Some good reasons why your Mom should have an iPhone 4S, monitoring health, safety

Two weeks ago, my brother, sister and I decided it was time to get Mom to upgrade to an iPhone 4S.  Part of what triggered it was my mother-in-law falling in the bathroom and dislocating her shoulder on Dec 23, and on Xmas day my sister not being able to get a hold of my mom all morning.  Mom was OK, but had taken a medication that made her drowsy and she took a nap in the backyard far away from the phone, and her hearing isn't the best.  Finding my mom could be easy with the IOS Find Friends app if she was set up.

Find the party. Find your family. Or find a place to meet up after work. And if you lose your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac, iCloud can help you find it, too.

My mom is in her 70s and living in the home alone.  My brother and I live 2 hr plane flight away, and my sister is only 10 miles away.  The nice thing is her living in the same home for 45 years and being born in Alameda, CA there are lots of friends and family in the area to ask for help, but we needed a way to know if mom was in trouble.  So, let's upgrade mom to an iPhone 4S and see if it would work.

Previously my mom had a clamshell simple phone that she would carry around, but leave off most of the time.  Getting her to change habits and get a more complicated device is an obstacle that is typical.  The safety and monitoring seemed worth the effort.

I worked at Apple and my sister, so getting my mom set up with an iPhone is not an issue.  Even though my Mom has not had a problem using her iPhone having kids who worked at companies like HP, Apple, Oracle, Intuit, and Microsoft (not all at the same time) gives her tech support that is hard to match.

Having FaceTime to enable us to see how mom is doing at home is great for the grand kids and for us to check on Mom's health and safety.  Seeing a person's face in a live video feed besides being social is a great indicator of health.  Think about the term "you don't look so good."  It is pretty hard to do when talking on the phone. With FaceTime you can see.  Luckily my sister sees my mom a couple of times a week and I see my mom at least once a month on my frequent trips to the bay area.

After two weeks, my mom is using her iPhone to check her e-mail, surf the web, and text her family.  Mom is using text so much, my sister upgraded her text messages to 1,000/month.  Find Friends apps has worked great.  We can check out here mom is and mom can check on us.

Typically, some one in their 70s is going to want a simple to use, low cost phone.  Paying the extra money for an iPhone 4S would block most purchases.  But, when you think of monitoring the health and safety of your parents, seems like it is worth the cost.

Fujitsu launches big data services in the cloud

Next week I am moderating a panel discussion on "Opportunities in Big Data" at a small Fujitsu conference in SJ.  And Fujitsu just announced data services in the cloud.

Fujitsu Launches Cloud Services as a Platform for Big Data

Tokyo, January 16, 2012 — Fujitsu today announced the launch of Data Utilization Platform Services, which use cloud services as a platform leveraging big data⁽¹⁾.

This is a cloud service for gathering, compiling, and integrating massive quantities of sensing data; combining it with knowledge; processing it using realtime processing or batch processing; and using it for such purposes as making future projections. It covers four specific services offerings: Data Management & Integration Services, Communications Control Services, Data Collection and Detection Services, and Data Analysis Services.

Fujitsu is promoting Convergence Services that leverage big data to help resolve business and global issues, generate new sources of value, and bring about a more prosperous society. Data Utilization Platform Services will act as the core of these services.

...

One of the personas Fujitsu has is the "data curator"

I'll look for more information on this topic while I am at the conference.

Amazon Web Services abstraction of SSD in the cloud

GigaOm's Derek Harris has a phttp://gigaom.com/cloud/amazons-dynamodb-shows-hardware-as-mean-to-an-end/ost on AWS new Dynamo service.

Amazon’s DynamoDB shows hardware as means to an end

By Derrick Harris Jan. 18, 2012, 11:55am PT No Comments

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Somewhat lost in the greater story of Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB NoSQL database is that the new service runs atop a solid-state storage system. However, by abstracting those SSDs underneath a higher-level application service, AWS has once again demonstrated its cloud wisdom by illustrating how new hardware presents greater opportunities than Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone.

AWS doing solid-state drives is a big deal in the world of cloud computing, where users have been wondering for years when the company might start offering SSDs as a service. Other cloud providers already offer bare SSDs as a service, and more certainly are thinking about it with the advent of companies such as SolidFire that are specifically targeting cloud providers with solid-state arrays. The idea is that they’ll be necessary to run I/O-intensive applications such as databases and ERP, which many large organizations consider mission-critical but which many cloud providers aren’t yet equipped to handle.

I speculated on the arrival of SSD to AWS 2 years ago.

When will solid state memory server be an option in AWS instances?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2010 AT 12:47AM

modifyremoveorganizepost follow up

I was having another stimulating conversation in silicon valley last night, and one of the ideas that made sense is for solid state memory servers to be part of the cloud computing option.  It’s just a matter of time.  Amazon has their current instance offerings with a division of performance and memory.

It took longer than I thought, but SSD has arrived to the AWS and I am sure it will be a standard expectation for high data IO services.

Wikipedia going dark forces people to change, like look at alternatives

GigaOm has a post on Wikipedia going dark for 24 hrs to protest anti-piracy bills.

Has Wikipedia broken faith with users by going dark?

By Mathew Ingram Jan. 18, 2012, 9:34am PT 9 Comments

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Among the websites and services that went dark on Wednesday to protest the anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress, one of the more controversial is Wikipedia. A number of critics — including some regular contributors to the “open source” encyclopedia — say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, since it is supposed to represent a neutral point of view. But if anything, it could be argued that the internal process that led to that decision is actually a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions.

Going dark for 24 hrs reminds me of when the green energy efforts asks people to go dark, no electricity for an hour, forcing people to look for alternatives that don't use energy.  If you are researching a topic like I was 5 minutes ago, and you hit a dark wikipedia page.

How many people will choose to contact their representatives vs. pick another source for information?

The blackout has woken up critics.

Among those criticizing the encyclopedia for its day-long blackout (which the Wall Street Journal said will affect more than 10 million users) was tech blogger Paul Carr, writing for the new site PandoDaily. In his post, Carr argued that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was right when he said blacking out a global business to protest a U.S. law is “foolish,” and that Wikipedia was making a grave mistake by taking such a position, especially since the site just spent months trying to raise money from users to pay its bills:

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse. It’s idiotic, it’s selfish and it sets a horrible, horrible precedent.

no cost notification on cell networks, missed calls as a messaging bus

I remember being in college where some people would call someone like their parents with a collect call.  "will you accept a collect call from Dave Ohara. My parents respond no." and, know I want them to call me.  No cost to me, and my parents foot the bill.  I never did this, but it is the idea behind India's use of missed calls on cell networks as a messaging bus.

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher discusses the idea.

India’s “missed call” mobile ecosystem

By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 13, 2011, 6:00am PT 55 Comments

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Imagine you want to use your cell phone to, say, order take-out food or chat with a friend, but you don’t want to pay for making the call, or the text message. The answer to that ultra-low-cost question is India’s fascinating growth of the “missed call” ecosystem, where callers who aren’t willing to spend on, well, really anything, use the “ring once, hang up” to signal to commerce companies and friends alike on the receiving end that they want to communicate with them.

It’s essentially the poor man’s text message: a free way to nudge another person or company, but which comes in just one flavor. Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3, which is rock bottom low for even a developing market.

How big is this?  In India missed calls could be used as a messaging bus from half the users.

While the missed call system is increasingly fodder for entrepreneurs, the phenomenon has been a slight problem for the cell phones companies in India, as the free service seems to make up a significant portion of cellular traffic. According to a study from the Learning Initiatives on Reforms for Network Economies (Lirne) a couple of years ago, over half of Indian cellular subscribers made missed calls to convey a message.

Katie follows up today with a post on the use of missed calls for controlling remote irrigation water pumps.

This week Pluggd.in, an Indian site focused on Indian entrepreneurs and startups, profiled a startup called RealTech Systems which has developed an irrigation control system for farmers that uses cell phone networks and missed calls. Essentially a farmer installs the company’s Real Mobile Starter Control product at an irrigation pump, and the device uses a SIM card and a missed call to turn the pump on and off remotely.

The problem, as Pluggd.in puts it, is that many farmers have to walk many miles to get to the pumps for their farms, but once they reach the pump sometimes the power to run the irrigation system isn’t available — unreliable power is one of the biggest infrastructure problems throughout much of India. The farmers can use the product to check to see if power in the area is turned on, and then run the irrigation accordingly — from miles away.