If this goes on Kickstarter…
[Link]
Tag: Innovation
-
Takeaways from the #health2india 2014 conference
Attended the Health 2.0 conference in Bangalore over 7 & 8 February that had some very thought provoking sessions on the way technology is shaping the way forward for the healthcare industry. Also did a live coverage of the event on twitter (ab_aditya) in form of public notes. Here’s a summary:
- The industry is focusing on preventive care driven by advances in technology, particularly cloud, mobile devices, sensors & genomics
- A lot of useful technology already exists and the industry needs to integrate these to create meaningful solutions through collaboration among the various stakeholders
- Challenges include reaching out to the masses untouched by healthcare, providing leave scale quality service with empathy & improving the efficiency of the ecosystem
- Regulators & governments have a very important role to play at the current inflection point in removing obstacles to innovation
- Startups in the West are focusing primarily on consumers, while most in India are targeting healthcare professionals
-
Apple the Black Swan
Simply explained:
Apple’s string of success is effectively impossible. Yet it happened. They are a black swan.
Look at Taleb’s criteria:
- It is an outlier — check
- It carries an extreme impact — check
- It is explained after the fact — in the case of Apple, the explanation is Steve Jobs. He was a genius, and now he is gone
And so, AAPL continues its downward descent; it was great to ride it on the upside, but now that Apple is a normal company, the probability of another hit are so remote, it’s best to assume it simply won’t happen.
This is the disconnect many of us in the blogosphere have with Wall Street. We actually believe that design matters, that taste is objective, and that culture can be developed. And, by definition, none of these can be measured or quantified — or modeled.
-
Elad Blog: Who Cares If It’s Been Tried Before?
There is a difference between knowing the path and walking it:
Every large market, and every good idea, will have half a dozen others who are digging around the edges of it. Many of these companies will be doing something similar to your own idea, or will provide a service that at a high level sounds similar. In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS. In a lot of other cases, the market is still wide open even if at a high level it seems crowded or busy.
-
The real story behind the space pen
The story of NASA spending millions of dollars to create a pen that worked in space for their astronauts, while the Russians just opted to use pencils, is often cited as a KISS example. However, it turns out that it’s just that – a story, and not the reality.
I first came across the actual story behind the space pen in the Geek Trivia article of TechRepublic. Apparently, both the Americans and Russians opted to use pencils initially, but turned out to have several problems due to the tips breaking off, and their flammable nature (in the high oxygen environment). NASA did opt to use mechanical pencils initially, but they were pretty expensive (almost $130).
In the end both parties started using the space pen developed by the Fisher Pen company which was a lot cheaper ($2.39 after a bulk discount). The research behind development of the pen did require around a million dollars, and patented in 1965. But, this was done by the pen company and not NASA. Also, if you are interested in buying one, it costs around $50.
There is also a detailed Scientific American article on the space pen which appeared last December.
