Planning app

I would like to see an effective app for helping me plan. And not just one kind of planning, but all kinds of planning. It should be effective at helping me prioritize, even helping me figure out the pros and cons to various options. It should also be able to interact with my various calendars to help me schedule the parts of my plan that I am making. It should work on my phone or on the Web. Just an idea.

Better news service.

I just got a CNN Breaking News email. The subject of the breaking news really doesn't matter, but it brought to mind some ideas. Some years ago, during some political something or other, I signed up with CNN to get their Breaking News email updates. They come in this nice little string of text with just enough information to let you know what is going on. I have learned that a Breaking News email update usually means that they now have a great article on their site for me to read if I want to know more. Most of the time, if it interests me, I want to know more.

If you are not familiar with their Breaking News emails, you might guess that it would include a nice little link to the related article or maybe a stub or topic page that links to all the related articles if it is an ongoing story.

Nope. Nada.

They have an unsubscribe link. They have links from the ads that they stick in them. But nothing to get me to their site so they can do their job of getting me to read more of their content. Come on people, my kid could program that. The whole concept of hyperlinks in emails is almost as old as the web. This should have happened 15 years ago. Think of the change to readership and the bottom line in terms of ad revenue.

I should probably thank them, though. If I clicked off to CNN every time I got an interesting Breaking News update, I would probably spend a lot more time on their site, and consequently, less time actually trying to be productive. That brings me to another point. More than half of the Breaking News updates I get, I don't care about. For some, yeah, I am sure they are interested, but different people have different interests.

Let me pick my interests. Please. I don't care about sports, or entertainment, and there are only a few sub topics that interest me in travel, health, and living. Come to think of it, I really don't care about most of criminal proceedings under the justice section either. Constitutional law, business law, and patent law, yes, but the rest of the stuff, just let me opt out of it.

Make a general list of subject tags, arranged categorically, and let me pick whole sections, sub-sections, or even individual subject tags, and only send me the links on those. If you did, I can promise I will click the link much more often. Yeah, that link that doesn't exist yet. I figure, if you can tailor my content to me, you certainly can make it easier for me to get to.

Health mess continued

The health care debate has nothing to do with health care, but everything to do with money. Mostly, it deals with insurance coverage. It does nothing about the quality of health care and very little about the accessibility of health care. It doesn't address the problems with our pharmaceutical industry or with the FDA or with the shortage of medical professionals, or with any of a myriad of other health issues, except abortion and euthanasia, which aren't about health care, but religious and moral issues instead (we are not going there on this post).

I have seen many instances where the medical treatment offered was not the best available for the situation, but was instead based on how much money the practitioners would make. The bigger the size of the organization, the worse this seems to be, in general. I have however seen a fair number of cases where they practitioner is a small operation and they still push everything based on what is best for their finances rather then what is best for the patient.

I have had people tell me that the answer to this situation is insurance, but I believe it is just the opposite. I think that the insurance industry is the primary cause of this greed. Sure, there would be the small time medical scam operators that push their patients into something that either they don't need, or that is the most costly of the viable alternatives, but for the most part, before our insurance industry did their takeover of the health care system, practitioners did seem more concerned with the actual health and well-being of their patients.

Part of the problem is that the insurance industry has been making health care choices for all of us. The doctors don't really get the choice of the best treatments, just the choice of the best treatments the insurance covers. The patents don't get informed of their options, cause usually there is only one covered option. It no longer is about the best care for the situation, but about what the coverage is for the situation.

There are lots of examples where offshore clinics have far better care at a much lower cost, using much more advanced techniques. We don't have those options here, because even if the techniques are approved by our almost non-function governmental agencies, the insurance plans don't allow those treatments. They say they are trying to save us money. I have a hard time believing it. I have seen a system wide case where the US health care industry continues to do thallium treadmill tests to gauge arterial blockage, when other tests exist that are more than twice as effective, cost less than a fifth and often less than a tenth of the cost of the thallium test, and are usually up to five times faster. I say system wide because I have seen it happen to multiple people, in multiple states, in multiple hospital systems.

I have also seen and heard of many instances where the doctors (the good ones) pull people aside to a corner and whisper that what they recommend is some kind of do it yourself homeopathic or over the counter treatment, but that they have to issue this prescription or that. I even had one doctor explain that they have a quota that they have to meet in prescription writing in order to keep their license. I don't know the validity of this claim, nor the mechanism it would work by, but just the very mentality of the industry pressuring doctors to always prescribe the latest drugs in the maximum of situations leaves me thinking that the whole thing is just another corrupt system of greed.

We need some kind of impartial informing diagnosis web based system, perhaps not to be required use for doctors, but freely available so individuals can at least see what their options are and to get a non-biased second opinion. Sure, such a system would not be able to write prescriptions, nor would it recommend courses of treatment, but it could show possible diagnoses with all the known courses of treatment and what forms those treatments take. It could even show experimental treatments and list locations where different treatments are available. It could also show how reliable various treatments are shown to be. To put this together would require the input of many people, but if it were built correctly, it would be a learning system. Therefore, it's diagnoses would increase in accuracy over time. I can even picture it being a valuable resource to doctors, regardless of their expertise, experience, and training.

Where politics and technology intersect.

Yesterday, someone sent me a link to a video regarding a supreme court case relating to business process patents and by extension, software patents. I have a pretty slow connection right now, so when I watch a long video, I usually get it started, and then pause it to let the rest download. While I was waiting for it to download, I read the comments on the video to get a feel what others had to say about it. That left me with almost a feeling of dread before I even viewed the email. The problem is that too many of these process patents are locking up common sense approaches to doing business or of programming.

As both a business entrepreneur and a software programmer, this issue affects me. I also have the background of having been an assistant patent librarian for a patent repository library (a while before everything went web based) and helped patent attorneys and inventors search for patents and make sure they had all the information for protecting their own intellectual property. I believe that patents were a major factor in helping the United States of America become the leader of technology world wide and really were one of the keys of the industrial and post - industrial revolutions. However, I can also see how the system must be very diligent so that it isn't abused so as to stifle innovation instead of encourage it.

For my current situation, I have a fair number of innovations (that I am not sharing on here) that I am working on, that since they do things that have never been done before, are, in my opinion, very patentable. At least, they are under the current software patent regulations and tests. At the same time, I don't want patent trolls keeping me from creating new innovations by locking up basic functions of programming. So, in all my huff and puff prior to watching the video, I was concerned that what the comments were saying is that the court had given even more blank slate to the patent trolls, which I would view as bad for the industry, and for the economy.

Well, then I watched the video. And I was like... "and so..... what was decided?" Well, after some searching, I found that while the arguments for the case were last year, the decision is not expected until sometime this June. From some of the transcripts of the arguments, I have to conclude that the Justices are not as clueless as many people like to pretend they are. Then again, I have heard comments from Justices before than seem to go completely against the decisions they write, so, take that conclusion with a pound or two of salt, and maybe some indigestion medicine. Anyway, my thoughts are, why is everybody in such a huff, if the decision hasn't even been released yet. 

Then, something else happened. I read that Obama hates technology, and went, huh, I thought he was "Mr. Technology" during the election. Then, I read from InfoWorld that the whole thing was a joke. Ok, I have to admit that I am not an Obama fan. I think he has way too many control freak fascist tendencies, even worse than Bush, but perhaps about as bad as Cheney. The hubbub on this one is that people took snippets of an address he gave and missed that they were part of a joke. Not only did they not get the punchline, they never even knew there was a punchline.

Now, it is just too bad that there is sooo much venom out there that people jump to attack without know why they are jumping. Like most jokes, a good part of the humor worked because of the true parts of the joke, like the parts about media and how "some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter" and "some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction". Ok, they Obama hates technology headline should have made people go, "wait a minute" this doesn't sound like it is fully founded in reality. Need to get the whole story.

I suppose getting the whole story is too time consuming, especially when seconds count in being the first to break a story. I know we aren't going to get all cyber-journalists and bloggers to be more responsible, but perhaps there is a way that we can leverage the strengths of the internet to fix the problem and create better news sources at the same time. If there was a blog/cybernews integrator, it would still give credit for breaking stories, but if it allowed add-ons by other journalists who provide "the rest of the story" or additional details, then the truth would eventually come out in a single source for each story that is out there. At the same time, those who have an axe to grind could post as additional details, but the rants and slants could quickly be voted as such and relegated to comments and rants, and leave the real additional details in the body of the page, each with their respective authors getting their due. We could call it associated bloggers or something like that.

HP WebOS

So, you may have noticed, I haven't posted in about two weeks. I have been out and about the country. I realize I missed a wonderful opportunity to add my voice to the chorus of others throwing in their commentary on the HP-Palm connection. And really, I hope HP does something wonderful. I am not getting my hopes up, not because I don't like HP. This post is being written on an HP laptop. I love my laptop. The problem is that HP rarely does anything really innovative or revolutionary. They do a great job adding polish to existing innovations. They make good quality products. Their support could use some help, but most companies need this as well. Many of the things HP does, it does really well.

What it doesn't do well, or at least not very often, is create innovative and revolutionary products and break ground where others haven't. Palm's WebOS is a great piece of programming, but it doesn't go far enough, and I doubt that HP will have the self restraint to let go of control and let it become what it needs to be. In case they missed it, they should check out my post on a Smart Phone Dream Machine.

The most awesome job search/hiring system.

Ok, from the title, this sounds like a review or some kind of plug. I wish it were. If the system I am describing really existed, I would be plugging it left and right, and so would everybody else out there, on both side of the hiring fence.

So, the other day, I was called by some company to tell me they wanted to know more about me. They said, that perhaps, they would want me to do some small oDesk jobs for them so they could evaluate my abilities. I am fine with this, so, after putting together a very quick and dirty project portfolio, I went through the process of qualifying on oDesk. Well, I have had people do stuff on oDesk before, but I didn't manage it, someone else did. I had started signing up a long time ago so I could see what kinds of jobs were listed there, and truly, they have created a global job marketplace, but mostly just for small non critical programming jobs. One thing they have that I really like is tons of tests that you can take for free to show what your abilities are. Unfortunately, their tests are kind of oversimplified and not really representative of the abilities they are supposed to represent. It would take more work to make their testing system really rock, and then it would be a lot more useful, but I don't know if it would be cost effective for them in their current system.

The other tool that I have really come to like is Linked In. It is awesome for networking, and has become an important thing to have up to date for people to work on. Unfortunately, it wasn't around when I had most of my jobs, and a lot of the people I have worked for or with either don't have a Linked In profile, or don't do anything with their profile. Linked In has great things like discussion groups, questions, group memberships, and a bunch of other tools, but they don't do anything to validate your claims apart from their referral information.

I found myself wishing that Linked In would acquire oDesk, and create that more robust skill verification test system, and even integrate it with those organizations like PMI and Microsoft and Oracle and Cisco, and so forth that do certifications so that you could see automatically what people have. Then, create a new set of tools that allow much of the HR function of a company to happen in a portal from the site. Then you could have the user/employee be able to partially determine what kinds of things were publicly available. Anyway, I can envision a hiring process to go like this.

Since almost everybody, or at least a majority of individuals would have a linked in profile, whether or not they actively maintained it, when you wanted to hire someone, the best candidates would be on Linked In. The profiles would be up to date because companies (many of them) would use it to help manage their HR, and the certifications would be up to date because the certification companies (most of them) would use it or interface with it.

The hiring manager would sign on to linked in, and, in their approved status as a hiring manager for their company, would create a job requirement, (assuming it is a new job, and not filling an old one, cause then they would just edit the old one), and then look for qualified applicants. Everybody would be available for searching, depending on status (Most people would have something like "Only serious opportunities" or "Make my dreams come true" but some would have "actively looking"). Yeah, I know, companies would want to keep tabs on employee's status, so employees could hide their statuses if they wanted to for specific companies, users, or even demographics.

Anyway, they would get a short list of who is available, be able to sort by skills, other qualifications, rankings, proximity, or just about anything else that is in the system. They then could offer inteviews to those they are interested in, and be at the final decision hiring stage in a few days. If they are just looking, they wouldn't have to create an actual job, just a "just looking profile" and find applicable individuals. That way, instead of just throwing your hiring out into the wind, you can really get the best available candidates, or if you are desperate enough, you can try to "make someone's dreams come true". For job candidates, you can see where you are showing up on applicable jobs, change statuses of where you are looking, set your relocation requirements, and even find new training and qualification options and opportunities.

If that were the case, you can find out pretty quick where you measure up, what your strengths are and what you need to improve. Oh, and the time you spend out of work might dramatically drop as well.

Integrators

I predict that there will someday arise a whole class of integrator websites. What I mean by an integrator website is a site that addresses a specific market or class of websites, and pulls all the major ones out there into a single place, while making sure that the content providing sites are still benefited by actions done on the site.

An example of this would be a Job search integrator. It would integrate with all the big job search sites out there. It would also integrate with as many major employment providers and major corporations as it could. It would need to have some kind of supporting niche that it either provides or that it advertises for, like resume building, technical training, or certification providers (in order to provide revenue). It would have to be well designed so that the sites that contribute to it (or that it grabs data from) are not disadvantaged by it, and even are promoted by it. It would need tools so that one resume experience there would populate and extend to all the contributing companies, so monster.com and careerbuilder.com would both get updated at the same time.

Other types of sites for which this could happen are shopping sites (Amazon kind of has already started this), social networking sites, blogs, software code sites, product review sites, deal sites, etc. I think when these sites are fully functional, they will make life a little (or a lot) easier for those of us who just want to live life. I can see some sites refuse to use the integrators, but only those who want you to be their captive customer.

212 Catapult

Warning: Shameless Product Review

Ok, I really hadn't planned on doing product reviews, but this one really deserves it, because it is awesome. The product is called Catapult by 212 LLC. Disclamer: Two of the four partners were former business associates and clients of mine. Another was a former employee. I really can't be completely un-biased here, but this thing is still awesome.

Now let me underwhelm you. It is a media player. But, it is way more than a media player. It allows you to play all sorts of media, track who it gets sent to, who uses it, and in general get statistics on usage way beyond anything else out there that I have encountered. It also allows you to specify specific calls to action, and add supporting documents and links to related material. The bit-rate on whatever media you have added to it can also be adjusted.

All in all, it provides a very good media viewing experience, and can be tailored even to those with slower connections. The downside is that it doesn't help you make your videos or other media. You still have to have some talent with that. I will be testing it out in the next few weeks or months as I am seeking a new job. I look forward to being able to see the statistics of who is viewing my resume and so forth. Not only can I see that it is being viewed, but I can see exactly who is viewing it.

Very powerful. In the right hands, this could really do wonders. Of course, that is where that other required talent comes in. Once I get my Catapult resume promotion sequence set up, I will probably put a link on here so you can see it. Now, I just have to figure out what kind of media experience I want my users to have.