Ripped from the headlines: Connecting the dots for Mobile Health

Today and yesterday's Wall Street Journal had some fascinating and relevant M-health articles. 

·         Cisco Flips Consumer Strategy-This article goes into some depth and history about Cisco's failed direct to consumer strategy including the Flip Video Camera which they are shutting down after spending $590 Million to acquire.  They are reevaluating Linksys and their recently launched video conference product named UMI.  We payed a lot of attention to the UMI announcement since we examined the consumer video conferencing product closely in order to choose high quality low cost products for the telemedicine portion of our applications and found the UMI product to be ridiculously expensive given what was available for free from Skype and Logitech.  It was not surprising to see them cut the price from $25 per month to $10 per month and now to pull it entirely and "reposition" it as an enterprise product which means you will rarely ever see this system again.

·         Symbian Holds Fort for Nokia-The alleged news here is that Nokia is defensively announcing two new smart phones based upon the Symbian O/S that they are in the process of abandoning while Microsoft pays them to adopt Windows Phone 7.  This is laughable that if it wasn't so sad to see the world's leading phone company burrow into the ground.  Apart from the drama, the important point for Mobile Health is that the success of the iPhone and subsequent domination by the Android O/S has changed the global market narrowing the platform down to only viable two operating systems.  

·         HTC Phone Adds Video as makers go past apps-This article focuses on HTC and other Smart Phone manufacturers diversifying their proprietary offerings to go beyond app stores and markets.  HTC, Samsung, LG and Motorola were all demonstrating new services and systems at CTIA a few weeks ago.  The relevance and dot connection with Mobile Health is twofold.  The first is that the device companies are beginning to recognize the next phase of application integration and are seriously investing in proprietary and in house capabilities to develop applications and extend existing applications across phones-tablets-TVs and Set Top boxes.  This is an important recognition for Mobile Health to be sustainable in the home.  The other noteworthy nugget from the article was the projection from Gartner Group.  " The dominance of Google's  Android operating system, which market researcher Gartner Inc predicts will run on nearly half of the world's Smartphones by next year..."  So the upshot for Mobile Health is that the device makers are looking for differentiation and outside of Apple they are focusing on Android.  This is all good news for Mobile Health Developers such as LifeSignals.