Wireless Devices & Wellness

"Wireless Health" is a term that has been emerging over the past several years. As with all industries, advancing technologies are bringing revolutionary solutions to the huge health "care" marketplace.

A recent article by Dana Blankenhorn titled, "Could wireless health get too rich and too Slim?" addresses medical technology's increasing momentum. He selects the grand opening of the West Wireless Health Institute, as evidence with some important recent announcements which raise an interesting question:

• The Wests have put another $25 million into the Institute, bringing their total commitment to the effort to $90 million.
• Cisco, Medtronic and Carefusion have all joined as technology and education partners.
• The research partnership with Slim, who has also teamed up with the Gates Foundation in a $150 million health partnership.

As Blankenhorn points out, "in just a few years wireless health has been showered with money, tied into the very wealthiest circles, and given enough corporate partners to choke a horse."

Dana finds this "ironic because wireless health is not an area that should require immense charitable support. Sensor and wireless communication chips are ready for prime time venture funding and deployment today. They have been for some time."

Well, given Dana's skepticism, the emergence of wireless wellness is upon us and the opportunity for them to help revolutionize the wellness and sick care systems is enormous. However, until some smart business people get involved and the economics of the systems change, these technological capabilities may indeed only be relevant to a few.

I suggest you watch this TEDMED video delivered by Eric Topol who says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

The BP Disaster and You

I was reading the WSJ again today and came across an Op-Ed by Holman Jenkins, Jr. titled "Obama vs. BP and You". Mr. Jenkins is a smart man, no doubt. However, his editorial really misses the most relevant point around the BP disaster: how duplicitous and irresponsible many of the American PEOPLE are because their behavior is a significant contributor to disasters like the current BP situation in the Gulf.

Before I continue, you should know, I live in Louisiana. My uncles and relatives make a living from the oil and gas industry and from the seafood industry. Point is the situation is disturbing and I believe that my friend Mr. Jenkins and many others should start spending less time blaming others and more time taking responsibility.

Now obviously BP's hands are dirty here. They demonstrated some pretty irresponsible behavior. However, when you are drilling for oil a mile under the ocean, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. That the disaster is a surprise is a joke and I don't recall folks failing to fill up their tanks given concerns before the crisis unfolded. There weren't any, so long as oil remained relatively cheap.

Holman in his Op-Ed, like many commentators today, fails to address the most pertient issue : the BP disaster and the public's response is a reflection of our hypocritical culture. As a nation we cannot on the one hand bemoan our political leadership, whom we elected, and cry foul to BP either for their conduct, while we turn the thermostat down to a more comfortable 74 degrees. You can't have your cake and eat it too and that is the trouble today. Most American's are driving around in their SUV's while being "concerned" about the ecology. Give me a break - and Mr. Jenkins your editorial doesn't help folks realize their culpability when you attempt to paint Obama as being the culpret against poor BP and us. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Little effort has been made to do anything about curbing consumption of power based on fossil fuels, despite all of the obvious consequences. Somehow people cannot connect the dots between their personal choices and outcomes and commentators like Mr. Jenkins don't help the matter, when he writes:

"A policeman kicks out your taillight and then writes you a ticket for a faulty taillight. A president announces a moratorium on offshore drilling as a sop to a section of his public that always opposes drilling, and to be seen "doing something." Then he turns around and demands that BP compensate those injured by the president's own careless action. Mr. Obama may not quite have committed the miracle of converting Tony Hayward into a sympathetic character, but voters who aren't keen on higher energy prices should be watching closely. Their taillight is ripe to be kicked out next."

Holman, come on man ! That is the analogy you chose ? It would be more appropriate to point out that the driver is kicking their own taillights out, not some third party cop. I suppose when the next ecological crisis happens you'll blame that one on our failure to keep up the "war on terror."

Wether you are a fan of President Obama or not perhaps if policies created higher energy prices people would start to use less fossil fuels and things like the BP disaster would be much less likely to occur. Has anyone thought about that ?

Innovation Corruption - Why Our Government Isn't Working

For those of you who follow my writing, you know of my admiration for Professor Lawrence Lessig. He is one of the most relevant thinkers of our time. His recent speech “Innovation Corruption” was delivered May 20th at the Yahoo! campus in Santa Clara, CA (video below). The message was clear: government and business are corrupted by money. This corruption blocks innovation because regulation is designed not for everyone's good but to maximize money paid to Congress. The system Lessig referrs to is the “economy of influence.” Our government is completely corrupted, that it is why it doesn't work and people better wake up and pay attention.

From the Obama presidency, to the food business, to the broadband deployment problem in the U.S. and EU, Lessig cites examples of money's influence from a number of sources. His plea to the audience was to do something: the public is very much a part of the problem when clearly there are corruptive patterns that no one does anything about.

Did you know almost half of all senator and house members become lobbyist when they retire or lose their office ? This is just the beginning. Watch to learn more about just how corrupt the system is.

Update on 2010-05-29 16:37 by Bryan K. O'Rourke

When you think of what Lessig is saying about institutional corruption the British Petroleum disaster comes to mind. Read this excerpt from  Bob Hebert's  May 28, 2010 Op-ed in the NYT's "An Unnatural Disaster" :

The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.

President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Bob is right, but as Lessig points out, its up to us to do something about it.

Fitness Industry Should Pay Attention to Changing Bookstore Biz Model

I am reading Jeff Trachtenberg's article in the WSJ this morning titled "E-Books Rewrite Bookselling". The article includes an important quote from Arthur Klebanoff, who is chief executive of New York-based RosettaBooks LLC, an e-book publisher. Arthur says "It's fair to say that the leadership folks at the major trade publishers didn't believe until very recently that e-books had any economic life in them." The important words here are "VERY recently".

I write and lecture about radical change happening in business today with a particular emphasis on the fitness and wellness industry. What I attempt to share with leaders and organizations is that the rate of change is exponential, not linear as many of us assume. Jeff's article on how the E-Book business is revolutionizing bookselling illustrates the circumstances all business models are facing TODAY. Unfortunately, as with the book business, most industry leadership doesn't understand the true pace of radical change and therefore does not see the disruption coming until its to late. As Jeff explains:

Nowhere is the e-book tidal wave hitting harder than at bricks-and-mortar book retailers. The competitive advantage Barnes & Noble spent decades amassing—offering an enormous selection of more than 150,000 books under one roof—was already under pressure from online booksellers. It evaporated with the recent advent of e-bookstores, where readers can access millions of titles for e-reader devices. Even more problematic for brick-and-mortar retailers is the math if sales of physical books rapidly decrease: Because e-books don't require paper, printing presses, storage space or delivery trucks, they typically sell for less than half the price of a hardcover book. If physical book sales decline precipitously, chain retailers won't have enough revenue to support all their stores.

Barnes and Noble has 1,362 stores, including 719 superstores with 18.8 million square feet of retail space: the equivalent of 13 Yankee Stadiums. That's a lot of fixed cost. As Jeff points out, Borders Group, the nation's second-largest book chain, saw same-store sales decline 14% at its superstores for the quarter ended Jan. 30. Of the 797 B. Dalton Booksellers stores that Barnes & Noble acquired in 1987, only four remain. And the number of independent booksellers continues to fall. As Indigo Books CEO Heather Reisman put it: "The days of filling the shelves and just opening the doors are gone."

Today the fitness industry is in a similar situation. Lots of high fixed costs and looming disruptive innovation. In an industry that loses almost half of its customer base each year, the days of filling a facility with equipment and just opening the doors are quickly coming to an end as well, but does anyone see what's coming? What is most telling, as identified in the WSJ article, was that Barnes and Noble was once a leader in the E-Book industry, investing in NuvoMedia in 1998. In a classic example of a market leader focusing on sustaining innovation as opposed to disruptive, the company abandoned the technology in 2003. B&N could have been the leader in E-books, but they gave up on the vision. Will leaders in the fitness industry make the same mistakes?

Watch and learn how new technologies are creating new innovations in publishing.

The IPad Books & Newspapers - Gerson is Right

If you read my posts you know how often I reflect on how technology is changing the world and doing it really really fast. A lot faster than folks realize. This is going to revolutionize a lot of industries and people's lives. Its sneaking up on us and for many, one day they are going to turn around and ask, "what happened?"

Michael Gerson, Op-Ed Columnist at the Washington Post, recently penned an editorial, The 64 Gigabyte Shape of the Future. In it he illustrates this point.

"Media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently observed, "I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing. If you have less newspapers and more of these . . . it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry." "

When Op-Ed columnists begin to realize the potential that rapidly evolving technologies offer their dying newspaper business models, there is hope. When the nostalgia gives way to the practical benefits of change, we are well on our way to a brighter future and people like Mr. Gerson won't be the ones scratching their heads when it arrives. As Michael observes in the article :

So: We know that even bibliophiles like me will purchase books that arrive via the Internet because it represents a quantum leap in convenience. We know that people will consume both good and unreliable news on the Internet when it comes free. Because of the iPad (and its eventual competitors), we will be able to test whether people will pay for excellent news content delivered on a platform that multiplies its usefulness and enjoyment.

Those of us nostalgic for the book-based culture also will be nostalgic for ink on our fingers, the crinkle of thin pages, paperboys and papergirls and stopping the presses. But there really is no competition. Tablet computing makes a user feel like a maestro or a magician, summoning worlds with a touch. Prospero throws his books into the sea to abandon magic. A million people have done the same to embrace a new kind of magic.