HANDHELDS
Location, location, and finally...location.
 Yesterday I met with a group at McGraw-Hill who are continuing to develop their Harrisons on Hand. Essentially, it is a medical textbook optimized for the PDA. My input included discussion about providing such content via wi-fi in a hospital setting. I emphasized the point that the access point has to be convenient for the hard-working residents on call who shouldn't be forced to walk too far (or climb too many staircases) to seek some clinical advice from their wireless-enabled PDA.
Sometimes, a university IT dept. is solidly behind an implementation like this, but the hospital IT dept. has different ideas of where they would allow the access points to be located. Turf wars such as this, are a reality in medical informatics, and does have a chilling effect when it comes to piloting new projects. It's important to enlist the people who can be served by the new system to help make a pitch for setting it up in the most useful way. Makes me think of Doc and David's World of Ends.
(Photo: They're located in the Madison Square Garden complex. Just before I went in, I was able to access the Verizon hot spot serving this plaza.)
After that, I made way down to Bowling Green Park, near the Battery (southern tip of Manhattan), to check out the public hot spots in that area. Again, I picked up the Verizon service, and also hot spot sponsored by The Downtown Alliance and maintained by a new company, Emenity, formed by the founders of NYC Wireless. Their logon page provides a map of the local businesses. I metered the bandwidth at 1.2 Mbps, which is why these hot spots are worth keeping in mind when trekking through the city.
I'm just getting around to mentioning that two days ago this blog was kindly mentioned in the daily Web broadcast by KenRadio. Ken Rutkowski and Andy Abramson provide international tech news, and by going through their archives, I can judge that they are pretty good at evaluating trends and/or techology products. (They were hip to the Treo right from the start). We started conversing when I heard them mention that San Diego was the "wireless capital of the United States." As I began investigating this I came across an excellent article entitled "San DNAgo" (registration required for Web access) in the May 26 issue of Forbes magazine. It mentions that while San Diego is not the largest biotech center in the country, it does have a mix of venture capital, academia (not adverse to start-ups), biopharma, medical device and wireless handset manufacturers including Qualcomm.
10:12:08 AM 
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