Back from Florida

The weather was so nice, it was difficult to leave and come home. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend a bit more time in Florida this winter. Thanks to FaceTime, Skype, Polycom, iMessage, email, and the web, it was easy to participate in board meetings remotely. I was even able to chair a hospital quality committee meeting remotely, thanks to the high quality PolyCom video-conferencing system they have. My current doctoral course is in health care economics. One of the team assignments required a teleconference. There were four of us in diverse locations; Ottawa, Baltimore, Florida, and Jordan. If two of the students were in Canada and the Middle East, it didn’t matter that I was in Florida instead of home in Connecticut. We were all just a few hundred milliseconds apart.

Before leaving Florida, I decided to try out the new iPhoto app on the iPad3. It goes beyond the photos app that comes with the iPad. In addition to taking advantage of the greatly enhanced retina screen, the iPhoto app has a new feature called Journals. In addition to viewing your albums, events, faces, and places, you can create journals. A journal is a web page that can include pictures from your albums plus special add-ins from the app including a calendar icon representing the date you took the pictures, a map showing where you took them, and a weather icon showing what the weather was like when you took the picture or alternatively what the weather there is now. You can also add quotations and text boxes. See March in Florida for a page I created as a first try. The pictures can be edited, touched up, brightened, manipulated with effects, air-brushed, and arranged in a collage — all with your fingers. You then save the journal to a glass shelf and it is uploaded to iCloud where you can share it with friends, family, or the public. A home page shows all your shelves with the journals lined up on them in date sequence. In effect, journals gives you the ability to create a web site at iCloud with no traditional design tools. Just your iPad and your fingers.  This is classic Apple making things easy — it just works. But, it is not perfect.

iCloud can be slow in accepting your upload. The shelves on the iPad include a favorites shelf but that shelf does not appear on the homepage at iCloud. The six journals I created are not in date sequence as they are supposed to be. The iPhoto app does not sync with your iPhoto app on the Mac or your photos on a PC. The iPhoto pictures sync to the photos app on the iPad, not the new iPhoto app on the iPad. Syncing is one-way. If you delete or edit a picture or add a new one in one of your iPhoto albums on the iPad, it does not sync to iPhoto on the Mac or on your PC. There are a few things that need polish but you can see the vision coming through. Take a picture with your iPhone or iPad and the picture automatically goes to your photostream at iCloud. iCloud then pushes the picture down to all your other devices. You can then create journals and share them via iCloud. Facebook, Google, flickr, and others have nice ways to store and share photos, but journals are now offering an alternative that includes content creation for anyone with some imagination and an iPad. Take a look at patrickweb.com/iphotojournals and let me know what you think. As usual, I confess to not being a good photographer nor artistically creative.

Tags: albums, apple, events, ipad, iphotos, journals, mac, photos, pictures

Kindle Update

Thanks to Mary Keough, over at IBM, for reading my post and correcting me on the weight of the Kindle Touch. I was thinking of the new $79 Kindle when I said six ounces. I weighed four devices this morning to make sure I got this right. Here is what I found.

I have to admit that I am vascillating a bit between the Kindle and the Kindel Touch. They are both very light and a pleasure to read on. The touch screen is nice, but the simple buttons on the Kindle create a certainty about your intentions. When I swipe, sometimes I go back a page to make sure I had not swiped two pages. With the Kindle, a click is always “a” click. All the Kindle devices are great, and I suspect the Fire will keep getting better with software updates and follow-on models.

Mary asked about the advertising and quetioned whether it is worth the extra $30 on the Kindle or $40 on the Touch to get the device “without special offers”. My opinion is that it is not worth the extra money. The special offers appear as a screen saver when you stop reading. They are totally unobtrusive. You can easily not even notice them. If you want to look more closely and are interested in something being offered, you can go for it. Speaking of reading, the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was really great (see Apple at Grand Central Terminal). I am now reading Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. I have read most of his books, and this one too is really good so far. 

 Other patrickWeb stories related to the Kindle

Tags: amazon, apple, fall of giants, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, isaacson, ken follett, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch, steve jobs

Kindle Fire – Part 2

On September 28, Amazon announced three new Kindles — a $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $199 Android-based color touch screen Kindle Fire tablet. Technology pundits have criticized the Kindle Fire’s touch screen and various aspects of the user interface (see Daily Report: Kindle Fire Attracts Critics, and Buyers – NYTimes.com). I have observed the shortcomings also, but I think the device has a market niche that will be well served — people who like to read books. At $199, it is less than half the cost of an iPad. Amazon will relentlessly promote the Fire on its site and is rumored to be nearly ready to provide software updates for better performance and improved user interface.

I remain a believer in purpose-built devices. The iPad is great for documents, weather, stocks, surfing the web, and reading books at the kitchen counter. The Kindle Fire is great for reading books. That is what it does best. It can also do most everything the iPad can, but not everything. I don’t see myself giving a slide presentation with a projector and the Fire. I don’t plan to put 40 gigtabytes of dropbox folders containing all my data on the Fire. The Fire is great for reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie. It is basically a media player. You can do many tablet computing tasks, but that is not what it is best at. The device I like the best for reading books is the new Kindle Touch. It weighs six ounces and has no moving parts. Turning pages and setting bookmarks is as easy as a touch. You can change the font size to the optimum and read comfortably for long periods of time wherever you may be — incuding outdoors in the sun, which you can do with an iPad. If I am at the kitchen counter and want to read for ten minutes, I launch the Kindle app on the iPad and it automatically takes me to wherever I left off on the Fire or iPhone or wherever I last read — a seamless experience. So many gadgets, so little time! I plan to donate the entry-model Kindle to the senior center.

Tags: amazon, apple, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch

Apple at Grand Central Terminal

It was a coincidence that I had a board meeting in New York City yesterday, on the day that Apple was opening it’s fifth retail store there. The store opening was planned for 10 AM with collector teeshirts to be given to the first 4,000 visitors. I arrived at Grand Central Station from Connecticut at 8 AM and there was already a line of 2,500 people. When I returned to the train station at 2PM, the shirts had been gone for two hours. I was one of the many thousands who visited the store, which will have 315 employees. Some day my grandchildren’s grandchilren will tell friends that their Pop Pop was there on opening day.  The Wall Street Journal reported that more people visit an Apple store each quarter than visit Disney’s four biggest theme parks in a year. It was quite a site to be there yesterday. I took some pictures but the one’s in the WSJ are much better. There is a short video done by Engadget that is worth looking at (see  Apple just arrived at Grand Central Terminal, we hop aboard video).

After visiting the new Apple store, I could not help but think about Steve Jobs. He will be revered for many generations as a great innovator and business leader. After you read his biography by Walter Isaacson, you will also respect this great biographer. I met Walter in 1996 just before he became editor of Time Magazine and I was greatly impressed with his embrace of the Internet. He came to IBM with some colleagues and we brainstormed about how the publisher might take advantage of the Web. None of us really knew the right strategy at the time, and unfortunately, the publishing industry still has not figured it out. Industry by industry, it was Steve Jobs who showed the way.

Steve Jobs – by Walter Isaacson is already the biggest selling biography of all times.  Jobs not only authorized the biography but gave Isaacson access to his home, his family, and his innermost thoughts over a two-year period leading up to just before his death. Great biographers write about great people. Isaacson’s books about Benjamin Franklin and Einstein were great but much harder for me to read. The Jobs biography read more smoothly in part because I could identify directly with the technology issues so aptly described in the book. I know or have met many of the characters in the book. Although not a technologist, Isaacson did a gret job in desscribing the technolgy issues in layman terms. He offered an insight that will help many readers better understand the impact and potential of technology.

The basic premise of the Steve Jobs philosophy was to create a simplified and integrated experience for the consumer. Critics say that the integration of iMacs, iPods, iPads, etc. with iTunes and Mac OSX represents a monopolistic strategy. After reading the biography, I suspect most people will be convinced that it was an intense desire to make things easier has been the driver. Jobs would say that products and profits are both important, but elegant and simplified products are most important. It was the intense drive and focus of Steve Jobs that made such products available to the mass market and catapulted Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. 

I continue to believe that the Amazon Kindle is the best platform for reading books, but I read the Steve Jobs biography on the iPad. 

Tags: apple, ipad, isaacon, steve jobs

iPhone 4S Tracking

UPS tracking shows that the iPhone 4S is in Windsor Locks, Connecticut after arriving in Louisville, KY. Before that the iphone was in Anchorage, Alaska, where it arrived from Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong. The origination of the shipment was somewhere in China, and from there it went to Shenzhen, China enroute to Hong Kong. I am expecting the 4S to arrive mid-day tomorrow and I can’t wait. Stay tuned. Meanwhile iOS 5 is running on both the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. The press has had mixed views, but my view is quite positive. The key feature is iCloud. I tested it today. You take a picture with the iPhone and then go to your MacBook or PC or iMac, and the picture is there in your Photo Stream. iCloud is implementing cloud computing for the consumer. Much more to come on the subject.

Tags: 4s, apple, fedex, icloud, ipad, iPhone, iphone 4, iphone 4s, iphone4, itunes

Steve Jobs

The outpouring of stories about Steve Jobs has been impressive and certainly justified in tribute to an incredible person such as Steve Jobs. I am very saddened by the loss of such a vibrant and creative human being. I don’t think about the price of the Apple shares I own, but I can’t help but think about the human and medical aspects of his passing. I don’t know much about his wife and children, but I feel for them — it must have been painful for many months and perhaps years knowing that their husband and father was likely going to die. Miracles happen every day in healthcare, but in spite of a patient who no doubt knew more about his condition than many doctors might know, no cure was possible. If you have not read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, I highly recommend it. The novel-like non-fiction book tells the story of cancer from thousands of years ago through the many episodes of research.  In 2010, more than 500,000 Americans died of cancer, more than 1,500 people a day. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the US, exceeded only by heart disease. In spite of these large numbers,  to die from pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 is rare. And Steve Jobs was rare. Some say there will not be another hero such as him for a very long time, if ever. I never met Steve Jobs, but I did talk with him by telephone back in the early 1990′s. My assistant said that Mr. Jobs was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. He was CEO of NeXT, Inc. at the time. I was vice president of marketing for IBM’s personal software products. Our product was an operating system for PCs called OS/2. NeXT had an operating systems for PCs. It was not well known, but Tim Berners-Lee was using NeXT when he invented the World Wide Web in 1989-1990. Steve wanted to talk about possible collaboration. What amazed me was that the CEO of a company seemed to knew every detail about NeXT, how it worked, how it was built, what it could do. Attention to detail and unmerciful demands for flawless execution seem to be what brought the company from near failure to the most valuable company in the world. I read in one article that Steve had coached his team on how to handle the launch of the iPhone 4S on Wednesday. It would not surprise me if that is what kept him going near the end, and then when the launch was over and successful, he passed away. It would not surprise me to see a philanthropic move emerge that will be as beautiful as his products. I am currently reading the biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson. In two weeks the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs will offer great insight about the legend.

Tags: apple, einstein, iPhone, isaacson, jobs, steve jobs

Kindle 456

There are quite a few stories here in patrickWeb about the Kindle and about Amazon (see the links to the left for indexes to both topics). I confess that I am a fan of both. I also love the iPad — but for different reasons. The media loves to write about arch rivals and head-to-head competitors. They want to speculate about whether Fire will win out over the iPad. I don’t see it that way. In fact I see them both as winners. There is not going to be one device that is best for all things for all people. That is the great thing about consumer technology — there is something for everyone. Some will be happy to have an iPad as their sole “computer” and use it for reading books, writing stories, doing their email, and shopping on the Web. Others will want more purpose-centric devices. If you read a lot of books, you will want a Kindle. If you like to read outdoors, forget about using an iPad. On Saturday I received the new $79 Kindle. (I ordered the Kindle Touch and a Fire also but they will not be available until November). The new Kindle is great. It has no keyboard and is therefore smaller. You can hold it in your hand and read to your heart’s content and never get a sore wrist. It weighs next to nothing. The e-ink makes the words clear as a bell indoors or outdoors. If there is something you need to type, it has an onscreen keyboard that lets you select with the cursor. If you are going to write a story, that would be no good but to enter the SSID of your home WiFi network to get started, it is no problem. The new Kindle is #4 for me. I sold the Kindle DX on eBay and handed down one to my wife who doesn’t care about having the very latest model like I do. When the Kindle Touch and Fire (Kindles 5 & 6) arrive, I plan to donate a Kindle or two to the local senior center. What will Fire be like? I can’t wait to try it, but I expect it will be great for consuming media and for shopping — probably better than the iPad. When it comes to syncing my board papers between Dropbox and Goodreader, I expect the iPad will continue as the preferred solution. I expect the apps for CNBC and Bloomberg financial reporting, aviation and healthcare apps and many other apps will continue to be best on the iPad. I don’t see a replacement for FaceTime with the grandchildren. The best news is that we have some competition for tablets. That may make Apple the first company to have a market value of a trillion dollars, or it may mean that there are enough differences in the preferences of billions of people in the world that there is room for at least a handful of very successful products and companies. My bet is on the latter.

iPad stories on patrickWeb
Kindle stories on patrickWeb

Tags: amazon, apple, book, books, dropbox, goodreader, ipad, Kindle

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