A new service where patients can consult doctors over webcams is starting up in Hawai’i. The full article discusses weaknesses and strengths.
Patients use the service by logging on to participating health plans’ Web sites. Doctors hold 10-minute appointments, which can be extended for a fee, and can file prescriptions and view patients’ medical histories through the system. American Well is working with HealthVault, Microsoft’s electronic medical records service, and ActiveHealth Management, a subsidiary of Aetna, which scans patients’ medical history for gaps in their previous care and alerts doctors during their American Well appointment.
The Hawaiian health plan’s 700,000 members pay $10 to use the service. The insurer also offers the service to uninsured patients for $45. Health plans pay American Well a license fee per member and…
One hopes of course that this will not detract from the Central Bank’s work on bringing inflation down to single digits and rebuilding trust in the banking system.
Sri Lanka will issue new rules covering financial transactions through mobile phones, Central Bank Governor Nivard Cabraal said, as the island’s fast growing celcos join banks to offer new payment methods.
“Given the increased usage of mobile phones for financial transactions, the Central Bank intends to issue new operating guidelines for mobile payments during 2009,” Cabraal said in an annual policy speech Friday.
He said the move was part of an overall effort to improve the confidence in electronic payments, which would also cover payment cards.
Full report.
Board of Investment has granted approval to a sixth mobile/ 5th fixed operator.
The Board of Investment of Sri Lanka granted investment approval to a new mobile (GSM) and fixed (SCDMA) telecommunications network provider. Mr. Dhammika Perera, Chairman / Director General signed the agreement on behalf of the BOI and formally presented the BOI Certificate of Registration to Mr. B.A.C. Abeywardena, Director of RTEC Mobile Lanka.
FDI, which has been successfully attracted by the BOI has played a major role in the development and modernization of Sri Lanka’s telecommunication.
RTEC Mobile Lanka (Private) Limited signed the agreement to set up and operate a mobile and fixed telecommunications network. The venture is an investment of US $ 100 million sponsored by Global Electroteks Limited, UK. The project will create 320…
In all networks, there is a perpetual debate about the growth of whatever flows across it (data, voice telephony, traffic. electricity) and what levels of investment are most appropriate for carrying the future load without deterioration of quality. This debate is going on now, about the Internet and the load likely to be placed on it by proliferating video, the so called exaflood. But then, profits are essential for investment. The quote below is about a data drought that could drive down profits and cause all kinds of bad things to happen.
Panic over, then? Not quite. Perversely, the real threat may come from a reduction in internet-traffic growth, says Dr Odlyzko. Too little internet traffic, he contends, could prove to be more dangerous to…
Well, the research is coming in on the use of mobiles while driving and it ain’t looking good. Hands-free does not make a difference it seems, it’s the seriousness of the conversation.
But does chatting to passengers have the same detrimental effect on driving? An earlier study found that it does not. That research, led by Frank Drews of the University of Utah, analysed the performance of young drivers using a vehicle simulator. Dr Drews found that when using a hands-free phone, a volunteer “drove” significantly worse than he did when just talking to someone playing the role of a passenger. Passengers, the researchers believed, might even help road safety by commenting on surrounding traffic.
The reported does not seem to have distinguished between idle chatter with people…
Unlike in Asia, the price of an individual SMS has increased by 100% to USD 0.20 in the US. This has happened at the same time as the mobile market consolidated from six suppliers to four. Naturally, there has been public-policy concern. In defense of the telecos, it must be noted that most people in the US do not pay on a per-message basis, but get a “bucket” of services including a large number of SMS for a fixed price, so the per-message price is really not relevant to most people.
A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted…
Of the 4,283 bribery payments documented by the investigators, 2,505 (more than half) were made in relation to telecom contracts. Of the total of USD 1,400.7 million disbursed, USD 813.9 million (more than half) were for telecom. However, the complaint documents only three specific cases of large bribes paid in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Nigeria, all to government officials or politicians (including functionaries in government owned telecos). These three instances account for only slightly over USD 18 million, less than 3% of the total spent on telecom. This suggests rich pickings await the investigator who starts work on the court documents.
In 2002, Siemens COM paid approximately $140,000 in bribes in connection with a tender worth approximately $35 million for the supply of equipment and services related…
There are still some who talk about the value of government ownership of telecom operators. In their talk of national interest and local control, rarely is mentioned the word corruption.
The recent case in which Siemens pleaded guilty to massive “accounting violations” and paid large fines should be of interest to all who care about transparency. More than the fines, the court record is of great significance. Investigators and the law firm for Siemens amassed massive amounts of data, starting from the five terabytes of information seized from Siemens offices at the start. They have 100 million documents from 1700 interviews conducted in 34 countries. The lawyers and forensic auditors had more than 1.5 million billable hours. This is the treasure trove that corruption hunters…
Undersea cable operators have a nasty habit of laying cables close to each other. When they get cut, they tend to go in sets. The first question I have is why Maldives would lose 100% of traffic when it is connected by two undersea cables, one to Colombo and the other to India. That’s serious redundancy, especially for a tiny country of 300,000+ people. I can understand the traffic on Reliance’s Flag system going down because it was Atlantic focused. But most of Sri Lanka’s Internet traffic runs west via the Pacific. The very fact that I am posting this is evidence that Sri Lanka’s connectivity to the US is unaffected.
So it is possible that Dhiraagu was unaffected. Can readers from the Maldives shed…
Like no one asks who invented the mobile, few ask who invented the mundane components of the computer that allow us to do what we do routinely. The mouse for one (try using a modern computer without one!). Doug Engelbart, a man I am proud to have been in the same room with, was the inventor of the mouse. Forty years of his vision was celebrated earlier this month at Stanford.
The mouse was merely a byproduct of Engelbart’s larger vision, said his daughter, Christina Engelbart, executive director of the Doug Engelbart Institute. “That was what the public recognizes as a great innovation that’s really had a huge impact on everyone. But truly his greatest innovation of all was the vision and the strategic organizing principles…
The trend to mobile continues.
Mobile phones have been a key driver of growth, due to subscriber growth in developing countries and the recent emergence of low-cost international mobile calling plans. In 2007, nearly one-third of international calls were placed from mobile phones, and 45 percent of international calls were terminated on mobiles. Current trends suggest that by 2009, more international calls will be made to mobile phones than to fixed lines.
More detail here.
Here is an update on the search on how the Mumbai attackers coordinated their murderous activities:
The police official, Javed Shamim, said both men were in Calcutta in October when Mr. Rehman used a dead relative’s photo identification to buy the SIM cards. Mr. Rehman then activated them and either gave or sold them to Mr. Ahmed, Mr. Shamim said. He emphasized that no definitive links to the attacks in Mumbai had been established by the police.
Rakesh Maria, a joint commissioner with the Mumbai police, said Friday that the police had recovered seven cellphones, in addition to three Global Positioning System handsets and one satellite phone, all of which they believed the terrorists had used.
The police have said that 10 terrorists carried out the attacks on luxury…
It is always informative to engage in a retrospective assessment of the use of technology in a terrorist atrocity and see what we can do to make their activities more difficult (and prevent knee jerk reactions that only make the lives of law-abiding people more difficult). The first reports on the use of mobiles by suicide attackers of Mumbai are coming out:
Mr. Muzammil, who is the right-hand man to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvhi, the operational commander of the group, talked by satellite phone to the attackers from Pakistan when the gunmen were in the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the Western official said.
The attackers also used the cellphones of people they killed to call back to Mr. Muzammil somewhere in Pakistan, the official said.
One use is clear: they killed…
The Economist, which has been quite skeptical about mobile advertising, has a story which reports takeoff has occurred. What I find interesting is the analysis of which roadblocks have been removed. Here, the relevance of the broadband quality of service experience work we have been doing is noteworthy. Assuming that mobile operators want ad revenues (not a hard assumption), this shows that it is in their interest to improve the quality of service experience from the dismal levels that exist today.
Faster networks and lower rates also help. Having to wait for an advert to download, while being charged for the privilege, was unlikely to inspire warm feelings about the product being advertised. But with download speeds increasing and flat-rate “all you can eat” data plans, mobile services…
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