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cmyk Bengaluru Monday 27 June 2011

DC
Vatican to launch Internet news portal next week.

Internet address group ICANN names Steve Crocker as chairman.

Intel gets antitrust approval for Nortel asset buy.

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Technomics
Gadget Fix

Google Health to shut down soon


Singapore, June 26: Google is giving up on its vision of helping people live healthier lives with online personal health records. When Google Health was introduced in 2008, Marissa Mayer, a Google executive, said it would be a large ongoing initiative that the company hoped would attract millions of regular users. But Google Health never really caught on. In a posting on the companys blog, Aaron Brown, senior product manager for Google Health, wrote that the goal was to translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to health care and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users. Yet, after three years, Mr Brown said, Google Health is not having the broad impact we had hoped it would. NYT

Mobile phone is the arena for next generation technologies


SANGEETHA CHENGAPPA
DC | BENGALURU

Laptop with a projector


DC CORRESPONDENT
BENGALURU

A dose of IT

Why did Google Health fail?


game. Like others, Google also has different investment priorities in other portfolios of their business such as Android OS and mobile phones and devices, etc. It made sense for them to exit out of a sector that requires time. Socially, the rise of social media is changing the way people manage information, communicate, exchange content and interact with their doctors and care givers. Google Health failed to capture this trend in their solutions. Technologically, Google failed to learn from the failures of others and replicated solutions when there were far more superior solutions and players in the field. I guess alignment with doctors and clinicians is the first step towards creating a technologically superior solution that can align with healthcare consumers. Secondly, there were hardly any vertical partnerships in healthcare that Google went out to create an ecosystem with. Lastly, Google did not integrate their other products such as Google Maps that could provide location aware services to the consumers on their health front. Consumers and competition too contributed to putting the nails in the coffin of Google Health. Google Health focused on one end of the healthcare value chain and did not believe in working in aligning the overall healthcare ecosystem. Moreover, consumers are moving towards mobilebased solutions that Google Health failed to capture as a trend. Lastly, their competitions have far better ideas as a health tech solution is a longterm game. With Google Health putting down their shutters on their shop, what are the implications? The spotlight now falls on Microsoft HealthVault. However, health is a very large opportunity that Google may not like to miss. It may come back with an acquisition sometime later.

KAPIL KHANDELWAL

oogle Health is not going to be there anymore. After its launch in May 2008, Google Health went through a chequered existence till Google Execs announced, last week, to withdraw the product by end of 2011. I will use the PESTC model to conduct the postmortem analysis on the death of Google Health Politically, 2007-08 was a time when concerns around reforming healthcare reforms were at its peak and one of the key agenda items in the US Presidential war. Such need to reform healthcare was politically echoed world over by many leaders. This meant more business for healthcare ICT to create solutions to address various issues like healthcare access, costs, quality, outcomes and so on. Politically, it made sense for tech heavy weights to put their might in launching healthcare solutions and in this political back drop that Google Health was launched. However since then not much impact for many tech major's who waged on healthcare. Economically, this was the time for world's worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Healthcare was seen as anti-recessionary. Tech major's boardrooms discussed de-risking and growth by social sectors such as healthcare, education and so on. Google's board and leadership could not have been thinking differently while giving thumbs up to invest in healthcare business. However many tech majors have since realised that healthcare requires longterm strategic vision and investments to stay in the

June 26: Imagine a scenario where you are cruising down MG Road and impulsively decide to stop at a fancy new restaurant for dinner. After parking your car, you whip out your smartphone and take a photograph of the restaurants faade and within seconds the menu of the restaurant is displayed on your phone screen along with other relevant details like visuals of the interiors of the restaurant, the kitchen, its smoking area and its childfriendly zones etc. Augmented reality, a technology that is popular in the West will soon be adopted in India, allowing people to make spot decisions on where to dine without spending hours trying to figure it out, says Suhas Gopinath, CEO of Global Incs. Hot, new, tech products will be launched in the areas of mobile and cloud computing to cater to the unmet needs of multiple industry verticals. For instance, technology will make it possible for parents to receive messages as soon as their children board the school bus, and will allow them to keep constant check on their kids academic progress, at the click of a button, noted Suhas. Global Incs which began as a pure play IT services company is now aggressively focusing on product development, as the company is finding it hard to retain its global customer base due to rising costs. The company is developing a low cost iPad clone an eBag that will replace the heavy school bag. Very soon, kids will go all the way to school and back home with a compact, lightweight eBag in

tow. Imagine another scenario where your newspaper will be delivered to you on your mobile phone or tablet device. Sujai Karampuri, CEO of award winning startup, Shloka Telecom says that this is a new reality that will happen sooner than later. Stating that the next big game changer that technology will usher in is video, he said Video-calling will become the standard in two to three years, changing the way we live, work and play. We will also be able to see who we are playing mobile games with, across locations. Flexible screens especially the cellphone screen will be expandable to the size of a regular newspaper and people will be able to read large format content on their mobile devices very soon, says Alok Bhardwaj, founder of Hidden Reflex that launched the first Indian browser called Epic. He said, with OLED technology, screens larger than tablet

screens can be folded up to the size of a cellphone screen. Watch out for new, flexible devices such as a wrist watch which will also identify your GPS position and also keep you updated on all your Facebook friends status messages said Alok. Another sweeping change that will come into our lives is the way we interact with our computing devices. Human Machine Interface a favourite topic of the movie industry will revolutionise the way we interact with machines. For instance, the input device for a computer has stopped evolving beyond the keyboard and the mouse. This is where Gesture computing with powerful hand, face and emotion recognition algorithms can make the keyboard and mouse redundant. This way interacting directly with the computer will become ubiquitous and will perhaps become available to even low-end cellphone users in the near future observed

Sanjay Shelvankar, founder CEO of ScaleneWorks People Solutions LLP. Some of the applications that will use gesture recognition are sign language recognition, patient assistive robotics and immersive gaming. More important, gesture recognition will make the remote control redundant, added Sanjay. E-commerce is now coming of age, thanks to a gamut of brands and categories to choose from, free shipping, fabulous discounts ranging from five to 60 per cent, cash-back guarantees if a customer is not satisfied with the product and the convenience of researching purchases online. Its time for e-commerce version 2.0, because people are warming up to shopping online and apprehensions about the security of online transactions have begun to melt away. Sales have gone up by 10 times since we launched our site three years ago, says Ramakrishna Kalluri, director of playgroundon-

line.com, a site primarily focused on selling sports and fitness brands. . One of the greatest contributions of technology today is to integrate a consumers online and offline experiences. Suresh Narasimha, CEO of Telibrahma tells us how: If a customer who is shopping for clothes online, wants to know how a particular dress looks on her, technology makes it possible for her to see herself in all the dresses she has shortlisted. An auto enthusiast, who is going through the fine print of a Ford Figo advertisement in the newspaper can fish out his mobile phone and take a picture of the ad. He will be able to see a detailed brochure of the car and book a test drive, all on his mobile device. Telibrahma has assisted 50 national and international brands in engaging with their customers with such services. Technology service providers will target mobile phone users with a variety of applications that will be delivered via the cloud on a pay-per-use model, making life easier for the average person, says V R Govindarajan, director Perfios Software Solutions. People will be able to do pretty much everything on their smartphones that they could previously accomplish with their desktop and laptop apps. Location based services will help people find points of interest like coffee shops, libraries, malls, while on the move; personal navigation services will help people find their way through various parts of a city with ease, and free personal finance software, will allow people to manage and get a 360 degree view of their personal finances said Govindarajan.

ujitsu has launched the Bay Projector for its Lifebook notebooks (S761 and P771) , converting the notebooks into a fully-equipped mobile office. One of the most convenient features of the projector is that it can be inserted into the notebooks modular bay and can be used in seconds, with the added advantage of not having to carry the cables around as well. As a business notebook user, an executive might know the scenario of arriving at an important meeting, ready to give a presentation, only to discover that the projector is broken, missing or is not compatible with the notebook that he is carrying. The Bay Projector solves that problem and converts the notebook into a fully-mobile office said Alok Sharma, Country Manager, Workplace systems, Fujitsu India. This 210 gm light weight projector works almost on every surface, consumes less power, is quieter and is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The screen can be projected onto the wall and the latest figures, videos and illustrations can be shown to colleagues and customers. When not in use, the Bay Projector can be easily removed and replaced with a modular second battery, a DVD Super Multi drive, or simply a weight saver. At the end of a long day for business travelers, the projector can also double-up as a hotel room personal cinema, where it can be used for playing back movies on a bigger TV screen, for more comfortable viewing.

LulzSec hackers end attacks


New York, June 26: The Lulz Security group of rogue hackers announced it was disbanding on Saturday with one last data dump, which included internal AOL Inc and AT&T documents. LulzSec, which gained wide recognition for breaching the websites of Sony Corp, the CIA and a British police unit among other targets, said in a statement that it had accomplished its mission to disrupt corporate and government bodies for entertainment. "Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind we hope inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love," the group said. Known for irreverence and a fondness for naval

Obama in technology partnership


New York, June 26: President Barack Obama on Friday launched an initiative to develop new US manufacturing jobs by teaming up government with companies and universities to invest more than $500 million in advanced technologies. Obama, who must ease high unemployment to be confident of winning a second White House term next year, visited Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to launch the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, aimed at fostering a new generation of US-made high-technology products. This partnership is about new cutting-edge ideas to create new jobs, spark new breakthroughs, reinvigorate American manufacturing today. Right now, he told an audience of around 200 in a robotics laboratory. Reuters

Hackers attack EA website


CYBER HACKERS have breached an Electronic Arts Inc website and may have taken user information such as birth dates, phone numbers and mailing addresses, the company said on its website.The video game publisher posted a set of questions and answers on its website addressing the attack, which hit a server for EAs Bioware studio in Edmonton, Canada.The hacked website was associated with the fantasy game Neverwinter Nights. The company said no credit card data or social security numbers were taken but other sensitive information may have been breached by hackers. Reuters

Kapil Khandelwal is a leading healthcare and ICT expert. Kapil@KapilKhandelwal.com

metaphors, the hacker group took to Twitter the microblogging site where it had more than 277,000 followers to release its statement. A link to the release also was posted on www.lulzsecurity.com but there was no way to independently contact the group to confirm the release. The abrupt dissolution came a few days after LulzSec threatened to escalate its cyberattacks and

steal classified information from governments, banks and other major establishments. LulzSec also had said it was teaming up with the Anonymous hacker activist group to cause more serious trouble. "... Our planned 50day cruise has expired," the hackers said in their statement, "and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind -- we hope -- inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval,

mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere." In what could be a sign that cyber police were making progress toward shutting down LulzSec, British police said on Tuesday they had arrested a 19-year-old man on suspicion that he was connected to the attacks on Sony, the CIA and a British police unit that fights organised crime. London police declined to say if the teenager was a member of LulzSec but the hacking group said on Twitter that he had hosted one of its chatrooms on his computer server. The arrest came after Spanish police earlier this month apprehended three men on suspicion they helped Anonymous. So far LulzSec's publi-

cized assaults have mostly resulted in temporary disruptions of some websites and the release of user credentials. The data the group released Saturday was a mixed bag. We were not able to access all of the files but those that were available included a list of routers devices that handle Internet traffic and their passwords, as well as account information for an Irish private investigation service. The AOL documents appeared to be elements of an internal technical manual. A file list on a download site indicated there also was some AT&T internal data in the dump, although the nature of that data was not immediately clear. AOL was not immediately available for comment, while an AT&T spokesman did not have immediate comment. Reuters

SECURED DNS

A stronger Internet security system is deployed


Singapore, June 26: A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore this week to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the proliferation of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet scam artists, spies and troublemakers. It wont matter where you are in the world or who you are in the world, youre going to be able to authenticate everyone and everything, said Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project. The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete. The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to tamper with the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center. The technology is viewed by many computer security specialists as a ray of hope amid the recent cascade of data thefts, attacks, disruptions and scandals, including break-ins at Citibank, Sony, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and elsewhere. It allows users to communicate via the Internet with high confidence that the identity of the person or organization they are communicating with is not being spoofed or forged. Internet engineers like Mr. Kaminsky want to counteract three major deficiencies in todays Internet. There is no mechanism for ensuring trust, the quality of software is uneven, and it is difficult to track down bad actors. One reason for these flaws is that from the 1960s through the 1980s the engineers who designed the networks underlying technology were concerned about reliable, rather than secure, communications. That is starting to change with the introduction of Secure DNS by governments and other organisations. The event in Singapore capped a process that began more than a year ago and is expected to be complete after 300 so-called top-level domains have been digitally signed, around the end of the year. Before the Singapore event, 70 countries had adopted the technology, and 14 more were added as part of the event. While large countries are generally doing the technical work to include their own domains in the system, the consortium of Internet security specialists is helping smaller countries and organizations with the process. The United States government was initially divided over the technology. The Department of Homeland Security included the .gov domain early in 2009, while the Department of Commerce initially resisted including the .us domain because some large Internet corporations opposed the deployment of the technology, which is incompatible with some older security protocols. Internet security specialists said the new security protocol would initially affect Web traffic and e-mail. Most users should be mostly protected by the end of the year, but the effectiveness for a user depends on the participation of the government, Internet providers and organizations and businesses visited online. Eventually the system is expected to have a broad effect on all kinds of communications, including voice calls that travel over the Internet, known as voice-over-Internet protocol. In the very long term it will be voiceover-I.P. that will benefit the most, said Bill Woodcock, research director at the Packet Clearing House, a group based in Berkeley, Calif., that is assisting Icann, the Internet governance organisation, in deploying Secure DNS. Secure DNS makes it possible to make phone calls over the Internet secure from eavesdropping and other kinds of snooping, he said. Security specialists are hopeful that the new Secure DNS system will enable a global authentication scheme that will be more impenetrable and less expensive than an earlier system of commercial digital certificates that proved vulnerable in a series of prominent compromises. NYT

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