GigaOm takes a look at the biggest players in the space and puts it all in a chart for your reading pleasure.

Here’s a look at some of the best-known names in this field and how they stack up against each other.

Philip Fasano
Executive vice president and chief information officer

This summer NASA held a conference called, “mHealth – Smart Media and Health: Applications Benefiting Life in Space and on Earth.” You may ask, why would NASA have a conference on healthcare?

“As we consider the issues we need to address for providing health care in space, we find many analogous situations to the needs for health care on Earth — health care devices that are small, lightweight, and portable that can obtain and assess data and transmit data for analysis,” said William H. Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate at NASA headquarters. “By identifying and solving common issues of health care in space and in remote areas on Earth, we will achieve our goal of using spaceflight innovations to benefit all humankind. This workshop was designed to help us do just that.”

One of the presenters was Phil Fasano, EVP and Chief Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente.  Phil’s presentation, Consumer-driven health care mobile access for mobile patients (PDF) featured a concept video on how mhealth can effect multiple healthcare interactions.

“A guiding vision of the type of future Kaiser Permanente is helping to build—where information technology enables real-time, personalized care, resulting in improved wellness and affordability.”

I think the video does a great job of showing how information technology can impact healthcare through mobile devices as well as through social media and just getting everything off paper.  Healthcare is probably the last hold out in the information age.  I always thought it was because entrenched players were making too much money off of the existing paper based system and while I still think that’s an issue I also believe key players in the provider category are so resistant to change that they block any advancements in the vein hope of retaining total control.

At some point the overwhelming benefits from modernizing our healthcare system will catch up to the hold outs and coupled with the new government incentives for meaningful use and the impending explosion of new people covered by health insurance it looks like a huge opportunity to increase performance in an industry category the is 40 years behind.

Another entirely rational observation by Ford was that the replacement life cycle for consumer electronics is much shorter than for automobiles.  This lead to the decision to focus on smart phones as the main input and control device for end user functionality in the car. Now the two rational decisions converge in a problem, a big problem.

Most people have a iOS or Android smart phone.  Microsoft’s smart phone market share recently tumbled 27% YOY  to just 1.9% of the market. For Ford that means their technology layer is built by a company that doesn’t have end user devices and is forced to accommodate competitors devices.  Its an issue for sure and has been a clear problem but it certainly came into sharp focus at WWDC this week.

BMW, Audi, Chrysler, Honda, General Motors, Jaguar, Land Rover and Toyota to integrate Siri

Ford’s cornerstone of customer interaction has been the “hands free” voice command integration in its Sync platform. With Apple’s announcement that nine auto manufacturers car’s will be “Siri enabled” Ford’s partnership with Microsoft sets it alone in a fast moving world.

From GigaOM:

“If Ford, however, gives up even basic functions like message notifications to Siri, it basically starts ceding its platform, becoming a peripheral set of speakers and display to the iPhone. Voice is going to be the key user interface in the car, and it’s highly unlikely a driver is going to switch back and forth between two interfaces. So whichever company establishes itself as the de facto in-car voice assistant will have a huge advantage.”

I think the main problem for Ford is not just the voice assistance, its the suite of applications that surround Apple’s Eyes Free offering. Apple is not only providing control functions but they are replacing turn by navigation and when you consider the announced capabilities of Passbook, Ford has a huge up hill battle if it choses to go it alone with Microsoft as its partner. Its not about making a call, or turning up the stereo without using your hands, its about the mobile car ecosystem… and how you pay for gas.  Apple’s “secret weapon” is its huge user base of existing iTunes holders and their corresponding credit card accounts.

For Ford its a Forrest from the trees issue.  While they are trying to improve the Sycn voice command system to reach parity with Siri, Apple is going to take the ecosystem model right out from underneath them.

Dan Schulman, group president, Enterprise Growth, at American Express

American Express group president Dan Schulman says that wide spread adoption of NFC technology is four to six years out.  Schilman cites one key but sometimes overlooked issue: its not a value proposition change, its a form factor change.

Schilman offers some addition keen insight into the evolution of mobile payment.

From NFC Times:

“I know there is a lot of conversation around tapping your phone at the point of sale,” he said. “My view is, that is a form-factor change and not a value-proposition change and form factor changes actually take a long time to come about.”

“My view of the world is fundamentally different from that,” he said. “Imagine if, instead of tapping your phone at the point of sale you, metaphorically speaking, tapped your phone as you entered into a retailer. And you don’t even need to tap. You could do it through geofencing; you could do it through any number of techniques.”

“The way to define your commerce identification is not just your financial information to complete the transaction, but basically the brand that you want to shop for, the shopping list, coupons that you may have, the budget that you may have, and you basically tap that on the doorway and when you tap that on the doorway, you let that retailer know exactly who you are and what you want. So that merchant then can come back with a customized set of offers specifically for you.”

“The whole idea around digital commerce, which is the future of commerce, is all around data,” he said. “Data is the holy grail of digital commerce. Data allows us to know as marketers when we advertise something online, and (consumers) drag that into our wallet and then somebody actually taps their phone against the point of sale, we know, did you actually respond to that offer. Did you buy it? And what else did you buy when you responded to that offer? Think of how powerful that data is to marketers.”

“My view on NFC is, it’s still four to six years out only because you don’t have enough phones with the NFC chip in them yet,” Schulman said. “But people turn over their phones every 18 to 36 months and with natural upgrade cycles at the point of sale, every, call it, four years or so.”

From GigaOM:

“Hughes spans the whole automotive industry. It sells embedded security and infotainment services to Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen. It designs the technology behind State Farm Insurance’s Drive Safe & Save program, which allows it to monitor its customers driving behavior in order to adjust their premiums. It sells fleet tracking and fleet management services to enterprises and industry. Hughes has even expanded beyond the automotive business and into healthcare, providing an emergency response bracelet for seniors through its Lifecomm division.”

From Marketwatch:

John Stratton.  Verizon Enterprise Solutions

“We expect M2M and telematics to drive significant growth for Verizon and we’re taking an important step forward to accelerate solutions that will unlock more opportunities for existing and new HTI and Verizon customers,” said John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

“Joining Hughes Telematics’ robust service-delivery platform and suite of applications with our existing assets will create a premier set of capabilities. In powerful combination with Verizon’s global IP network, cloud, mobility and security solutions, Hughes Telematics’ flexible service-delivery platform has the potential to reach beyond the automotive and transportation realm to create new opportunities in mHealth, asset tracking and home automation.”

Jeff Leddy, CEO Hughes Telematics

Jeff Leddy, CEO of HTI, said, “This transaction provides Hughes Telematics’ stockholders with a substantial premium over today’s market price of our common stock. We are proud to join a world-class organization like Verizon which will help us continue to build and expand on our industry-leading services.

This combination represents an exciting opportunity to accelerate our innovation of new services and global growth and to bring these services to more customers and industries worldwide.”

HTI is mainly known for its automotive work but does have significant exposure in the connected health segments.  It will be interesting to see how their product lines get integrated into Verizon’s existing and new product offerings.

From the FCC: (PDF)

“However complex the technical details, this item’s purposes are simple: to save lives and reduce health care costs. Through the use of Medical Body Area Network (“MBAN”) devices, health care professionals will be better able to monitor their patients and can intervene at an earlier stage if warning signs emerge.

Moreover, wireless MBAN devices can reduce the risk of infection, improve patient comfort and convenience, and even obviate the need for an initial or extended hospital admission. Thus, by establishing service rules and allocating spectrum for MBAN devices, the FCC today is enabling significant, positive impacts on Americans’ health and on overall health care costs.”

From Gigaom:

“This creative use of spectrum provides wireless health manufacturers with the certainty they need to streamline their product development, which for many years operated on a variety of frequencies,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “I expect it will eventually lead to technologies not just for health care facilities, but also for in-home use.”

Rob von Behren

The exodus continue from Google Wallet with Square adding Rob von Behren to an unnamed position.  With the recent moves from other key Google Wallet leaders, Jonathan Wall and Marc Freed-Finnegan, one has to wonder what is going on at Google to make key people leave.

From NFC Times:

One of the chief issues creating the rift appears to be how open the wallet would be to app developers and service providers. That, along with some other differences on strategy, put some long-standing members of the Google Wallet team, who had argued for more openness, at odds with vice president of payments and wallet head Bedier.

“When I left the Google Wallet project in January, I fully expected to stop working in payments but to remain at Google,” von Behren said. “After meeting the team at Square, however, I decided to do the opposite. Square is doing some great things in the payment space. They have a strong leadership team and a culture that fosters innovation.”

The big question is whether Square is going to add NFC to is payment framework.  Square COO Keith Rabois has stated bluntly that NFC is not a priority for merchants or for Square but adding von Behren seems to contradict that stance.

From the post:

“Created on Ericsson’s behalf and entitled On The Brink, the video features interviews from Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and Flickr, Erik Wahlforss co-founder of SoundCloud and others discussing the effect of broadband on society. It’s kind of like a 20-minute version of our RoadMap conference next week, where we have other big name thinkers talking about the same topic. The 20-minute documentary looks at the past, present and future of connectivity and technology, and the impacts on people, business and society.”

Here is a shorter high level video of the vision:

"In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one."

From the post:

“Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today.If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:

• 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
• 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
• 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
• 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
• 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
• 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
• In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
• At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.”