Johnson introduces AtTask, the company, and provides details of the new Enterprise version of @task. AtTask also launched Project Daily, a blog with the best thoughts coming out of the project management industry.

Tags: AtTask, Scott Johnson, @task, Web 2.0, Apple, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota

More photos available at Flickr

This is an Intel podcast.

Related Stories: IntelDigitalHealth

Transcript:

Host: Michael Johnson – PodTech
Guest: Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Guest: Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
It’s one of the first times I’ve seen an information technology be put into the environment and the nurses are smiling about it and they’re saying, “This is helping me do my job”.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
This is Michael Johnson. In San Francisco, Intel along with Motion Computing and the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, announced the launch of the Motion C5, a lightweight tablet computer designed specifically for use in hospital, for nurse patient care. It features a camera, barcode scanner, interoperability with medical devices like blood pressure monitors and EKG machines, Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless connectivity and it replaces what’s sometimes referred to as the COW (computer on wheels) basically a laptop on a cart. After the initial announcement by Intel’s Paul Otellini, I spoke with Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. Motion Computing designs computers for health care use and I asked Eckert, how the C5 project began?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
We first talked with Intel at IDF for about a year-and-a-half ago and heard the initial idea. I think they might have had the wooden model at that point probably not much else, but a vision to actually make this a reality and we engaged very quickly as health care has been Motion’s primary market from the outset. Here is an opportunity to take a market we were already serving and try to do something very different and unique with Intel and their breath of vision and willingness to start from scratch with end user input was a terrific way to get started in this industry and we were interested in engaging with them. So it was a pretty short conversation about how quickly we would start working with Intel.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
What is it about this particular form that has been working for people that are working with it?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
The slate form factor is intuitive for the end user because it feels like a clipboard, a piece for paper that they would have carried, maybe a scratch pad, and navigating the computer with a pen, also feels very natural. So, what we’re trying to do is make a computer that mimics the way that the end user — inclination in health care environment for instance — it mimics the way they actually work and so they can almost forget the fact that they’re using a piece of technology because its just like they’re using pen and paper. That’s the market we’re going after and if the software works really well with the hardware device, that’s the type of experience they have and they see enormous increases in productivity because they’ve replaced pen and paper with a computer for the very first time in most of our applications.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now, I know that this sort of looks like I think some of the model of where computing is going in general, not just for health care. Where people are working with thin clients not much resident on the device itself but it’s sort of in the cloud, in the background. Tell me a little bit about what some of the challenges would be for security with this particular device because I know it operates on XP and also on Vista as well, the two platforms, but then tell me a little bit about security concerns.

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
For clarity and whether it’s implemented in a thin client or a thick client it’s often at the end customer’s request. They can do it either way and we have examples of both. What we focused on from a security standpoint is authentication, having multiple levels of authentication. So, finger print log on or RFID badge log on and having that authentication tied to a TPM module. So, you can have inscription within the device and then we also have a technology called Computrace that is often known as Low Jack for laptops that allows you to track if the device actually leaves the premises, you can scramble the hard disk.

So, there are a bunch of different safeguards around capturing the data on the device and making sure that the device doesn’t carry the data outside of the building. Then how you implement security for the data in the cloud or in the backend becomes the feature of how that software or that backend architecture is implemented.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now where do you see this going in as far as deployment within the next few years, I know the question was asked earlier about why has all this sort of converged now and where do you see it in five years?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Part of the reason, it’s converged now; if you think back in the last five years, we’ve now got the ability to do thin and light mobile computing platforms. We’ve got an operating system from Microsoft that enables tablets, we’ve got high performance wireless that even a few years ago 80211 was just getting started and we’ve got a push from Intel into the health care industry to embrace the software vendors that are making clinical information systems.

So, there is a number of different technology factors that point to why now, for this class of product in this particular market, the health care market. If I look forward over the next five years, we’re just getting started on getting these devices into the hands of clinicians and health care. We now have the right device, we’ve just now got the software that works with this device, so now it’s a matter of taking examples like UCSF Medical Center where we are right now and doing similar sorts of deployments in a number of different health care institutions across the US. Today, as it stands, we have 40 customers lined up to do trials and usability studies just like what we’ve seen at UCSF and that’s just the beginning of how big the opportunity could be.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Are any of those trials happening in other places other than the United States?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Yes, there are trials in the UK, there are trials in Singapore. We have some trials in Canada and over time I would expect many, many more. Our focus is US, Canada, all major European markets, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. So, all those markets are areas where the Motion C5 product will be launched effectively now and we’ll be shipping in a couple of months into 25 different countries.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. I also spoke with UCSF’s Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Michael Blum, about the development of the C5 from a medical practitioner and administrator’s point of view.

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
We’d worked with motion on some of their previous products and got together with a group of clinicians in an advisory capacity to really review the functionality and the features that they were talking about including and really work together to say how would this work in a clinical environment? Where were they on the mark? Where were they missing the mark? And what they really needed to do to introduce the concept of infection control and how important that is in the environment today. And really that’s some of their early beliefs about infection control. For example, the original thought was that the thing had to be — the device actually, had to be completely submersible to be disinfective which turns out not to be true. It actually needs to be wipable and that led to a lot of further modifications in the design. Things such as reducing any of the cracks and crevices came out of those sessions.

We also worked a lot with them around the importance of the software vendors, the applications really being customized to take advantage of the mobility and a lot of the team members brought their particular software providers, the GEs, the McKessons, the Cerners and the Siemens to really work with Motion and really developing their application specifically for it and that took the better part of the year, year-and-a-half until we ended up but today where the launch happened.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
It’s a pretty massive structure in which to deploy this, I mean, this is a world known campus here. Many people come here from all over the world to study medicine and also to get treated as well. What were the challenges, some of the main challenges you had in deploying such a device in such a large infrastructure as UCSF?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
So one of our goals in designing the device was actually to make it so that it was as lightweight as possible from the infrastructure’s perspective, from the organization’s perspective that you didn’t have to go back and do a major change. So, it runs on common wireless infrastructure which we have deployed here and it runs on typical Windows platform.

So there is not a tremendous amount of re-work and learning. Having said that, it is a culture change and a technology change to move from a typical Notebook computer that people know how to work and so on, to bring them to using hand writing recognition, to using a bio metric sign on requires some training of the nurses and we’ve gone through that process and found that the nurses readily adopted this technology because it’s easier to use as opposed to when you try to do that kind of culture change and something that’s a challenge and you train and you train, and you train.

This is a pretty quick training cycle and the nurses adopted pretty well. Some of the other challenges are building the images, which way the software’s loaded onto the tablet so that you don’t have to touch each tablet individually, it requires a little bit of a specific build for the tablet, so we went through that hurdle. It was not nearly as bad as everyone had feared and it adopted a pretty standard image pretty well and the connectivity with the wireless has turned out to be excellent as well. The next step will be how are we going to plan to acquire and deploy them throughout the facility as we get some more experience up here.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
I know that we’ve been reading a lot of newspapers writing about security concerns with their laptops being stolen from the VA, the FBI and then you know hundreds of thousands of documents and records being on the individual laptop. What’s the situation with the motion C5 as far as it being for I guess to develop thick client or thin client? How much information is resident on the C5 as you walk around with it?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
So, that’s an excellent point and tremendous concern of ours is the protection of the patient information and the patient privacy and it’s a focus of everything we do. The way it’s been designed is that no patient information is resident on the device itself. The entire client application and all the other applications are running off backend servers so that if this device was taken out of the environment, or broken, none of the information would be lost or would be taken out of the environment. In those situations, where you do have thefts of the devices, if there is patient information there, it’s a huge problem and as you point out the VA and several of the Universities of California have run into issues, so we’ve designed it and that was another part of the measure feedback from the clinician design team was that no information should need to be resident on the device in the environment.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So, we’re not going to see a C5 on eBay any time soon?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
Well, I’m sure you will, someone will steal one of these as soon as they can. As it was pointed out earlier today, a couple of things were built into it, the RFID locationability so we can see where they’re tracking through the environment. There is also platform features that are built in. So, should it be taken out of the environment? It can become disabled. There is essentially low jack for computers that you can’t employ things like that but people are going to steal anything that they can. Our goal was to make sure that if they do steal it, they don’t get any patient information with it.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So, what’s the most exciting thing about this implementation for you?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
I think it’s really the nursing satisfaction, the nursing adoption and the fact that we’re actually making it easier for the nurses to care for the patients. It’s one of the first times I’ve seen an information technology either a software application or a device, we put in the environment and the nurses are smiling about it and they’re saying, “This is helping me, do my job.” That’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was Dr. Michael Blum, Chief Medical Information Officer for The University of California at San Francisco. We also heard from Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. They spoke at the launch of the Motion C5 Tablet Computer for nurse patient care developed with Intel and UCSF. In San Francisco, this is Michael Johnson.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Intel, Motion Computing, tablet, IntelDigitalHealth

Reporter’s Notes: This is such a big issue the FCC is getting involved. Rich Tehrani’s VOIP blog covers the specifics. Vonage users in San Francisco now have E911 service, the importance of which was underlined by a recent case of a Bay Area man who died after calling 911 from a VOIP phone and was unable to be located in time for the crucial medical attention he needed.

- Michael Johnson

Click here for transcript.

Tags: VoIP, Scott Navratil, Dash911, E911, ISPCON 2006

More images from Interop 2006
(more…)

Tags: Interop

See also:
TiEcon.org

Tags: iFilm, Blair Harrison, Scott Ehrlich, Red Tie, TiEcon, MTV

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, March 22, 2006 (PodTech News) — At the opening of the VentureOne Summit, the panel discussion covered new potential market opportunities.

Panelists included Tim Draper, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Brad Feld, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital, and Scott Bonham, Managing Director, Granite Global Ventures.

“A big idea and a 100x person, that makes a company . The 100x people are so hard to find and they make all the difference in the world in any industry and anything in life. …The 100x person can happen anywhere, but you need density around that person to be successful…”

Panelist Bill Gross, CEO, Chairman & Founder of IdeaLab.

Here’s part three of the panel discussion at Venture One.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, March 22, 2006 (PodTech News) — In a panel discussion on the opening day of the VentureOne Summit, panelists Scott Bonham, Managing Director, Granite Global Ventures, Brad Feld, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital, and Bill Gross, CEO, Chairman & Founder of IdeaLab, agreed that renewable energy and social computing are among the most promising of possibilities for venture capital.

Tim Draper, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also on the panel pointed out that, “…combining media with social networking, with the desire for people to lean back and watch movies… there’s something going on there and it going to be very exciting…”

Here’s part four of the panel discussion

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, March 22, 2006 (PodTech News) — In a panel discussion on the opening day of the VentureOne Summit, panelists Tim Draper, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Brad Feld, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital, and Bill Gross, CEO, Chairman & Founder of IdeaLab, drilled down into the globalization factors involved in venture capital.

Scott Bonham, Managing Director, Granite Global Ventures, who also was part of the panel said, “…Twenty years ago, they would have considered the US as a big enough market, but today it really is a global market. You have to think about building your company, building your expertise… everything about buildingthe company now, it’s more global and so the whole job of venture capital has a global orientation towards it…”

Here’s part two of the panel discussion

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, March 22, 2006 (PodTech News) — Some of the VC industry’s best and brightest gathered at the VentureOne Summit, which began in San Francisco this week. The gathering opened with a spirited discussion of what makes a great prospect, and how — given government regulations, global competition for innovative developers, and shifting opportunities — a new company can survive. The panelists included Tim Draper, Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Brad Feld, Managing Director of Mobius Venture Capital, and Scott Bonham, Managing Director of Granite Global Ventures.

“The amount of minutes we spend connected has just grown so dramatically,” said panelist Bill Gross, the CEO, Chairman and Founder of IdeaLab. “That leads to really powerful opportunities for entrepreneurs to take advantage of that… for Internet technologies and information companies. And then, just not for Internet companies, the ‘world is flat’ phenomenon that’s happened in the last ten years because of that connectedness, means you can reach global markets so much more powerfully than you could before…”

Here’s part one of the panel discussion at VentureOne.

Over the next week I will be putting together a best of PodTech 2005. If you’ve been a listener of PodTech please submit the PodTech podcasts that you think are deserving of the top PodTech podcasts of 2005. Additionally, I’ll be giving away $500 to one of the listeners who submits their favorite PodTech podcasts.

Submit your favorite PodTech podcasts to John at PodTech dot Net

Happy New Year and thanks for downloading and listening.

Some 2005 guests have included:

IBM executives

Roche Pharma

Juniper Networks

Foresight Nanotech Institute

Microsoft RSS Product Team

Heidi Roizen Mobius Venture Capital

August Capital, David Hornik

TechCrunch

Web 2.0 Workgroup

Gabe Rivera - Founder Memeorandum

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Barracuda Networks

Nextpage

Yahoo!

Telecosm

Steve Forbes, Forbes Inc.

Steve Gilmor, Gilmor Gang

Jerremy Pepper– PR Blogger

Cathy Brooks, Porter Novelli

Chris Shipley, Guidewire Group, Demo

Mike Sigal, Guidwire Group

Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

Mark Radcliff, DLA Piper

Dave Hodson, Microsoft

John McDowell, Loyalty Lab

Rob Chandra, Bessemer Venture Partners

Scott Sandel, New Enterprise Associates

McDonalds, Steve Wilson

Robert Scoble, Microsoft

Linden Lab

John Markoff, NY Times

Kevin Manney, USA Today

Ryan McIntyre, Mobius Venture Capital

Plaxo, Founders Tod and Cam

Ross Mayfield, SocialText

Sandy Berger, National Security Advisor under Bill Clinton

BlogOn Conference

DemoFall Conference

Vortex Conference

Optimal Media Group, Kristen Nobles

IBD - Under the Radar Event

SuperNova Conference

Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Andreas Stavropolis

Alwayon Innovation Summit

George Gilder, Gilder Publishing

Paul Saffo,

Denise Howell, Legal Blogger “ Bag and Baggage” & (get name of her firm)

Mark Cuban, Owner Dallas Mavericks, Founder of HDNET (previously founder of Broadcast.com) - the most popular podcast on PodTech

Sharon Weinbar, Bank of America Venture Capital

Garage Technology Ventures, Bill Reichart

Burgarht Tenderich, BitePR

Blinx, Founder CTO Suranga Chandratillake

VideoEgg, Kevin Sladek

vSpring Venture Capital, Paul Alstrom

Thomson’s Private Equity Week, Daniel Primack

Twelve Horses, David LaPlante

Jennifer Jones Consulting ,Jennifer Jones

ActiveWords, Buzz Buggerman

BlogHer

Anina.net

Six Apart, Mena Trott, Andrew Anker

Halley Suit, Blogger

Bloggett Communications, Rene Bloggett

Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe, Wired Magazine

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine

Scott Berkun, Author Art of Project Management

JD Lasica, Author DarkNets, Founder OurMedia.org

Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, PodShow

Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Inventor

Bloglines Founder, Mark Fletcher

Feedster cofounder, Mark Johnson

Morganthaler Venture Capital, Ken Gullicksen

IMEEM, Dalton Caldwell

Eric Rice, cofounder Audioblog, EricRice Show, Everday Films

Jeff Clavier, Softech VC

Jeremy Allaire, Founder Brightcove

Keith Benjamin, Leventhal Venture Partners

Wilson Sonsin – Bob O’Connor

Shel Israel ,Author Naked Conversations, PR & Marketing Professional

Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path

John Patrick, Founder Attitude LLC.; Author of Net Attitudes. Retired IBM VP of Technology

Suz Charman, DarkBlogs, Corante

Theresia Ranzetta, Accel Partners

David Hills, CEO Looksmart

Charlene Li, Forester Research

Julia Komarachik, Glennbrook Networks

Shasta Ventures, Tod Francis

Knownow, CTO

Bill Flitter, Pheedo

Blogtronix, Vassil M

USA Today, Kevin Maney

Virginia Hospital, Mark Rein

New York Legal Services, John Grenier

Mirage Las Vegas CTO - Laura Fucci

Podvertiser,

Pluck Founders

Jason Lopez - PodTech News

Jeff Karnes - Yahoo

Amr Awadallah - Yahoo and Stanford PhD candidate

Kevin Efrusy from Accel Partners

Rich Karlgaard - Forbes

Scott Hirsch, Founder of Management Innovation Group

Venture Capitalist, Entrepreneur, and CEO Veteran - Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad

Dan’l Lewin Microsoft Exec

Network Appliance

Yahoo’s Geoff Ralston

Joe Hayashi, Yahoo Podcasting

Scott Gatz, Yahoo Personalization and RSS

At Gnomedex I had a chance to sit down with a Founders of Bloglines and Feedster to chat about what their up to and where their going.

Guests: Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines (now part of Ask Jeeves); Scott Johnson, Founder of Feedster

{Podcast sponsored by Barracuda Networks - Best Email Spam and Spyware Appliance and No per user license fee}

Click here for the entire transcipt of my conversation with Mark Fletcher and Scott Johnson

sound bites:
Mark Fletcher (MF): Yeah, our view was that we wanted to be the universal inbox, so you should be able to subscribe to any sort of content and be notified when anything is updated or new. …first challenge was coming up with a tool that lets you follow 100 or 200 feeds, and that’s what a basic aggregator is. The next challenge is to be able to expand that to 1000 or 2000 feeds, and there are lots of interesting challenges to that. The great thing is, you know, I’m a computer science guy, and the real interesting thing is that this is not a solved problem. This is a completely new problem in computer science that we didn’t have to deal with ten years ago, fifteen years ago, whatever. So to be able to work on a problem where we don’t have all of the answers is incredibly exciting.

Big prediction next five years:
MF: Things are going to get huge. It’s very easy, certainly, with the early crowd here. We’re in the first inning of a nine inning game for all of this. Everybody that uses the internet is going to be exposed to RSS in aggregation over the next five or ten years and it is going to become an important part of their life. They may not know it yet, but it will happen.
SJ: Your mom will actually care what RSS is.

Mark Fletcher Scott Johnson Next Generation Web Bloglines Podcast Feedster Podcast Gnomedex Gnomedex Podcast Feedster BloglinesTechnology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier Business Podcasts podcast shows PodTech.net InfoTalk