Extinction is exactly the right word, as it seems that browser-based bookmarks are now dinosaurs. The heavy use of mobile—where people use search or an app to get to preferred sites—seems to be the main factor. The other is the turf wars between browsers, leading to the lack of an easy way to sync bookmarks from one to the other (Xmarks main feature).

My bookmarks are now completely in the Cloud. There’s no reason to access a bookmark unless you have an internet connection, so why not? I had to do the usual scramble and research to find a substitute for my discontinued product. I settled on Raindrop.io which has great user experience and has been crafted with care across all browsers, iOS and macOS. I’m highly satisfied and recommend it.

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This video shows Spotify driving a music visualizer on a 65” Sony 4K TV. It’s great for entertaining, listening to music, or just sitting back and enjoying the show. If you’re interested in setting up something similar for yourself that will work with Spotify, iTunes, or streaming web services like Pandora or Soundcloud, read on! (Mac only, sorry.) Demonstration music credit Tom Petty “Runaway.”

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The face of blogging changed greatly over that period. Beginning in 2015, when LinkedIn’s Pulse was opened to ordinary citizens, I began cross-posting my professionally oriented posts there. That has provided good results from a business perspective. Similarly, I began cross-posting cultural and personal work to Medium. Some of the amplification there has taken my readership far beyond what I could expect from a self-hosted blog. However, a copy of everything is here, where it will never go away.

I’ve decided it’s time for a hiatus to recharge my creative juices and to determine what I’m writing about and where the content will be placed. Lookout for changes.

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Mabu seemed cheesy and a bit creepy, but the idea had legs, if a bit odd.

At the same time Mom needed a birthday gift and I was tapped out of ideas. I had heard a lot about the Amazon Echo, how it was like artificial intelligence and how it became a virtual companion to people somewhat like Mabu does. One of the top reviews on Amazon was a couple, one of whom had Parkinson’s, and how the Echo had helped their lives. Mom has some trouble getting around, but nothing like that. However she likes gadgets and will spend the time to get them to work, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

When Mom unwrapped the Echo I was sure I’d be returning it to Amazon. Explaining the concept, likening it a bit to HAL in 2001, a Space Oddesey (considering my audience) got rather puzzled looks. We tested it out, asking when Shakespeare’s birthday was (that day), getting the weather forecast, setting a timer for 5 minutes. It all went smoothly. You can believe that the Alexa voice recognition works amazingly well. If Siri is version 1.0, Alexa is 2.0. The Echo just sits there patiently waiting for its trigger word, and then helps you out. It really is perfect for an older person – no small buttons, no hard to read screen.

I was sure I’d be taking it home at the end of the weekend to return it. I figured it was a novelty that would soon wear off. However, I left it in the apartment overnight to see what would happen.

When I returned the next morning, Mom reported she had gotten the Echo to do a few things on her own. She seemed to be warming up to it. Like I said, she will tinker with things, but she gets frustrated easily.

I was still sure I’d be talking it home, only now I was beginning to like it enough to think maybe I could use it. A classic case of giving someone a birthday gift you want.

What made her finally want to keep it was the music. She has Amazon Prime and that opens up all of Amazon Music. You can tell the Echo to play Frank Sinatra and it will happily comply. There are playlists for moods and genres galore. The Echo has a lot of heft to it, and is a very competent Bluetooth speaker. I also paired it with Moms iPad Mini and it could easily play that music, as well.

In spite of the technical nature of it, which could be a non-starter, the Echo is very useful for an older person. You just give it verbal commands, and it does what you ask. You can use it for a shopping list, you can set a reminder to watch a TV show or take a pill. You can get the weather or news without looking for reading glasses.

The Echo is a comforting robot presence in their house now. It’s like a pet that doesn’t need walking or feeding. Or a daughter that doesn’t talk back.

As far as real healthcare goes, the Echo is an open platform where you can build skills that can be added on. So far, I’m aware of only one, KidsMD. Parents can ask the Echo questions about common illnesses like fever, cough, and rashes, and get instant information on what drugs to use, how to administer them, and how much. It would be tricky to build something more complex from a regulatory point of view, but there’s potential there.

Mom kept her new little robot companion and has had a steady stream of curious visitors checking it out. I considered one for myself and ordered a Tap, which is an Alexa that doesn’t have to be plugged in all the time – the compromise is that you have to tap a button to use it. I thought I could use it outdoors at the house.

I returned it within a day. It was just a shadow of the Echo experience. My main reason for returning it was the atrocious wifi performance. It constantly dropped connections (the wifi specs are very different). Also, part of the beauty of the Echo is that it sits there patiently listening for you to give it a job. Having to tap the button to ask a question is no better than Siri on your phone and Alexa on the Tap seemed like a dimwitted cousin.

The Echo is the knife edge of Amazon’s entry into the whole Internet of Things. It has a lot of promise. Amazon Prime, with it’s numerous benefits of music, video, photo storage etc. may eventually give Google (now Alphabet) a run for their money.

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One of the first things you learn when you start using Twitter is hashtags. Hashtags allow you to tune in to the Twitter ‘radio signal’ around topics or events. However, hashtags can also allow you to create your own personal filing system.

Creating your own personal Google using Twitter and hashtags is a simple matter. When you find an article or link that you want to share on Twitter, at the same time you share, you simply add on the appropriate hashtag for the topic so you can find it later – perhaps even adding multiple hashtags. Ideally, this is the hashtag commonly related to that topic so you can feed that conversation as well. Later, when you’re interested in reviewing or searching everything you’ve flagged on a topic, you simply use Twitter’s advanced search (https://twitter.com/search-advanced?lang=en) to search your own tweets for that specific hashtag. You’ll be presented a neat list in reverse chronological order.

Here’s an example: Since its launch I’ve collected interesting articles and links about the Apple Watch, using the hashtag #applewatch. So, if I want to find an article that I’ve noted, I simply search my own tweets for #applewatch and I frequently can find what I’m looking for. At that point I can use the browser find command to refine the search for certain words I might remember from the original link such as the publication or author. Since these tweets are public you can see this search here. So of course that means you can search another user’s public tweets, as well.

If you’re a frequent Tweeter and diligent about hashtagging your topics you can create a truly powerful archive around your interests. It becomes a vast file cabinet to draw from.

Of course, there are lots of ways to save web links. People save them as bookmarks in folders in their browsers. They save them as social bookmarks in Pinboard or Delicious. Or, folks save pages in Pocket or Instapaper using tags – which can also create a nice archive. But, Twitter has advantages because by now it’s integrated into almost every app and browser, is just a tap or click away, and is simple and convenient.

You can level-up this approach by saving all your tweets using several different methods. One of the easiest is to integrate all of your tweets with a bookmarking service like Pinboard or Diigo. In this scenario every tweet of yours gets added to your bookmarks, including all hashtags. Here’s the instructions for Pinboard https://pinboard.in/settings/twitter. After setting this up, there’s no need for Twitter’s search – you simply search within your own bookmarks in Pinboard. Most commonly the import uses an additional hashtag, like !fromtwitter. I set this up in Delicious years ago almost by mistake. I ended up not really using Delicious for anything else as a result, but it made collecting and searching tweets easy (Delicious killed this functionality about a year ago.). Twitter collection can be set up with Evernote in a similar manner using IFTTT https://ifttt.com/recipes/114761-twitter-will-automatically-archive-to-evernote.

Twitter improved their search about 4 years ago, basically eliminating the need for other tools to search tweets. About the same time they made it possible to download all your own tweets. Here are the instructions to do this https://blog.twitter.com/2012/your-twitter-archive. It can take a few hours or a day to get this archive, but once you have it, it comes as a browsable collection as well as in csv format. This archive serves as a personal Google, provided you have hashtagged your links.

That’s three ways you can create your own personal Google: using Twitter’s advanced search; importing all your tweets into a bookmarking service; or periodically downloading an archive of your tweets. If you’re tweeting regularly, pick up the precision of your hashtagging and you’ll create a helpful resource in short order.

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The consensus is that backdoors for government access is a terrible idea that just weaken the system. And of course we learned from Edward Snowden that we’ve all been snooped on for years through similar mechanisms. Keys under doormats are a bad idea. (MIT: Keys Under Doormats – Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications)

Of course, huge data hacks have been in the news for the past several years. How fast have we forgotten about Target, JPMorgan, Ashley Madison, and Sony Pictures where massive data breaches left millions of Americans’ personal information exposed? Many of these people are just now starting to find out the extent of the damage done.

But the Government must be secure, right? They have loads of experts and vast funding. Well, after the recent hack of over 700,000 tax records they don’t seem to be able to do such a great job. So, they don’t seem like they might be able to keep that backdoor key away from hackers or totalitarian regimes.

The FBI promise this tool is just for for a one-time use on this one phone also rings hollow. The press reports many other phones where Government access is requested. Recently there was a report where the Government obtained a Tor-hacking technique through subpoena from Carnegie Mellon. They immediately exploited it to shut down a bunch of nasty sites, which is hard to argue with. However, the parallel with the Apple case is that once they have a cracking tool, they will use it widely.

One of the big risks is our health records. More and more of our data is on our phones, connected devices, and electronic health records. This past year saw over one million patient health files breached through nearly 258 large-scale healthcare data breaches. This is highly sensitive and personal information and I personally want the Government out of my business. Smartphones are increasingly the remote control for much of this data.

The Internet of Things increases security risks. How about a hacker changing the dosage on your insulin pump? Or getting into your car and shutting it down in the middle of the highway. Let’s hope this security battle is resolved in a public forum rather than the FBI relying on an obscure 1789 law, the All Writs Act.

P.S. Just for fun, you can read I dared two expert hackers to destroy my life. Here’s what happened.

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Given that Virtual Reality is in a very early stage of development, Goldman outlines 3 scenarios over the next decade. Even in their base case, they estimate $580bn in revenue by 2025. Here’s the chart:

Of more interest to me personally, were the meaningful use cases they see which will drive VR markets. Looking beyond videogames, they predict real estate, retail, and healthcare will be among the first markets that VR/AR disrupts. In particular they signal out healthcare as being $5.1bn by 2025, a huge number, and an 11% slice of the pie.

Goldman forecast three primary uses for VR/AR technology in healthcare: 1) as a tool to aid doctors in medical procedures and day-to-day tasks, 2) for physical therapy and to treat phobias like fear of heights, and 3) to increase access to doctors through virtual visits.

One of the most successful uses of Google Glass was in Healthcare. Glass was used to overlay vital info for EMTs and surgeons and to provide hands-free assistance. You could easily see a hybrid of a VR headset and Google Glass being used in a similar manner, with the ability to provide more information and interactivity. I worked on a project for Sudler and Hennessey which used Google Glass in an augmented fashion to enhance a conference experience, adding a layer of imagery and information over what was in the booth. So, I could see Prediction #1 bring on target.

As far as Prediction #2 goes; virtual reality is a visceral experience and if you’re afraid of public speaking and could practice in a VR headset, I believe you could make some progress. This is entirely new territory but the options appear viable.

Increasing access to doctors through virtual visits, Prediction #3, seems a stretch. Doctors have been slow to adopt telemedicine due to reimbursement issues, and the physical need to interact makes the use challenging. Possible, but way out in the future.

VR has been in the news a lot this first month of the year. CES was full of VR gear and hype, and the headsets people having been waiting for, like the Oculus Rift, are only months away from launch. The Sundance Film Festival featured virtual reality for the second year. Under a program called New Frontier, the festival is promoting eleven independently produced VR films on a smartphone app. One of the notable shorts, Defrost, is a sci-fi drama that follows a woman who suffered a massive stroke and was cryogenically frozen. The woman’s waking up 30 years later as the film begins. The viewer experiences the story from the perspective of the woman, Mrs. Garrison, who’s wheeled around the hospital after awakening and is reunited with her very family – which has aged 30 years into the future. In a way it’s healthcare VR, so perhaps Goldman Sach’s will be right.

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Virtual reality offers many possibilities for pharma. In the short-term, the sheer novelty of the technology guarantees a certain share of attention. This is likely only a 12 month opportunity. Next year many virtual reality units are scheduled to be rolled out, so it is probable that there will be a flood of pharma efforts by mid-year.

If you’ve had a chance to try it out, virtual reality offers a riveting experience and intense moments of simulation. What better technology could there be to teach HCPs to relate emotionally to the suffering of patients of various disease states?

Last Summer Excedrin created a stunt with Oculus Rift, the most sophisticated but expensive and unwieldy VR apparatus out there, and simulated the effects of a migraine. Excedrin clearly reached  way out of their box in terms of their indication, but they got their point across and plenty of attention.

Recently, in Australia, there was an effort to convey the experience of Multiple Sclerosis using a bicycle – built to malfunction. “Its gears are unpredictable, its frame off-balanced, and its brakes numb to press,” the ad’s narrator continues. “This bike has multiple sclerosis.” You can imagine doing something similar with VR. Many disease states where symptoms are visual, auditory, or balance related can be simulated with VR – migraine being a leading example.

The high-tech geewhiz effect of VR offers a tremendous method to visualize the structure and chemistry of some of the high-science drug compounds now launching. It delivers a Fantastic-Voyage-type experience of zooming through chemical structures and pathways in order to understand the science behind the therapies. VR serves up great gaming possibilities for learning – which could be an interactive competition at a conference or online. And the fact that the Samsung Gear VR is only $100 makes it well within  possibility to equip sales forces with the unit to deliver unique and interesting experiences to doctors.

The two options above offer standalone experiences built specifically for VR. It’s always takes a big push to get someone to download an individual app or sign up for one of your experiences. Maybe that’s too much to ask. Another option is to piggyback on other developed VR content – whether it’s a movie, story, or game – and interject a brand message of some sort, almost like an advertisement, to put it crudely. Ideally this would be content complementing the subject matter so branded content wouldn’t seem out of place and would offer value to the viewer.

Next year, Oculus will launch its full-scale Rift headset in the first quarter of 2016, while HTC is expected to begin selling its much-anticipated Vive not much later. Sony is also said to be readying to launch its PlayStation VR headset in the first half of next year. 2016 will be a big year for virtual reality in general and VR could be an area where pharma can actually be in the forefront of innovation rather than its typical laggard position. Let’s hope so.

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In the six months or so since the Watch has been on the market, there’s been a minor explosion of Watch applications that I personally use. This has lead to a cluttered and unorganized layout on my Watch. Well, it’s holiday time, leading to tinkering with a second screen (a Watch in my case) while watching movies or sports. So, I have cleaned up my Watch to make it a better experience.

The first thing to do is get rid of all the apps you don’t use or that don’t serve a purpose. In the Watch iPhone app it’s pretty easy to review all the apps with Watch extensions and turn them on or off. Some icons are cryptic: even if you’re familiar with the iPhone app, recognizing the Watch app may be a guessing game. In this way you clean up your screen and realize what’s what.

Next, you try to group the apps into related groups – most used, travel, weather, etc. This is like walking on ice while drunk. The best way to edit the layout is on the app on your iPhone, but the little buggers are slippery and naturally snap towards the center of the honeycomb. In my view,  different grid types should be offered as an option here, or you should be able to add spacers and cluster your apps – maybe apart from the central nucleus. It’s very challenging to arrange the apps anywhere near to a layout you want. I eventually managed to work my layout into an X with logical groupings of apps, but it’s a work in progress. The Watch app itself is an anchor in the center and I realized late in the game you can’t actually move it.

The Internet has come to the rescue for help with this task, specifically the Apple Watch subreddit. In the subreddit users have crafted complex layouts that must require a ton of dexterity and even more patience. The key post that started it all has a very functional format (no idea how he did it), and there are some remarkable designs posted. I’m sure we’ll see some Christmas tree layouts in the next four weeks.

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In a rare PR move for Apple, there was an interview with Jay Blahnik, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, in Outdoor magazine in August. The interview was revealing as to Apple’s intentions in the area of health and their overall approach. Jay laid out the strategy behind the creation of the Activity and Workout apps and said it all boiled down to – sit less, move more, and get some exercise.

So, how does the Apple Watch succeed against these goals? What’s missing?

There have been many reviews of the watch as a fitness device, most saying it’s solid for recreational athletes but perhaps lacking for fitness fanatics. If you haven’t seen it in action, tracking exercise on the watch uses the Workout app. When you work out, you can either set a calorie goal, a time goal, or an open ended goal. A heart rate monitor is built into the Watch and runs while you exercise. I’ve tested it against my Polar chest-strap based monitor and it was quite accurate – so now I’ve replaced the chest strap with the watch for my workouts. Since a decent heart rate monitor could easily run you $100, that can be factored against the price of the watch. At first I was pampering my Watch and wouldn’t have done worn it during a workout, but now the honeymoon’s over. The sport watch band is well suited for workouts and changing bands is so easy you can swap them for a daily workout in less than a minute. The Watch doesn’t track time in heart rate zones, but it does what I need and it’s probably sufficient for most people – if they are willing to measure workouts the Apple way. However, If you’re a dedicated runner or cyclist, you may want an exercise-specific app instead of the Workout app, or specialty device like a running watch.

The Activity app is Apple’s gamification dashboard for overall health. As described in the Outside article, Apple wants you to make healthy choices. It’s not enough to exercise – being sedentary is evil. By most accounts the hourly watch prompts to stand and hit your move goal are motivating. So, most would agree the Apple Watch does a solid job against those goals of: sit less, move more, and get some exercise.

However, overall health is a broader concern than simply exercise and movement. Nutrition (weight too) and sleep are missing from Apple’s tracking.

Apple has wisely left nutrition tracking to several already existing and excellent apps. Let’s use MyFitnessPal as an example. It’s a highly polished app that lets you either enter your meals or zap the UPC codes of items you eat to track your calorie intake. If you plan to lose some weight, you identify your goal and the app will track you to a daily calorie limit. If you set alerts to enter your meals in MyFitnessPal, you’ll get a reminder to do them on your Apple Watch, which is motivating. Calories show up in the Apple Watch companion app.

When you look at the integration of MyFitnessPal nutrition data with Apple’s exercise and activity tracking it gets interesting. Apple has an underlying health data interchange platform called HealthKit. HealthKit exchanges selected data between apps, including data from devices such as the Apple Watch, wifi scales, etc. and integrates it all in one place. It can also connect to Electronic Health Record systems such as Epic, meaning you can share what you want with your doctor.

HealthKit is Apple’s operating system for health information but it’s a work in progress.

Pulling all this data together isn’t as simple as the advertisement shows. I used to enter workouts into the MyFitnessPal app where they would then show a calorie offset against the day, e.g. 220 calories from exercise on an elliptical meant 220 more calories I could eat that day. I setup MyFitnessPal as a source in the Health app (which is the dashboard app for HealthKit). Calories transferred seamlessly, but not workouts. This is where you start banging your head on the table. When you set up MyFitnessPal as a source in HealthKit, you’ll see that it MyFitnessPal can read workout data from Health but not write to it.

That’s OK, you can enter a workout directly into the Health app. So, I entered a bike ride into the Health app as a data point. The workout showed up in Health, but would not transfer into MyFitnessPal (even though Health is set up as a source). It also did not show up in the Activity app against the 30 minute exercise goal. Crap.

So Health/HealthKit is something of an island at this point and you have to be a good data analyst and willing to tinker with the apps you use to get everything working for you. I wrote about HealthKit a year ago and many of the same issues are still there.

However, if you go all-in on the Apple way and use the Workout app, things will work smoothly. The time you spend on the treadmill will count against the exercise circle goal in Activity. The workout will also show up in the Health dashboard, and the calories burned transfer from Workout -> Health -> MyFitnessPal. It’s pretty damn smooth.

The Workout app is simplistic and inflexible – it lists only a certain set of exercises and a few ways of tracking. Apple, we need some options here! People are waiting for this. If you’re doing martial arts or swimming you’re not going to want to wear your Apple Watch or any watch for that matter. If you want to track that exercise you should be able to enter it into Health or another app. The data should then transfer smoothly throughout this data ecosystem just like it does with Workout.

That’s not happening today. Activity does not appear to talk to any of the leading running or biking apps out there. Some specialty apps, like Runkeeper, will serve as a source for Health(Kit) and exchange data. But if you want to use Activity to stay healthy and do it the Apple way, your 1 hour run entered into Runkeeper isn’t going to make it back to Activity – you’ll still have your 30 minutes to go. Strava and Runtastic appear to be in the same boat and neither runs natively on the Watch, meaning you have to drag your iPhone around with you, which is a no-go with me. This lack of integration of Activity with third-party apps is a huge gap in Apple’s health tracking.

The Watch is a mass-market health and fitness tracker. It’s likely that Apple would prefer to satisfy running and other exercise enthusiasts by allowing great third-party apps to fill that gap (like they are). In the Outside article integrating Activity with leading apps was mentioned as part of the OS 2 update, so hopefully it’ll happen soon.

The Health app itself, though charmless, has gotten interesting.

It’s a solid example of the integration at work. Take a look at these calorie charts (which are better in MyFitnessPal), and also charts for active and resting calories. There’s even a heart rate chart (by the way, when did I give Apple permission to monitor me all the time?) Weight also gets picked up from MyFitnessPal.

Sleep tracking is another area frequently identified as key for health. The Jawbone Ups were notable in this category as having excellent information display in the app and being pretty unintrusive on your wrist while you slept. I had two of them.

Sorry Jawbone, but now for free you can use Sleep++ on your Apple Watch. You simply wear your Watch when you sleep; you start the app when you go to bed and switch it off when you wake up. It shows the depth of your sleeping and sends the data over to Health. Overnight it uses about 10% of the charge on your watch and, critically, it’s a native watch app that runs independent of the phone – you can put your watch in airplane mode to save juice. Personally, I don’t want to wear the Watch when I sleep, but in my experience this app works smoothly.

The Apple Watch with the help of excellent partner apps and HealthKit covers all the bases and does a solid job of tying all your health tracking needs together. But, what’s next?

Activity, exercise, nutrition, and sleep are external drivers of health. How about blood pressure, cholesterol, and everything that goes on inside your body? This is where HealthKit is a slumbering giant. If you go into the Health app under “Health Data,” you’ll see all the current biometrics that HealthKit currently covers, and more are constantly being added. This image shows the categories available. HealthKit can be a living dashboard of your total health and help you tackle medical issues, going well beyond simple tracking.

I recently worked on an app that helps patients collect and manage crucial streams of health information for their anemia due to kidney disease or chemotherapy. The app integrates with HealthKit, using patient entered data as well as data captured from the phone. The combined data can be easily shared with your doctor. The app, Procrit’s Health View App, provides help beyond the prescribed drug to aid these patients – beyond the pill, as it’s known in the biz. It recently won the app category for PM360’s Trailblazer Awards (an industry trade magazine).

HealthKit eventually will be able to integrate app data, data from devices like a blood pressure cuffs, patient reported outcomes, and also environmental factors. Then you’ll be able to share this data with your doctor either via a patient portal, an electronic health record system, plain old email, or simply printing it out. At that point, you can work with your doctor to take a stronger role in your health, far beyond fitness. That’s the promise.

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