Health Record Adoption will be driven by aging

The MobileHealthCrowd blog has an interesting article on the adoption of home-based health sensor technology. The aging population and the desire to live at home will drive a massive adoption of health sensor technology in the next 20 years.

When you think about the implications of this trend it creates fascinating ramifications. These are my thoughts on potential impacts:

• Continued investment in wireless broadband and Wi-Fi
• incorporation of monitoring technology in to mobile phones (think about how Apple has built-in the connecting technology for the Nike sensor in to their latest iPod)
• Adoption of dual-homed routers for the home to provide fail-over circuits. This could include automatic fail-over to wireless broadband services
• Rising adoption of Personal Health Records

It is the last potential development that is really interesting. As we age and want to stay in our homes and independent we will need to collect and share monitoring information from a myriad of devices. Where will this information be stored? The logical place is our Personal Health Record. When you recognize this it becomes likely that the senior segment of the population will be the big adopters of the Electronic Personal Health Records. Adoption will occur because their lives and their independence may depend upon it.

Unlike most Internet technology adoption we have seen to date which has come from the more youthful segments of the population - in health terms - the Young Invincible crowd. Personal Health Record adoption could come from our Seniors first.

HealthCampDc 2009 is a go

It has been a busy start to the year but I have finally dropped things in place to run the next HealthCampDc on Friday February 27th. Once again the event takes place at the DC offices of CareFirst. The address is 840 First St NE, Washington DC, 20002. The offices are close to Union Station so in the interests of being environmentally friendly (and less vehicular storage challenged) I urge you to consider using public transport.

There are a limited number of places available at this event and last year's event got some great feedback so sign up quickly and help to shape the agenda for the event. As a barcamp style event you will be an active participant in defining what is discussed at the sessions held that day.

If you haven't attended a HealthCamp or BarCamp you may be wondering what this is about. HealthCamp is about joining in a conversation and stimulating action that will transform HealthCare.

One of the enduring guides for HealthCamp comes from the Health 2.0 definition that TedEytan evolved with his readership on his blog.

Health 2.0 is participatory healthcare. Enabled by information, software, and community that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own healthcare, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.

How do you sign up?

We have made it simpler this year. An eventbrite page has been setup. You can find it at http://healthcampdc.eventbrite.com/

CareFirst are the facilities sponsor for the event. The attendees at last year's event were very complimentary about the location and facilities. This year we will have an extra room available to give us more flexibility in hosting sessions.

The event is just a few weeks away so sign up quickly and spread the word!

I look forward to seeing you at HealthCampDc for some fascinating discussions about how we can transform HealthCare. It is a very timely event since the new President and his administration has HealthCare targeted as one of their top three agenda items.

A Parallel Twitter Search Repository

I was reading the news about Twitter limiting API requests for developers to 20,000 per hour. There is a good assessment of the implications on the SocialToo blog. The foundation of Twitter's success has not been the service itself but rather the openness of the API. The API has encouraged developers to create innovative new services that address limitations in the core service. Throttling API calls may seem like a prudent move for Twitter, it could even be the harbinger of a business model, but it potentially hurts Twitter and the ecosystem in subtle but significant ways.

The throttle on the API makes it more difficult for companies to create business models that are based on Twitter. This will encourage more diversity and weaken Twitter's bid to become the ubiquitous communications utility.

If it is a harbinger of a new business model then I hope to see pricing tier details emerge that allow heavy users to raise the API call limits. If this comes to pass then Twitter will have to provide Service Level Agreements to go with this. If Twitter is going to do this they need to move quickly. If they fail to do so then the ecosystem will find a way to isolate the influence of Twitter.

I have been thinking about the Twitter business model for some time and suggested that throttling the API may be an early indicator of that (See my post from July 18th - Twitter's business model emerges?). People may be willing to pay for priority access - the stock quote model.

If Twitter does not move quickly to support the innovative applications that make Twitter so attractive then I have a suggestion to developers. Think on this....

If you are building a business around the Twitter API how about creating a shared search repository with an API that mirrors Twitter. Let's use the wisdom of the crowds to crowd source Twitter data.

What do I mean by this?

There must be a growing number of developers that are building applications that pull the same information from Twitter. The followers of the most popular twitterers, The tweets around the most popular trending topics. Who is following who....

What if the results of those API calls could be pooled in a cloud resource on the Google AppEngine or an Amazon EC2/S3 platform? If this information could be made accessible using the same API structure as Twitter then developers could modify their applications to check this resource first before using their valuable pool of API calls to Twitter. Then when a call is made to Twitter send the returned data to the cloud. If you think about it, the growing number of Twitter desktop clients have tremendous potential to build this parallel repository. What if TweetDeck or Twhirl had an option in their preferences to "Post Twitter search data to community repository"? As the number of desktop clients and users grew so would the power of the community repository.

Yes, there are probably a legion of technical issues to resolve in all this, but we are already seeing services like Identi.ca mirror and extend twitter functionality. If we want the Twitter ecosystem to thrive then developers need to work together to minimize the impact that the core Twitter service can have on their livelihoods.

What are your thoughts?

We need to kill browser plugins - or move them to the cloud

Louis Gray asks an interesting question in a post on his blog: "Is requiring a Plug-in akin to designing for IE Only?" Like Louis, I use the Safari browser for a lot of my browsing, which doesn't support plug-ins. The rise in popularity of Plug-ins for Firefox has occurred at the same time as the rapid adoption of the iPhone.

The iPhone is in the vanguard of mobile internet use. This trend will continue with the introduction of Android phones and the continued popularity of the Blackberry. The Mozilla foundation is working on a mobile version of Firefox but this is not a real solution. Mobile phones are not the only way we access the Internet. Games consoles and Internet Tablets, like the Nokia N810 are also entering the mix.

I believe that the future lies with developers creating cloud-based functionality that can be activated from a bookmark. Examples of this already exist with bookmarklets from services like delicious and bit.ly. The advantage of the bookmarklet is that it can be designed to be browser-platform independent and can also deliver functionality to mobile devices.

Flash and the iPhone

According to Mobile Crunch, Apple has reportedly changed their position on "Duplicate Functionality" applications on the iPhone and in the Apps Store.

This is raising the question of whether we will see Flash appear on the iPhone. Personally, I believe that Apple is holding out against Flash on the iPhone for strategic rather than technical reasons. Here are my thoughts:

• With Quicktime as the de facto video standard on the iPhone, success with the iPhone supports the growth of Quicktime. Look at Google developing a library that supports Quicktime instead of just flash.
• If Flash was available on the iPhone it would further encourage developers and media people to produce for the Flash Movie format.
• Look how the Movie Studios produce trailers using Quicktime. Does Apple want to lose that business to Adobe?  

I am sure there are some technical reasons, such as processor load and battery life impact that can justify Apple's stance but at the heart of the issue is more likely the strategic battle with Adobe for control of video formats used by the entertainment industry.

Thoughts?

In search of new business models

In the past few years the Advertising-based business model has been the approach of choice for many startups. Today TechCrunch carried the news that Jott, the "voice to action" web service is dropping it's free option. Jott's CEO, John Pollard was quoted saying "The terrible advertising market means every customer has to pay their own way."

Jott is a cool service that can be indispensable for some people. The ability to make a phone call and dictate a blog post or a tweet, or create an appointment or task is a great capability when typing on a phone keyboard is not an option.

Back in October, when Ping.fm went off the Internet for a brief period I raised the business model question. In this economy revenue is king. I see Jott's move as a confirmation of this trend away from Advertising support as the primary revenue model. Advertising will not go away. In fact I can see it getting more intrusive as a means to encourage serious users to upgrade to a fee-based advertising free service.

In that same Ping.fm post I also suggested that mobile application development could become an increasingly attractive option for developers since this provides an opportunity to generate revenue through sales with few distribution headaches.

We are heading in to an extremely interesting phase in the evolution of the Internet. Entrepreneurs are going to have to think much harder about their path to revenue. This should trigger some inventive business models but also consolidation around some of the giants in the business that have the audiences that generate substantial revenues from advertising. This won't necessarily reduce the pace of innovation but we may be entering a phase where the consumer's "free ride" is much less common place.

Microsoft has a dirty SharePoint secret

At work, like probably a lot of people I am running Windows XP with Office 2003 and Sharepoint 2007. I have been battling a problem with Sharepoint and Excel for some time now. It all centers around the Datasheet view in SharePoint. This seems like a useful feature that lets you manipulate Sharepoint lists as if they were a spreadsheet. If only it would work reliably.

When I try to use Datasheet View I get an error telling me that "The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons:

• A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed,
• your browser does not support ActiveX controls,
• or support for ActiveX controls is disabled."

It seems I am not alone with this problem. Microsoft Help and Support does tell us that you have to use Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 Professional edition. That is the first open dirty secret. With all the differing versions of Office that were sold you have to use the Pro edition to get the necessary activeX components to enable this functionality. So, if you are a small business and purchased Office Small Business Edition for your desktops and then went and bought the Microsoft Small Business Server with SharePoint then you are probably going to be stung for some upgrades.

The other dirty secret is more difficult to fix. It appears that SharePoint can't cope with you running multiple editions of Office. So, if you upgrade to Project 2007 or one of the other newer versions of Microsoft's Office productivity suite but don't update the core Office 2003 Professional version then you will probably find that the datasheet view in SharePoint stops working for you. It appears that latest owssupp.dll file (and possibly other dll's) are not backward compatible. This hybrid situation where part of Office 12 (ie. Office 2007) gets installed alongside Office 2003 is a situation that Microsoft can't cope with. I also saw this when I installed a trial version of Sharepoint designer. When the license expired the datasheet view stopped working and when I uninstalled Designer it didn't fix the problem.

With a growing dependence on web-based applications the datasheet view error is a nasty one because it actually causes Internet Explorer to crash. If you use Firefox with IE Tab it will also crash Firefox.

Right now I am running with Outlook 2007 and Office 2003 and I am wondering if this hybrid setup is a continuing cause of the problem.

I know it is in Microsoft's best interests to push us to upgrade to everything 2007 but they should be able to support their own stable of products that span across versions. Maybe this just indicates that not only is the Windows platform creaking but the Office System has also got to large and unwieldy.

It is going to be a common situation, particularly in this economy where organizations may upgrade parts of the suite in order to access enhanced functions but leave other parts of the Office suite in place on the prior version. I think Microsoft's decision to radically change the user interface in Office 2007 may make more companies reluctant to change because of the retraining costs that they will incur.

Telling us to upgrade everything to 2007 is not an acceptable answer. However, when Microsoft tells their customers who bought 30Gb Zunes to just wait 24 hours to fix their the leap year bug that stopped the devices working on December 31st, you know that we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for a fix. All this just confirms my thinking that simpler, browser-agnostic, web applications have a bright future.

UPDATE - I may have worked a fix for this problem. This is what I did:

I did a search on my C: drive for owssupp.dll.

I found two versions in these directories:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Since I am using Microsoft Office Excel 2003 (ie. Office 11 Pro) I renamed owssupp.dll in the Office12 folder to owssupp.dllx.

I then restarted my PC. So far I seem to be able to get the datasheet view working. It will be interesting to see if anything is broken in Outlook 2007.