Ding in the Universe

Going Green

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:05:00 +0000

A lot has been said about global warming. I do not intend to reiterate arguments, merely to advocate four simple principles:

1) Being green is good in itself.
There are those that disagree global warming is man-made. Even then, there is the case for sustainability. We are putting tremendous pressure on the Earth and that is not scalable. Fossil fuels are expected to last for only 50 more years. Most of the third world is industrializing rapidly -- China is expected to surpass the US in terms of carbon emissions by 2009. Overfishing is expected to deplete the world's oceans in our generation. We have a duty to ourselves, to past and future generations, to find a way to achieve sustainability.

2) Transitioning to green technologies creates higher profits and new profits.
The major shake-up in the car industry exemplifies both. Toyota is now the biggest manufacturer of cars in the world, in large part because of its culture of innovation and trail-blazing work on hybrids. Traditional car manufacturers such as GM and Ford are going through tough times and will need to adapt or die. In regards to new jobs, one need not look further than the myriad companies focused on alternative fuel cars, from the (in)famous Tesla to zanier alternatives like the T-rex. The success of these companies will open up entirely new markets.

3) Silicon Valley must inspire other regions
Silicon Valley is the most innovative place, arguably in the world. Showing it can work here will inspire other places. And for a large part it is happening. There are 70 solar start-ups in the Bay Area alone. Companies in Silicon Valley promote a number of initiatives that help reduce our negative impact -- whether it be incentive programs for purchasing hybrid cars or putting solar panels, buying carbon offsets, or having goals and objectives for recycling. To quote John Doerr, why not make Silicon Valley the Green Valley?

4) The US must inspire other countries
In the 1940s, when the specter of war loomed ominously Europe and much of the world, the United States took leadership and devised a plan to win the nuclear race. It was called the Manhattan Project.
In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the United States took leadership men and devised a plan to win the space race. It was called the Apollo Project.
In the 2000s we are living yet another race, this time for survival amidst global climate change. And we need the United Stats to take leadership. We need a Project.

What do you think? How can we as a society overcome this challenge and fulfill our destiny?

Companies I Admire

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:22:00 +0000

I wanted to make this a more personal post. I found myself thinking of the top 10 companies that I respect and my experiences with them:

Established ones like

Ben & Jerry's -- I buy its ice-cream because I agree with it deep social consciousness, namely its focus on ensuring good financial return for its suppliers and promoting good environmental practices.
Google -- Its myriad products make my life truly richer and better, from accessing maps while driving to reading news to keeping in touch with people.
Pixar -- Every single movie has a fresh story and superb animation. No wonder it is the most successful film company in history by revenue/movie.
REI -- Amazing customer satisfaction. They allow you to return products (as long as good condition) for full refund, no questions asked, at any time.
Toyota -- I drive a Honda hybrid but I see its success deriving from the trail-blazing work of Toyota (Toyota promotes continuous improvement through a system they call "kaizen").

Start-ups like

Amyris -- Mass-produce malaria treatment using biotechnology. Most of the 1.5 million people who die from malaria cannot afford the treatment but Amyris's solution promises to make it available for 25 cents.
Azureus -- Uploading and downloading files from other people. The key innovation -- you can watch a movie while still downloading it.
Kiva -- Microfinance at its best. I lent a small amount of money via the Internet to a needy small business and expect to recoup it completely.
Tesla -- My dream car. It is the world's first sports electric car, combining the sleek design of a Lotus and a super efficient engine (the equivalent of 250 miles per gallon!)
Wikipedia -- Who would have imagined that a volunteer-contributed online encyclopedia would have more useful content than any other effort undertaken in history?

These are very different companies yet there are fundamentally common themes. Specifically, they seem strongly focused on three things:
1) constantly innovating -- Never getting complacent, always keeping ahead of the game.
2) doing what is best for users -- Even if they lose money in the short term, this builds long-term loyalty.
3) social responsibility -- Making sure to improve the community around them.

For me these are the hallmarks of a successful company that stands the test of time. What is it for you?

The job security of real estate agents

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:57:00 +0000

Check house listings on Craigslist, Zillow, HousingMaps or a number of other tools
Explore the neighborhood to an extremely high level of detail, without necessarily even visiting it, using Google Earth.
Access the latest housing trends and their analysis by experts with a few searches and clicks.

You would think that having all this information available would make real estate agents obsolete. Indeed, until recently, only professionals had access to all this information. Nowadays, with an Internet connection, everyone has access. But there are fundamental limitations to the information. And making well-informed decisions is often tricky. Despite believing firmly that technology empowers everyone , I think that at least in real estate the experts are definitely going to continue strong.

I say that for two main reasons.

First, there is too much information out there. For instance, in 2004, when I was looking for a place to rent, I decided to focus on an online listing of places that other graduating students like me had decided to move to. Then I used the power of web 2.0 to look at what various people had to say about the places I was considering. Having access to just the right information helped me make a good decision quickly. But unless you know exactly what to look for, the information is overwhelming. There is just so many houses for rent or sale listed that it is hard to narrow down options.

Second, even if you narrow the choices, it is hard to make sense of it. There are so many variables to consider -- down-payment, mortgage, loans, tax implications etc. Unless you are an extremely savvy buyer -- which is likely only if you buy/sell regularly -- chances are paying the 5% commission to an agent is worth it. Yes, there is some hassle in coordinating with another party which will definitely have its own interests. But buying a house is a big deal and if you are going to put in $500K (the average in the Bay Area), expert advice is worth it.

I wish there were a way to tap into the wisdom of crowds in making a decision. For one, I wonder if there is a way to get substantial and unbiased feedback in buying a place. When I was renting I looked at what previous renters had to say. But there is typically less turn-over among buyers than renters, which makes feedback harder to get. One solution that I have thought of is to build a market that can give the consensus on a housing decision. Imagine a website where I can list the terms of my sale/purchase and other people can rate it. Call it HotDealOrNot.com. Given enough people voting it is likely that the ratings in HotDealOrNot would be more accurate than any single expert's opinion.

If you have an interest in building such a website (which could be extended to all kinds of decisions) hit me up. Or if you are curious in thinking more about real estate and how it is being affected by IT, check http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/.

The Death of Printed Material

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:29:00 +0000

Fact: our knowledge is growing exponentially
Claim: the digital word is going to supersede completely the printed word in organizing this knowledge

This is virtually unquestionable for me but I wanted to write about it because I have seen people espouse very different notions of printed media. Some of them below:

1) printed media can reach more people in the world today
False. Delivering a book to all 6 billion human beings will take an unprecedented level of coordination. Not to mention that books are perishable items. Delivering to the roughly 1 billion human beings on the web right now is a matter of a few clicks.

2) printed media takes longer to produce therefore carries more respect
False. The bleeding edge of human knowledge has been the first to adopt the digital world. The vast majority of scientific journals are now published online, and many of them exclusively. Yes, there is a lot of misinformation on the web but there is no lack of respectable information either.

3) printed media is made by experts and thus more accurate
False. Wikipedia has shown people will structure knowledge for free and do it as well as paid experts. Take another example -- the taxonomy of living beings. In a few months Wikimedia (the non-profit behind Wikipedia) has catalogued over 100K species and has surpassed any manual taxonomy ever produced.

4) printed media will always more content because there is too much past knowledge that will not be digitized
False. Various scanning efforts are increasingly moving past human knowledge to the digital world. And if you go online today you will find everything, from broad interests like news and cooking to very specialized like how to make Ubuntu software work or the latest episodes of South Park.

So when the whole world is connected online, why would there be a need for printed material? Why would I buy a paperback when I can access the material much more easily through the web? Or read a newspaper when I can get fresher news online? I have a really hard time seeing printed material surviving. Except for cases where emotions carry more value, such as a rare manuscript or curling up with a book on the beach or giving a hand-written note to a loved one.

Food for thought: this amazing amazing video from Michael Wesch, a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State.

Access = Good. Prevention = Better.

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:28:00 +0000

I have blogged previously about using technology to improve access to health information (for instance see Health, the next (online) frontier and Health in the Palm of your Hands). But while making health information more widely available improves the system, it is not a fundamental paradigm shift. Technology is truly exciting when it can change human behavior. And there is scope for this if the major forces in this space understand where our health care is broken.

For one thing, the United States does not have health care, it has "sick care". Our whole system is built on acute care. The vast majority of us go to the doctor when something needs fixing, whether it be a broken knee or an upset stomach. At the same time, doctors have economic incentives to do procedures, especially the most dramatic ones such as placing a stent in your heart. Chronic care is available but very expensive. A long-term condition like cancer costs the patient or the insurer hefty sums of money. Preventive care, which is arguably the most sensible approach, is on the sidelines. By and large we agree with the principle that people leading healthier lives get less sick, which ultimately means less suffering and economic cost -- and then fail to put resources towards this direction.

Imagine a world where technology would actively help in doing better preventive care:

A person with high risk of diabetes uses his cell phone to measure the glucose content of the food he is going to eat, avoiding choices that can lead to poorer health.
A community of casual runners uses pedometers that keep their history. The runners can then share their data, providing them an additional incentive to reach their goals.
Better organization tools allow insurers to incentivize targets on preventive care. For instance, Kaiser analyzes the incidence of diabetes is high in an area and identifies risk behavior. It then requires physicians to spend say 50% of the consultation time specifically on prevention, which presumably gives Kaiser long-term savings.

This is a big issue. In the developed world especially, people are living longer and suffering from illnesses that can be prevented. Our grandparents may have had tuberculosis or malaria, chances are we will suffer from heart disease and arthritis. Acute care is not going to away but with the reduced incidence of infectious and water-borne diseases, prevention is going to become much more relevant in medicine.

In a perfect world, access to all information should lead to the best outcomes. An so we are focusing on the first step, which is providing the information. But we need to also consider the second step, which is how to use this information. A huge challenge -- but maybe some of you reading this share my faith that we can successfully leverage technology towards prevention.

Large, Unsolved Problems in Tech: Bugs

noreply@blogger.com (Aseem) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:14:00 +0000

(Lately, I have been thinking about really big, largely unsolved problems in the tech space, so this is the first post in the many to come along those lines).

There is an old joke about the computer industry: (allegedly) Bill Gates is heard boasting that if the car industry kept pace with the computer industry, we would have flying cars today that go 1000 mph and give 1000 mpg. GM responds back that if the car industry followed the computer industry, your car will also break down twice a day, will need to be replaced every 2 years AND you will come to accept this as progress!

While universally regarded as an innovative and fast-paced, Computer industry has a major problem: Quality Control! Hardware has gotten faster, storage has increased exponentially, and overall capabilities of the software has risen with the underlying infrastructure. But, one fundamental issue remains - we are unable to build software with a high degree of confidence (at least not without huge costs).

Look at the construction industry - they can build bridges that last 100 years (which by the way is not that long either but it's a start), can offer levels of confidence in case of natural disasters and is backed by a large private insurance industry, indicating that the risks are measured and manageable. When you travel over a bridge, the thought of the bridge collapsing at that moment hardly ever crosses our minds.

Car industry is probably not as far ahead as the construction industry but still is capable of producing vehicles lasting decades with proper maintenance. We rarely worry about our cars breaking down *without a good reason* on the highway. Again, there is a large insurance industry that believes that it understands the risks involved with cars.

Yet, we don't expect anywhere close to that level of service from our computers. We accept that they will crash at random, so we incessantly save files, that new software will ship with (often known) bugs and many bugs will never be found or reported and many that are found will never be fixed.

Why?

There are several possible speculations:

Industry is still too immature to have the same level of service as some of the older industries.
Underlying hardware platforms are weak (same could be speculated about the many layers of software on top).
We don't understand how to write large-scale software well.
We don't have a good enough language to describe the software in a consistent and elegant manner.
We don't know how to test the software well, i.e. software creation has advanced faster than testing can keep up.
etc...

In reality, it's probably a combination of these and various other reasons. Fundamentally, we need a new way to build reliable software! This doesn't mean perfect software but measurably bad - rather than arbitrarily bad. It could mean different types of QA certifications (like Six Sigma) or a private insurance industry which usually indicates measurable risks. We need to be able to trust our computers the same way we trust some of our other appliances.

So, what would it take to fix this? Several approaches have already been tried:

Build a proof-based language from start: Lots of attempts have been around this (like ML and even Microsoft dabbled in this a few years ago), but none have really worked for mainstream applications
Build better automated tests: Lots of research projects that are building software to detect common bugs in code automatically. These may be an useful stop-gap measure but definitely not a long term solution.
Better software design and engineering: improved methods and frequent testing like Agile can help to some extent.
Perhaps, we need a brand new platform designed from scratch that will address this problem at all levels with a combination of above.

The verdict is out (and may remain out for a long time). Ultimately, I believe that this could be a trillion dollar problem, capable of changing a whole industry (and with the growing reach of tech, numerous other industries as well).

What can we do?

Why I remain skeptical of online social networking

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:53:00 +0000

Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Doostang etc etc. It seems there is no lack of online social networks out there. Here is a large list and some stats for Aug 2007.

So there is undoubtedly value in online social networks. They help you to keep in touch. They help you plan. They allow people who would have never otherwise met to know each other. Many are trying to innovate and create useful tools and an ecosystem on top of their site. Some are focusing on going beyond the desktop and connecting on mobile.

But do we really need this many of them??? In the last month alone I received

an unsolicited email from Quechup (they supposedly automatically email everyone in your contact list)
came across ApnaCircle, started by the founder of Hotmail and focused on the Indian market (there are plenty of social networks focused on specific markets)
was invited to hi5 by my 50+ year old uncle who is discovering social networks

Perhaps this is reflecting a nascent, booming market. In other words, many startups are emerging and only a few will succeed. But seriously, it feels excessive. I say YAUSN (yet another unnecessary social network).

Even established online social networks seem to be hyped disproportionally. Right now not a day goes by when Facebook doesn't make headlines -- and not necessarily for new features but market speculation. For one thing, it feels like hype because not a single online social network has yet turned a profit by itself. Sure, many of them claim that advertising is the solution. It makes sense since social networks know a lot about you so they can do very targeted advertising. For instance, if you have a profile saying you like beaches, next time you log in you may see an ad for sunscreen. But this is harder to do than it sounds. Case in point: no online social network has a proven sustainable business model.

I guess the market will take care of itself. Till then I remain skeptical of the long-term future of online social networks. If you want to read further in much more depth, latest Economist has a great article.

Health, the next (online) frontier

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:31:00 +0000

Healthcare is broken in the United States. In the richest country in the world 1/6 of its population is uninsured ie gets minimal medical care. Doctors are rewarded for treatment, not prevention. And the system is extremely entrenched -- caution is not necessarily bad given health is supremely precious but makes structural improvement hard to implement. The challenge is huge but with the challenge there is also an opportunity. And technology can provide part of the solution b y improving the management of healthcare.

There have been many attempts, most of which were initiated by the government or hospitals and almost all failed. Now though it seems circumstances have matured and technology companies are seriously entering the market. In 2007 alone:

RevolutionHealth, a company started by the founder of AmericaOnline, launched a portal that gives users wide access to health information.
Intel and IBM both announced technological improvements to store health records.
Microsoft acquired a company that searches the web intelligently for health and medical information. Recently it launched its own portal. which allows patients to manage their health records.

All the signs indicate we are indeed going through a paradigm shift, probably comparable to what the finance industry went through in the 1980s.

Managing health records online is an especially compelling idea and arguably the holy grail of the current efforts. Let us take the following pipeline: employers cover patients, patients are treated by physicians, physicians get reimbursed by insurers. Now, insurers see reduced costs in having to maintain mountains of paperwork. Physicians need to spend less precious time asking patients for their medical history. Patients have greater power over their lives by controlling their own health records. And this ultimately means that employers pay less for covering their employees' health plans. This is obviously an over-simplification since there are various other interests at stake. Plus, the costs of moving to online health records ensuring privacy are both non-trivial.

The gauntlet is out though as tech companies are trying for game-changing progress. The need is definitely there:

fact: The US government estimates that healthcare accounts for roughly $1 trillion (10% of the GDP).
fact: HMOs estimate that 33% of their costs go solely into administration
fact: The Institute of Medicine put an upper estimate of ~100,000 deaths every year due to preventable medical errors. Arguably many of these could be avoided through better management of healthcare.

10 Lessons of how the business world is similar to the natural world

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:39:00 +0000

1) Natural selection is always happening, even if you are not aware of it
Ideas are arising constantly, often in multiple places. Most fail, few succeed. Those that succeed eventually find themselves challenged by a new idea. In 1994, Altavista's dominance in online search gave way to Yahoo which gave way to Google, and the cycle is going on.

2) Evolution happens at different rates
Designing and releasing a car can take years (notwithstanding Tesla Motors's efforts to change that). Designing and releasing a software can happen in days. The lower the barrier towards entry (tech being a prime example) the more ideas arise and fail and the rate of evolution is faster.

3) Environment makes a huge difference
The ideas that succeed are the ones that can perform best in their environment. An idea that succeeded in the US may not succeed in China. A company must adapt its strategy if it wants to win in different places.

4) Building an ecosystem is critical to succeed.
You can have a good idea, assemble a good team, and build a good product. But unless there are other businesses that need or rely upon you, your product is probably very vulnerable to consumer fickleness. Case in point -- part of the reason >90% of the world uses Windows and not Mac OS is because Microsoft allowed a community of developers to flourish on its platform whereas Apple didn't.

5) Evolution is non-linear
The idea that wins is not necessarily the biggest, boldest or most disruptive. Betamax was arguably a better technology but failed in critical things (eg advertising) and thus lost to VHS.

6) Cataclysmic events can shake things up
An asteroid falling on the Earth or the markets crashing because of a tech bubble both do extreme damage on the inhabitants of the system. Only the fittest survive.

7) Compete and Cooperate
It is not about monopolizing the market. In the long term it is the small mammals that win over the large dinosaurs. To maximize its fitness, a company must strike the right balance between competing and cooperating with other companies.

8) Adapting and Seizing opportunity
When the oceans calmed down some fish ventured forth to the dry land. We are their descendants. You don't hear about the fish which remained comfortably in the sea. Similarly, a company may be the undisputed leader today but it needs to constantly innovate if it wishes to be around for the long haul.

9) First mover advantage is huge
On Earth it took millions of years for sophisticated intelligence to develop in the form of human beings. Once it did though it quickly spread all over and no other sophisticated intelligence was able to compete as effectively. Similarly, companies that are the first ones to come to a market and fulfill a core need are very likely to win big.

10) Large systems get very complex
I have merely outlined some principles and am barely doing justice to this topic. If you are interested further read The Natural Laws of Business and let me know if you recommend I read it. =)

Paradigm Shift in Biotech?

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:01:00 +0000

Biotech has historically under-delivered in almost 30 years of life (most experts agree that 1976, when Genentech was founded, marks the birth of this industry). There have been promising developments:

synthetic human insulin, which has reduced significantly the cost of treating diabetes
hybrid strains of plants that are resistant to disease
treatments for very rare genetic disorders
we have sequenced the entire human genome

Our knowledge is now magnitudes larger but there still have been very limited large-scale development affecting millions of lives.

Could this be changing? In 2007 various initiatives have shown signs of success, for instance:

23andMe, dedicated to organizing your personal genetic information, received $3.9M in funding from heavy weights, including Google and Genentech
Navigenics, which promises to sequence your genome and tell you your chances of cancer and other diseases, has recently come full force into the public eye
Microsoft released its source code to advance research on an Aids vaccine. The tools might help sequence the virus, allowing scientists to understand how it mutates and identify weak points. This innovation is coming from a non-biotech company and evolved from a seemingly unrelated technology, which is a promising sign of how biotech is maturing.
Breakthroughs like building a nanotech drug delivery device that are helping mankind get closer to the dream of curing cancer.

There are biotech hubs sprouting all over the world. And these are not just in North America, some very prominent examples include Singapore's Biopolis and "Genome Valley" near Hyderabad, India.

The fundamental issue though is a lot of the developments have been theoretical rather than practical. Neither of the three companies mentioned above (23andMe, Navigenics, Microsoft) have a concrete product. And when the products come out, even if they become commercially viable, it is possible they will cater to only the richest. To truly fulfill its promise, biotech needs to reach to individuals across class and geography, like technology has succeeded in doing in the last decade.

What do you think -- are are indeed living through a paradigm shift? I for one believe biotech will deliver the cure for diabetes within the next decade.

Changing how we see images

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:53:00 +0000

For most of human history the only way to keep a picture was by actually reproducing it. Then in the last hundred or so years came a revolution. Today we are bombarded with more visual information in a day than a person received over a lifetime perhaps five generations ago. And there is a revolution afoot in how visual media is accessible to us. I would identify four major themes:

Sharing -- We have been moving increasingly towards a model where your photos are online and you can decide who can see them. A prime example -- you can organize photos on your desktop using Picasa and then upload them photos to the web using Picasaweb. But there are alternatives, for instance, Sharpcast keeps photos on your computer only but allows you to share them with others easily. This peer-to-peer method is promising because it ensures higher privacy.

Searching -- The default mechanism today is a user enters some keywords system, returns an image that it thinks corresponds to the keywords. For instance, image-search services offered by Google, Yahoo, Ask or Microsoft associate various keywords to an image based on where the image was found on the web.

Automatic Recognition -- Increasingly sophisticated software can detect the actual contents of a picture. For instance, Neven Vision uses various signals such as texture, coloring, and contrast to distinguish people vs objects in an image. This can be enormously useful for filtering inappropriate pictures automatically or even allowing one day users to input a picture and find other similar pictures.

Collaborative -- If automatic methods are not perfect then let us use humans to help us classify images. A professor at Carnegie Mellon has created the ESP game, where people compete with each other trying to label images, thus providing machines with more knowledge on what the image really is. Flickr is a prime example of the power of tagging -- anyone with permissions can create labels which then becomes part of the description of the image.

The Revolution is being Mobilized

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:36:00 +0000

In the beginning governments funded mainframes for very complex applications.
And then private enterprise seized the idea and spread it wider, especially at the workplace.
So that big and small companies said one day "Let the computer come to the home" and computers reached the home.
And now visionaries envision when computing will go beyond work and home and become embedded in fabric of our lives.
Which will be good.

We are living amidst a new step in the information revolution, this time powered by the mobile platform. A smartphone has core capabilities that most users look into a desktop: search the web, check email, watch videos, look at maps. Even if you don't have a simple text-based interface, you can access many useful services, from calling free 411 services to get a business's phone number to SMSing to get directions. Yet there are many challenges in this space. Here is a look at the main ones and some innovations/developments that might change the rules of the game:
1) small screen size which limits how much information you can see -- There are research groups and companies looking to project imagesholographically using particles in the air.
2) keyboard input is difficult -- After the iPhone the trend seems to be touch pads ie the keyboard is embedded into the display screen itself.
3) limited bandwidth which is especially relevant to streaming video -- In the US the telecom industry is waking up and migrating to faster networks (eg Sprint's EDGE network).
4) lack of standards which means it is hard to develop applications that will work on all phones -- As the market consolidates standards are emerging and there is a push for interoperability.

There are already indications of the potential of cell phones. Imagine you are

in a restaurant and split the bill -- you can send payments to each other with phones right away.
suffering from diabetes and want to measure your glucose level -- your phone might come with an optical system that can measure this non-invasively.
in a hurry and want to edit a document you had created -- instead of transcribing notes you can just login and edit it through your phone.
walking in a supermarket alley -- you will see good deals showing up on your phone targeted to your interests
in a farm in Iowa and want to call Tokyo -- you plug into the free VOIP network and talk as if next door (how can it exist for free? simple -- you show ads)

Cloud computing, converge of platforms, ubiquitous computing, digital identities, paperless society -- these and many other concepts develop heavily on whether cell phones can meet their promise.

Health in the Palm of your Hands

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:17:00 +0000

A patient comes to the doctor complaining of branchospasm (difficulty in breathing). The physician decides to prescribe him Volmax but makes a mistake and prescribes him Flomax, a completely different drug. The end result -- a patient has to be hospitalized and a good doctor is judged guilty of medical error.

Drug names are notoriously confusing. There are thousands of them and it is difficult to remember what each does. The issue is further aggravated because the FDA does not allow names to imply medical claims. Furthermore, names like Xanax, Cialis and Serzone are creations of marketing departments that are more interested in snappy monikers that will boost sales. And goes without saying that a medical error is detrimental for everyone -- patient, physician, hospital, insurer, and society.

Almost 10 years ago, ePocrates tried to address this issue by creating an online list of drugs that users could access using their phones. The software allowed looking up names, recommended dosages and possible complications, such as the interaction effects with other drugs. Aside from this core functionality, the company showed wisdom in how they sold their product:

trust -- Health practitioners came to trust ePocrates because the list of drugs carries blessings from established authorities in medicine.
up to date -- The software connects to the web to access a list of drugs that is always up to date.
platform-independent -- ePocrates has tried to make their product available to as many smartphones as possible.
user adoption -- ePocrates focused on selling their product to hospitals/institutions who in turn made it free to end users. As such, end users did not incur costs directly, which helped early adoption.

ePocrates is now the de facto standard used by health practitioners. It has a loyal user base and a search on the web will quickly show you they believe in the product (from one user: "ePocrates is a must for medical professionals"). In hindsight, their choice of platform was their wisest decision. ePocrates recognized physicians and nurses tend to walk throughout a hospital, carrying a beeper. So instead of requiring them to purchase new devices or to sit on desktops, ePocrates leveraged existing behaviors.

ePocrates's success aside, there is certainly room for growth. Here are some features that directly or indirectly would lead to happier users:

Open platforms, not closed ones like Apple's iPhone, so ePocrates can be readily available.
Faster networks, such as Wimax and EDGE, so the software will run faster.
Allow information to flow both ways. Users could annotate drug entries, which could then be shared with other practitioners. Of course, since this is a very sensitive area such as health, any annotation would be reviewed by a panel of experts.
Internationalize. This is not just a matter of translating because the same drug could be solved in different countries with different names.

For more information on ePocrates: http://en.wikipedia.org/ePocrates.

The network is the power

noreply@blogger.com (Amit Garg) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:47:00 +0000

Before discussing any specific innovation, I feel important to set some context on my thinking. I believe successful innovation is not about the brilliant mind of a single individual, it is about a team of committed individuals standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Call this "the network". Long gone are the days in which a single entity -- the genius scientist or the massive ENIAC in a basement -- was the source of innovation. Today is the era of of networks. Look around you:

The Internet is a collection of machines, big and small, sharing information with each other.

Google relies on massive distributed computing to provide search results with blazing speed.

Bittorrent allows for many-to-many file-sharing, such that the final file is composed of pieces downloaded from various other users.

The VLA (Very Large Array) is a system of telescopes that linked together can peer deeper into the universe than any other man-made instrument.

Wikipedia is a shining example of how the wisdom of crowds can provide better knowledge than any expert-edited encyclopedia.

So if you have the spark of inspiration, by all means, work furiously burning the midnight oil. But if you do not tap yourself into the network, your idea will just remain what it is, an idea that looks good on paper.

I for one vote for the open-sourcing of ideas and a creative commons approach to innovation.

Why does the world need yet another tech blog?

noreply@blogger.com (Aseem) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:41:00 +0000

If you're interested in the tech space, you could probably name over a dozen major tech blogs that provide everything from early scoops of new products to a colorful commentaries on latest developments and some even provide full-fledged predictions on where the industry is headed.

Well, in the spirit of full disclosure, none of us have the connections to get you any grainy screenshots of the next iPod, nor any juicy rumors about the next billionaire's wedding and we certainly have no intention of regurgitating news from other blogs.

Our motives are somewhat different - we want to discuss major developments in the tech space and their implications to the immediate industry and even beyond. Sites like Youtube are already playing an important role well beyond what is considered typical tech industry.

We want to find out the biggest problems in tech and discuss ways to address them. We want to take a step back from the day to day work and think about where we can help and how technology can impact lives beyond the current boundaries.

We want to ask the right questions and provide a forum to intelligently answer those questions. Sometimes these questions will be asked in hindsight to better understand what happened and sometimes we will ask them hoping to ignite a good debate around the topics.

While we are attached to the tech industry, we are by no means limiting ourselves to it.

Given these goals, we will not cover most minor developments in the industry. We expect to spend more time thinking about the content of the posts than actually writing them. I doubt our volume of posts will be very high but we hope to have lots of discussion around the small number that do get posted.

With that in mind, we begin Ding in the Universe and invite everyone to participate in the discussion!