At the end of the Health 2.0 Conference earlier this month, I sat down with the event’s co-founders Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya to discuss the big trends. I’d been impressed and excited by the innovation demonstrated at Health 2.0. It turns out much of it was driven by Big Data. Healthcare is a huge, … Read more

Today at the DC to VC: Health IT Startup Showcase, a collaboration between Morgenthaler Ventures and the Health 2.0 Conference, I saw firsthand how health IT startups are tackling big, real-world problems. Coming from a world where a photo-sharing mobile app gets bought for $1 Billion, it’s refreshing to see startups trying to solve important … Read more

I’m at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco – and it reminds me a lot of the Web 2.0 Conferences of 2006-07. The second coming of the Web, coined “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly and his company, was entering its peak around 2006. If I ever doubted that Web 2.0 was big business, I … Read more

With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of “Big Data” has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That’s predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I’ve … Read more

YouTube has come to define the era of online video, so let’s take a look at its most popular videos of all time. Our latest update has Justin Bieber still at number 1 with Baby, which was the first video to earn a half a billion views! Also of note is a music video by … Read more

A week ago Facebook got itself caught up in yet another privacy controversy, when old Wall posts from 2007-09 were automatically converted into Timeline posts. The confusion was that for some people, those old posts seemed private in nature. So it was thought that Facebook had mistakenly turned private messages into Timeline posts. Facebook responded … Read more

The adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by doctor practices and hospitals is one of the most exciting developments in health – and the iPad is playing a big part. Up till recently, the typical EMR system was a PC-based enterprise software suite deployed in a large, public hospital. But thanks mainly to the iPad, … Read more

Earlier this month, I finally purchased a DNA test at 23andMe, the personal genetics company based in Silicon Valley. When the test kit arrived, I duly spat into the plastic tube and posted it back. It isn’t cheap, US$299 plus postage, but the results promise to tell me about my ancestry, inherited traits, and any … Read more

In the fifth and final part of our series, Social Books, we explore how the “big six” book publishers use social media. So far in the series we’ve looked at the largest social network for book lovers (Goodreads), a new social network for book writers (Writer’s Bloq), how public libraries use social media, and whether … Read more

Like many of you, I’m connected to the Internet virtually every waking hour of my day – via computer, tablet and mobile phone. Yet I still regularly visit my local public library, in order to borrow books, CDs and DVDs. Which made me wonder: are these two worlds disconnected, or is the Social Web being … Read more

Continuing our Social Books series, today I’m looking at book highlights. The increasing popularity of e-readers, in particular the Kindle, has made it common practice to highlight passages and quotes within books. There have been various efforts to make those highlights social and today I’ll look at the two leading services. One is from Amazon … Read more

Today I reviewed my magazine subscriptions, partly to see which of Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle and digital magazine indie Zinio has the best offering currently. My check reaffirmed many positive things about digital magazines, but one thing still frustrates me: the user experience for subscriptions in both iTunes and Kindle. Apple and Amazon could learn … Read more