17 Inventions which will change the Tech World in the year 2008 and ahead - Part 1

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.”

2. Telecommunications: iPhone & Android

Steve Jobs of Apple iPhone & Eric Schmidt of Google Android

With very different approaches, this duo’s dragging the stagnant phone business into the Internet Age. Jobs’ Apple’s iPhone embraces a closed network and Schmidt’s Google Android platform envisions a wide-open one. Both are forcing change for the better.

Steve Jobs launching iPhone at Macworld 2007 (click here to watch the video at apple.com)

Schmidt presenting Android, an Open Mobile Platform - Read the full story at Google Press Center

Are there a minimum set of requirements for carriers?
No, anyone has the ability to perform any type of customization. The Apache P2 License has not restrictions.
What’s the difference between Android and other platforms?
The difference is that Android is open to all 3rd party developers and the code is entirely open source. Eric Schmidt added that open source is the best method to drive volume and provides increased flexibility and adoption.
Will there be any issues with existing Networks?
Android powered phones will run seamlessly on all existing networks
How will Google leverage Android for its Ad Services?
Ad services from Google are flexible enough to run on any platform, however initially there will be no ad driven models. When ads are released Google plans on creating a plan in which they share the profits with the mobile carriers.
How does the timing of Android coincide with Open Social?
Eric says the timing was completely coincidental, but the applications built using Open Social will run well on Android. In fact, developers will be able to leverage Android to make their Open Social application mobile.
What is the look and feel of the Interface like?
The interface is Top Notch and Google will be taking a lot of input from the community in order to enhance it. Google will be offering a hosted service for developers in order to publish and test their apps.

3. Social Networking Online – Facebook & now its API’s

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook.

It’s not Facebook that matters, it’s Facebook thinking. IT will feel growing pressure to provide social networking functions - to customers, along the supply chain, and inside their workplaces.

A very practical article I came about on BBC – Facing the Future Facebook Style by Bill Thompson

4. Business Softwares – Mark Hurd, HP

After recapturing PC market, its interesting to see what Mark Hurd (Business Week 2007 Businessperson of the year, beating Steve Jobs and Rupert Mudroch) is doing in the Business Softwares domain. HP has announced new software and services to help businesses transform IT operations and automate the full lifecycle of managing business services.

Business Technology Optimization Software

Business Information Optimization Software

HP Open Call Communications Software

Printer, Server, Storage and Workstation Management Software

Read an interesting writeup on Mark Hudd at Proficiency2020

5. Virtualization – Simon Crosby, CTO of Xen-Source and now CTO of Citrix Systems

“Virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource.” - Wikipedia

A very interesting read about Virtualization - by Amit Singh on Kernelthread

David Marshal from InfoWorld took an interview of Corsby regarding what’s happening with Virtualization. (Read the full interview)

Virtualization Report: With all the buzz and constant chatter about the benefits of virtualization, how do you answer people when they ask about the downsides? Do you think there are any?

Simon Crosby: There are downsides to poorly planned virtualization deployments. Before anyone begins a virtualization project, it is important to know what the end goal is, and exactly what they are trying to achieve. Simply buying an expensive virtual infrastructure product because it’s all the buzz is certain to not deliver the benefits you want, unless you have a clear view of the intended outcome. So I always say “Start at the end – ask yourself what benefits you want to have achieved.” If you simply want to reduce server count, power use, save rack space and upgrade your server infrastructure, our entirely free XenServer Express Edition or XenServer Standard Edition may be enough. Indeed we have over 150,000 users of these affordable production-grade server consolidation products today – from Police department 911 services, to very large enterprises. If you’re looking to virtualize your infrastructure wholesale, then the objectives include greater flexibility, dynamism, security and availability – things you can’t achieve by carrying on the way you are. These features are offered in our powerful, yet affordable Enterprise Edition product, which offers all you’ll need to manage a virtualized server, network and storage infrastructure as a pool of resources. Few projects end in total failure – but the cool factor can wear off fast if you’ve paid a lot for your virtual infrastructure and you suddenly find that you also need to change out your backup procedures and storage management tools. It all takes planning. Customers that think ahead tend to have more successful outcomes. Many of those use Citrix XenServer.

6. Linux – Mark Shuttleworth, originator of Ubuntu

Taken from the Wikipedia and arranged date wise:

· In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of Debian, a Linux distribution.

· Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning 575 million USD.

· In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider.

· In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and free and open source software projects in South Africa, such as The Freedom Toaster.

· In March 2004 Shuttleworth formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects. He returned to the Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian, through his company Canonical Ltd. To come up with a list of names of people to hire for the project, Shuttleworth took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him whilst traveling to the Antarctic aboard the icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov.

^· In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, abbreviated SABDFL.

· In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of Impi Linux.

· On 15 October 2006 it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth became the first patron of KDE, the highest level of sponsorship available.

Mark on Ubuntu – interesting read

**Continue reading : interesting inventions (innovations) in part 2.