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.”

“Sensitivity to initial conditions means that each point in such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points with significantly different future trajectories. Thus, an arbitrarily small perturbation of the current trajectory may lead to significantly different future behaviour.”

The basis of much of the Club of Rome’s work was the use of computer simulation called World3 to run scenarios to help predict future outcomes.  That in and of itself was a fairly revolutionary concept. Though the model conditions have received criticism, Roger-Maurice Bonnet said in his book, Surviving 1000 Centuries: Can We Do It?, “the basic message of Limits to Growth, that exponential growth of our world civilization cannot continue very long and that a very careful management of the planet is needed, remain as valid as ever.”

It is interesting to note that a paper given by Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?, also made extensive use of computer simulations to give birth to Chaos Theory.

Limits to Growth is now 40 years old and though its dire predictions have not come true, the reality of limits in all aspects of human existence faces us in a slower and perhaps more terrifying way that we could have imagined.

A recent study by MIT:

Author, Dennis Meadows: Is it too late for sustainable growth?

Today a report on Scientific America, “Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?” explores some additional implications of World3 and charts out the grim situation.

Figure courtesy of PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

“We’re in for a period of sustained chaos whose magnitude we are unable to foresee,” Meadows warns. He no longer spends time trying to persuade humanity of the limits to growth. Instead, he says, “I’m trying to understand how communities and cities can buffer themselves” against the inevitable hard landing.”

Metafilter: “I really don’t know how to integrate, process and deal with the fact that we’re basically living in a living nightmare of a dystopia.”

From Google:

“The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.”

The Knowledge graph does three things:

1. Helps users find the right things
2. Provides the best topic summary
3. Go deeper and broader

From Techcrunch:

“The company has actually been working on the semantic technology that drives this knowledge graph for quite a few years. This specific project, Google told me earlier this week, has been in the works for about the last two years. During this time, the company has been working hard on creating the vast database of structured knowledge that powers the features it is launching today (though Google’s acquisition of Freebase . Today, the knowledge graph database currently holds information about 500 million people, places and things. More importantly, though, it also indexes over 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections between these items.”

Google Product Manager, Jack Menzel

From GigaOm:

“It will increase serendipity,” said Google Product Manager, Jim Menzel, adding that the tool will make searching both more efficient and more rewarding. He cited an example of a family using the tool to consider a Six Flags visit by clicking on a parade of associated images. ”What better way to decide whether to go to an amusement park than to flip through each individual ride?”

Google’s Knowledge Graph takes on two other internet powerhouses, Wikipedia and Facebook, but in different ways.  The new “better summary” is a clear shot at Wikipedia’s encyclopedic approach to providing online users with great information about a wide variety of topics. But the Knowledge Graph is also clearly a challenge to Facebook’s Social Graph and illustrates the dual natural of the digital channel, its about users and their connections to other users in a world organized by content interests.

Snake Garden – 5 30 11

I have followed Pinterest and used it for THINK but I really had not used it until now.  I needed some content and a theme to work with so I picked the garden project.  Snake Garden is in its second incarnation. Produced in conjunction with Jason Vise.

Last year we got a late start but still managed a good summer crop of arugula, basil, tomatoes, eggplant and hot peppers.  We did a Winter garden of french radish, swill chard, dinosaur kale and, yep, arugula. Also over the Winter we worked on the bamboo structure.  Dug in molded cement anchors with stone inlay with a piece of rebar and righted the bamboo poles.

This year we used all of the dirt from the compost pile to expand the front beds and make room for another back plot.  We cut down two big trees with an electric cordless chainsaw and trimmed back the crape myrtle on the wall. Hoping for big things.

Snake Garden v2, 4 8 12