can be used for many other applications in addition to Quicken. Any application that has a data file and where you can specify the location of that data file can take advantage of the concept I described for Quicken. Another application that I have found quite useful is 1Password. 1Password maintains a secure database of logins and passwords for websites that I utilize. The database is stored in a folder in the My Dropbox folder. The 1Password application is installed on the iMac, MacBook Pro, iphone4, and the iPad. They all use the same file and are always in synch.

There are many applications that can take advantage of this concept. In fact, for $99 per year you can get 50 gigabytes of Dropbox storage. This has allowed me to put all of my data folders in the My Dropbox folder. This allows me to run any application on multiple computers and always have the same data. As a byproduct of this Dropbox becomes a backup repository for the data. The concept of desktop, portable, mobile, and handheld devices with synchronized data in the clouds is one that I expect to become pervasive.

Tags: 1password, cloud, dropbox, ipad, iPhone, quicken, sync

The Future of the Web

The Demo conference two weeks ago was in Santa Clara, not San Diego. Sorry for the error — Demo has often been in San Diego, but not this time. My last posting summarized what the event is all about and mentioned a few companies that launched there. In addition to the excitement of seeing so many enthusiastic start-ups I gained some new insight at the conference as well. Executive Producer Matt Marshall made some brief but profound comments in his opening talk. The content was not really new but he pulled together and nicely summarized the big picture of where things are headed (See more about his talk at DemoBeat. In a nutshell Matt said the future of the web is evolving around social networking, mobile, and cloud computing.

All three of these topics are written about throughout this blog but I truly gained some new perspective on them at Demo. I have often said that social networking is not about eleven-year old kids on MySpace. It is more about grown-ups looking for jobs, hunting for people to hire, or collaborating on a new venture. The new ingredient is e-commerce integrated with social networking. People can buy what their friends are buying and can offer help to a colleague who wants to know how a particular product works or might fit into their environment. More broadly speaking, social networking is finding its way into every web application, not just a separate application of its own.

The mobile Internet is booming as we can all witness from the massive press coverage about every new phone, phone rumor and network pricing change. The new trend I observed at Demo is that startup companies showed off their new application and pointed out that in addition to the mobile app, the data from it can also be viewed from a PC or Mac. That is a 180 degree flip since a year ago. The iphone and Android phones have the power and speed and graphics to make e-commerce, business apps, video conferencing, and other sophisticated apps practical on the handheld devices. The iPad and coming tablets take things to the next level. The PC and Mac become secondary.

Every start-up at Demo either offered some form of cloud computing service or had it built in to whatever they were offering. While there are still skeptics about cloud computing it is clear to me that it has evolved to where the Internet was ten years ago. Cloud is a natural evolution of the Internet. What makes cloud computing so powerful is actually what is on our computers and devices — the browser. Browsers are getting very sophisticated and able to execute javascript incredibly fast. The result is that apps in the browser have the look and feel of what we expect from a desktop computer or better.

When you combine all three of these market factors — social networking, mobile, and cloud computing — you get a new generation of capability. It takes things up a notch in terms of power, flexibility, convenience and ease of use. I no longer say we are just 5% of the way there. I revise that to 10-15% overall but still 5% in healthcare.

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