ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

OffType.net is a basic online image editing service well, even basic will be kind of better for the service, let’s call it very basic. Then you may be wondering that why am I writing about this service ? What’s the use of this service ?

Well, OffType is a very basic online painter and thus becomes a perfect tool for kids. Kids can easily draw, try handwriting on it, sketch and share their doodles with others (well, just couldn’t control myself and here’s my doodle).

Just like the online canvas, the service is also basic, it supports comments, ratings and allows you to display the images in the blogs or websites too, but fails to provide the proper embed code. There is no login or account option, I’m sure few parents will love to see all the doodles of their children and comments on them at one place.

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**Please go through interesting 12 inventions (innovations) in Part 1 & Part 2.

13. Unified Communication, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft

Gurdeep Singh Pall is lead-ing Microsoft’s charge into unified communications, a change he describes as being “as fundamental as the shift from the telegraph to the telephone.” Pall and his team have melded presence, IM, e-mail, voice, and collaboration capabilities into Office Communication Server 2007, Microsoft’s UC platform, and are now working on what’s next.

Competitors coming from the conventional voice market aim to extend the PBX-based model of communication into data networks, Pall says, while Microsoft is developing new methods to communicate and collaborate via software.

Eighty percent of people tell Microsoft that the desktop is their primary communications tool at work, but the phone is still a separate, critical island. “We knew part of what we needed to do was make the phone work like the other tools people use to communicate and collaborate,” Pall says. So far, Microsoft offers presence, calendars, and application and document sharing to help collaboration.

Next for unified communications: Pall envisions deeper integration with the desktop. A lot of institutional learning happens in meetings – in conversation, video, or document sharing, he says – but much of that content is lost without a way to store, search, and retrieve what was said and presented. Pall sees all facets of collaboration eventually being searchable, savable, and shareable content.

Read the full story on Information Week

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**Please go through the first 6 inventions (innovations) in part 1.

7. Agile Software Development – Martin Fowler, ThoughtWorks

Taken from Information Week Article by Andy Dornan:

Seven years ago, Martin Fowler and 16 other programmers published The Manifesto For Agile Software Development. Their goal was to revolutionize the software industry, emphasizing freedom over bureaucracy and rapid delivery of useful code over planning.

They partly succeeded. “At the time it was written, we seemed to need to hide what we were doing,” Fowler says. “Now there are conferences on agile development, and they’ve gotten a lot of attendance.”

Fowler puts the theory into practice as chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, a global consultancy, where he advises 800 employees–and many more outside developers who follow agile methods.

Famous for his evangelism of the Ruby programming language, Fowler is also an open source disciple, believing that it saved Java by letting more developers innovate. But that doesn’t make him anti-Microsoft–he uses both Java and .Net. “I want a strong Microsoft, an effective competitor,” he says. The best way for Microsoft to stay strong, he says, is to embrace open source.

Q & A with Martin Fowler:

IW: What do you think of programming tools aimed at non-developers, like mashup platforms and Microsoft’s Oslo project?
Fowler: When people say we don’t need programmers any more, I tend to smirk. You need a certain kind of mindset to program computers effectively. There’s a difference between writing tools that allow muppet programmers to churn software out and getting business people more involved in development.
We want programmers to engage more fully with the business side, who are in themselves may be great people but not great programmers. I think we can gain considerably in the industry by having more rich relationships between the business and programming.

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1. Health Care Technology – Partners Healthcare: (Source – Information Week)

John Glaser, CIO at Partners Healthcare, is a bit of a contrarian among health care IT leaders, though some might just call him a realist.

Either way, Glaser–who in his 20s hitchhiked from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Panama Canal–isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. After a dozen years as CIO at Partners HealthCare, which operates several Boston-area hospitals, including Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women’s, Glaser is skeptical of some high-profile electronic health records efforts. Yet he’s also helping Partners take one of the industry’s toughest stances on e-records adoption.

When it comes to high-profile efforts by employers, such as Wal-Mart and Intel’s Dossia consortium, to rein in costs by giving workers access to digital personal health records, Glaser doesn’t expect much in terms of changing health habits or greater e-record use. “IT can mitigate costs but not solve the cost problem,” he says. Similarly, Glaser isn’t sold on efforts by Google, Microsoft, and Steve Case’s Revolution Health to push consumers to use personal health records. “It’s very noisy, lots of action,” he says. For every 10 patients who have access to a digital health record, he thinks only one on average will look at it, so consumers won’t drive e-record adoption.

But Glaser isn’t just shooting down ideas for using IT in health care; he’s a firm believer that e-records can improve care and cut costs by giving doctors better data and information sharing. He’s founding chairman of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and co-creator of the New England Health EDI Network, a consortium that lets health care providers swap administrative and payment data with insurers. Still, he isn’t convinced such regional health information organizations will evolve into the one national health information highway that many envision. There’s no business model, he says. Instead, providers will make data-sharing deals as needed.

Partners, an early adopter of e-records and computerized order entry, now is mandating its doctors agree by January to deploy digital health records or be dropped from the network. Glaser’s IT group is providing doctors with technical support for the rollouts, “like a mini vendor,” he says.

Glaser thinks it’ll be decades before a majority of Americans have e-health records–not 2014, as President Bush set as a goal three years ago. But progress will happen. “There will be different levels of pain, and a form of chaos, before order.”

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Data management has become crucial for every mouse potato these days and what data could be more important than your passwords. Right from your operating system log in to the hundreds of sites,forums and accounts you visit – all know you by your password and many of them might not bear the question ‘forgot your password?’. This is where a utility like KeePass can come really handy.

Keepass is a free,secure and portable password manager which comes with some good and useful features. It supports the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES, Rijndael) and the Twofish algorithms to encrypt its password databases. The best part about it is that the passwords are encrypted while KeePass is running, so that even if Windows caches the KeePass process to disk, your passwords are not revealed in any case.

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