Dana Blankenhorn

The Moment of Greatest Opportunity

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 3 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Hard as it is for you to believe moments like this, when times are darkest, are those offering the greatest opportunity.

1. Everything we value in California grew up during the Great Depression -- its farm belt, its media, avionics and technology all date from the 1930s. Even Las Vegas.
2. Apple and Microsoft grew up alongside the recession of the early 1980s.
3. Google emerged from the dot-bomb at the start of this decade.

What can we learn from successes like these? The people behind them were passionate first about the product, then about the customer experience, and only later about the money. None of their creators listened to the pundits of their time. They focused on doing something they felt needed doing for its own sake.

We know what our country needs. What's lacking is the imagination and drive to make it happen. Or what seems to be lacking -- I have no doubt that there are people, right now, out of sight of both this blog and the TV cameras -- working on solutions.

You should be one of them.

So let's look at some of our most intractable problems, and then you look for ways to solve them:

Always On in the Worst Way

Always On technologies, the use of wireless networks as an application platform linking sensors and data between you, your stuff and the Internet, can have powerful, positive impacts on our lives.

But it can also have negative implications. Always On can be misused to create a surveillance state, in which you are constantly a criminal suspect, where Big Brother is always watching, where freedom is just another word and control -- from business and government -- becomes absolute.

Unfortunately, that is the way it's being used today. AT&T, a company no one should trust with anything, let alone their security, is now selling businesses "remote monitoring" systems, from $350, which let businesses put customers and employees under constant surveillance.

While it's cool to do security monitoring using wireless networks, that's just one application space.

Rice Science Monday: An Always-On Breakthrough

I've held off blogging about a recent piece at EnGadget involving Rice because, frankly, I didn't understand what they were getting at.

Turns out they were getting at something very important indeed, namely something I've called The World of Always On since 2003.

Specifically, computer engineering professor Lin Zhong and bioengineering professor Michael A. K. Liebschner (left) were looking for a more reliable way to move signals between medical sensors and actuators placed in or on the body.

The idea is that a sensor picks up a condition requiring action, a processor chip defines the proper action to take, and some actuator takes the action, all without an intervening human control. When we're talking about, say, a heart patient, this is life-and-death stuff.

Electricity is the communications system used by the human body, passing signals through nerves to the brain, then on to muscles and tendons. But that's being used. Radio is the system used by computers to move data between always-on devices, but given that people live inside a radio-wave filled biosphere that's not always reliable.

The answer was sound. The Rice scientists applied vibrators to the body, and found that a frequency shift key (FSK) signal, a simple change in a tone's pitch, run through the skeleton could be easily registered as a command. "This is quite amazing because all the links involved multiple bones and many joints," said Zhong. "All data transfer is contained inside the human body, and it can only be retrieved through direct physical contact,"  added Liebschner.

This Week's Clue: The Final Frontier

As you may know I recently took on a new role. I am now editing a blog called A-Tech Review, which carries the name of my co-author Martin K. Bayne on it.

I have known Martin for 10 years but never met him. He's one of the Internet friends I made through this newsletter. When I first knew him, Martin was also known as "Mr. Long Term Care," an expert on the problems of insurance and home health care. He was looking for e-commerce insight, which at the time was the main beat around here.

Martin had gotten his own beat the hard way, a diagnosis of adult-onset Parkinson's that required he have visits from a health care worker in order to survive. Over time his disease process has continued, and he now lives in a nursing home. Eventually the disease will reach his heart, and the world will have lost a good man too soon.

Yet he has continued to work. (Picture by Corbis, available from Fotosearch.) Martin has recently perfected the lost art of the very short story, something that was quite common a century ago in the work of O.Henry and George Ade, who first published their work in newspapers. He has the idea of turning his stories into something like greeting cards -- ask me about them.

But while he rages, he still can't stop the dieing of the light. He has asked me to carry on his work, in the way I know best.

And so I shall.

This Week's Clue: Final Five: The Internet Future

For the final essay in the e-mail version of A-Clue.Com, which is being sent to over 1,000 subscribers, I talked a little about the Internet's future, and its importance.

Enjoy.

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Something that sets my teeth on edge is any reference to what the Internet is doing" or where the Internet is going.

The Internet isn't doing anything, and isn't going anywhere. It is a protocol, a way to connect computers together. It's a voluntary technical agreement.

When they make this reference, people are usually talking about HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol first unveiled by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. They may be talking about the Internet address space, or its naming conventions, or some technology like AJAX that makes the Internet more efficient. Or they may be talking about some other new technology, like video over IP, that runs on the Internet Protocol.

That would make sense.

When it gets crazy is when they start talking about social networking, or blogging, or TV clips, as what the Internet is doing. (Time Magazine just did that in naming no one in particular as its Person of the Year.) These are just services that ride on the IP backbone. They're not the Internet. The people who use the Internet, who feed it material and download that information, they are doing something. The Internet? Not so much.

 

This Week's Clue: Final Five: Always On

I am folding A-Clue.Com into this blog as of January. To celebrate the end of 10 years in e-mail publishing I am posting 5 essays covering the letter's main topics.

This week I talk about The World of Always On, an idea I considered "the next big boom" after finishing work on my Moore's Law book, but one that has yet to come to pass. Enjoy.

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By all rights we should be in the middle stage of a tech revolution as important as the commercial Internet itself.

I am talking here about what I call The World of Always On. (To the right is the current state of the art in active heart monitors.)

The vision is simple. Extend applications into the air by using 802.11 WiFi routers as application platforms. Use sensors and motes to collect data on our bodies, our homes, and our property, creating new valuable applications that live in the air. Use Internet standards to let you control these applications from anywhere.

I first began exploring this idea in 2003, after the dot-boom went dot-bust. Having explained (for myself if no one else) how progress was inevitable with Moore's Law, I sought out the new direction it would take.

I was struck by two things. First, how small powerful chips were getting, with line widths reaching the nano-level. Second by the need for people to "age in place," and the monitoring requirements of that.

I posited a true "killer app," a heart monitor linked to an 802.11 router. Perhaps, I speculated, it might have a bluetooth link to a cellphone, so the whole thing could live wherever the user went? At the same time, I noticed, Intel was doing fascinating work with Alzheimer's patients, creating multi-chip systems that could identify when a patient was acting confused, and when they were not, lowering the load on care-givers.

Always-On Comes To China

Three years ago, I wrote often about The World of Always-On. This consisted of wireless applications which lived in the air, sensors and motes that could collect data from your home, your yard, your stuff, even your body and evaluate it using your WiFi connection.

It didn't happen. I guess I didn't shout loud enough. (Yes, I know. This is actually the cover art to a Blink182 song.)

Or did it? Jude  Jake Ludington has been to Demo in China and comes back with a report on an outfit called Beijing Perfect Sky Information Technology Co. Ltd.

Here is how he described it:

The system monitors health data for cardiogram readings, pulse, blood pressure, body temperature and a number of other factors to track changes in vital signs. Data is sent wirelessly to a server that tracks patient information to check for any changes that represent an out-of-normal condition. In the event of a dramatic change in health status, the service will alert physicians, family and anyone else scheduled to be notified in an emergency.

Bingo! This is an Always-On medical application, which I called a "killer app." The patient wears sensors which take regular readings. The WiFi network sends these to a computer for analysis. When an alarm condition exists, a text message can be sent to a designated person, or a list of persons.

Frankston Calls for Always-On

In a discussion of Google's problems in finalizing its plans for WiFi in San Francisco, Bob Frankston took me back to my work of three years ago.

Frankston says that the emphasis on "networks" is overblown. Connectivity is the thing. Under the Internet protocol, if you have connectivity, and whatever you connect with has connectivity to something else, then eventually your bits are going to get where they're going. And that's the key -- bits getting where they're going.

Instead even municipal WiFi plans, like those of Google, emphasize building "a network" that will cover "a whole city." A better way, says Frankston, is for consumers to build their own connectivity "at the edge," then work to link those bits to other Internet connections.

So here are the Frankston statements which got to me:

We’ll get more  incentive when companies making products and services, such as alarms and monitoring, see the value in using shared connectivity rather than creating their own special solutions and negotiating new relationships each time. If that effort went into extending IP connectivity we’d start to get benefit.

I’m taking about modest IP connectivity – the most valuable services such as medical monitoring or supporting infrastructure is akin to a slow modem and can be deployed over any path – no need for DSL or all that. Just put a simple packet transceiver at both ends of a copper line and you have a 24x7 data path for devices and services without a large footprint deployment.

Just Call it Always-On Already

For many years at Corante I was known for pushing something I called The World of Always On.

The idea is that wireless networks are an application platform waiting to happen. All they need is client data. This can come from medical sensors, from your home environment, even from products in your home.

Well, those client devices now exist. H-P called the Memory Spots.  It’s a radio chip that can hold half-a-megabit of data. Any data you like.

What they are waiting for are applications. I have written many, many times about these applications, but for starters here is a quick sample list:

• Where are my keys?
• Do my plants need watering?
• What’s my blood pressure? My sugar level?
• Is anyone trying to steal my stuff?

These questions define medical, home automation, security, and home inventory applications. Each one can be a billion-dollar niche.

Simple Steps Toward Better Healthcare

This decade has been marked by a complete lack of real jobs.

Real jobs include health benefits.

Instead we have had an enormous rise in non-job jobs. Wal-Mart jobs are non-job jobs. Immigrant jobs are non-job jobs. Freelance jobs are non-job jobs. You can't really live on a non-job job, only survive.

This is not because businessmen are bad people. They just can't afford to offer health benefits under our present system.  In fact, I'm certain most businesses would love to offer real jobs, because real jobs offer stability, and let the business raise its stock of human capital over time.

Why are there no longer any real jobs?

Two words -- preventive care.

Preventive care used to mean simple check-ups. No more. Now preventive care means pills, lots and lots of expensive pills. I, for instance, currently take three different prescription medicines to deal with a family history of hypertension and high cholesterol. None were available in my father's time.  Where his "preventive" medicine costs were about $25/year, mine come to $80/month -- and that's just for co-pays.

We have wondrous medicines that can prevent many illnesses, and give relief for many conditions.  But they cost too much.

There is a second problem, of course. Technology, or the lack of it. The HIPAA Law, meant to improve patient privacy, has instead caused doctors to refuse technology. They won't even use e-mail, fearing the liability. The liability laws also prevent use of new Always-On technology, for such things as  monitoring conditions, delivering medicine, alerting caregivers. The industry won't touch this stuff -- what if it breaks?

The ultimate solution is a single-payer health plan. But such plans, worldwide, are under incredible financial strain right now, because of the two problems I have just described.

So let's address those now.