Slide 1: cmyk
cmyk
DC
Wipro to give priority to BPO ventures in Kerala. Samsung unit sees firm smartphone market. Oracle is buying British database firewall company Secerno.
Bengaluru ● Monday ● 24 May 2010
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Technomics
‘UID tech can transform the country’
May 23: The Indian government’s unique identity programme will have some major positive economical and social implications, with ample opportunity to leverage the technology far more ambitiously and intensively, according to global consultancy firm Deloitte. “The UID programme will provide the opportunity to leverage technology far more ambitiously and intensively and build truly inclusive, transformational infrastructure. This will improve the overall productivity of our economy,” Deloitte India Principal Economist Shanto Ghosh said. According to Deloitte, the UID opens up a vast array of new possibilities for our technological future and offers a foundation on which a host of applications can be built. Elaborating it with an example, Ghosh says the UID number of each resident can be linked to a bank account through which the government can provide direct services, such as health and education, through digital vouchers and cash benefits. The Unique Identification Authority of India, headed by Nandan Nilekani, will issue the first set of 12-digit unique identification numbers between August, 2010, and February, 2011 Thereafter, 600 million UID numbers will be issued in the next five years. Apart from providing identity, the UID will enable better delivery of services and effective governance. The UID project is primarily aimed at ensuring inclusive growth. Citing various media reports, Ghosh said the UID programme will create 350,000 new jobs and USD 20 billion of economic output over the next five years. — PTI
a Dose of IT
Delivering health care at homes
es. While there is little immediate opportunity for private HCHC providers like Manipal to cut costs and with innovative pricing substantial improvements in quality and services can be funded. To address this impasse, two solutions exists for HCHC players who enter into this segment; increased economies of scale through consolidation in the HCHC services and radical improvements in efficiency through the exploitation of information and communication technology (ICT). Over the last decade, the rapid development of ICT runs parallel to the HCHC innovation in healthcare. However, the main problem in ICT-based HCHC is not a lack of technology but how to take advantage of it, how to organise healthcare delivery in a smart way around the home. While telemedicine has been utilised in various forms for many years, telehome HCHC is a relatively recent innovation. It can include a variety of somewhat different services or applications, including telemonitoring (e.g. blood pressure, blood glucose, ECG, etc.), teleconsultation (e.g. online, by videophone, by telephone) and telerehabilitation (e.g. by videophone), as well as self-care devices to be used by people in their own homes to help them monitor and manage their health themselves. Various industry consortiums such as Continua, 3iC, etc have been trying to establish ICT standards for telehome HCHC ICT applications/services and clinical research may be developed as add-ons to the basic HCHC services. As healthcare consumerism and competition increases in the HCHC segment, use of ICT and providing innovative services which will be positioned to increase the consumers to reach their full human potential would be the key differentiation points in HCHC segment. The key issue for ICT players and vendors to solve for HCHC clients is how can they create innovative technologies that are centered around the home and accessible by everybody at home, that can traverse multiple generations from grand ma and pa to great grand kids living under the same roof or sharing time under the same roof. While electronic health records (EHRs) carry individuals records that are fairly centered around healthcare episodes, what the next generation of ICT solutions.
Sure, it’s big. But is that bad?
BRAD STONE
NEW YORK
L
ately many of Bengaluru residents would have received SMS from Manipal HomeCare, asking you if you need medical care at home. This is a new service launched by the Manipal Hospitals Group. Their services include non-medical services providing assistance to elderly or sick with Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) such as bathing, dressing, hygiene and toileting (including hygiene, use of incontinence products), transferring (moving from bed to chair, walker to toilet, etc.) as well as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) such as medication management, diet, feeding, etc. Other services which consists of skilled nursing services for such as dressing, wound care and suture removal, injections, blood glucose monitoring, etc. Though home-centered healthcare (HCHC) is an innovation in healthcare delivery in many parts of the world, the innovation in India is that it is now a service extension of branded corporate hospital chains. While globally HCHC continues to be the “warm fuzzy” of healthcare delivery system; patients and families widely praise the services and are demanding more. Politicians, including Mr Obama, believing that care in the community is a more appropriate and cheaper alternative to in hospital patient care, have expanded the number of home care programmes as part of their healthcare reforms. If this occurs, HCHC programmes will also compete with physicians for limited health service dollars under the reform programs around the world. Coming back to India, the issue is not the ageing population that needs to be taken care, but the chronic disease burden of the youth and the mid-aged that are expected to explode and increase in numbers due to our genetic disposition. As I had mentioned in my earlier article in this column, close to 50 million households would be the potential. Hence HCHC is indeed the way forward for healthcare in India. However as competition emerges in this segment, to improve value to customers one can cut costs and/or increase quality and servic-
N the 1990s, Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer, almost singlehandedly brought the antitrust weight of the federal government down on that era’s high-tech heavyweight, Microsoft. Now Mr Reback contends there is a dangerous new monopolist in the catbird seat: the search giant Google. This month, Mr Reback shepherded Adam and Shivaun Raff, the husband-andwife entrepreneurs behind London comparison shopping site Foundem, around Washington. The three held meetings with Congressional staff members and antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to air the Foundem couple’s complaint that in 2006, Google’s supposedly objective algorithms suddenly dropped Foundem into the netherworld of Google search results. They say Google also raised the rates Foundem had to pay to advertise alongside search results. These moves, they said, pushed their comparison shopping site out of view, and Google later put the spotlight on its own shopping listings. Google is the “arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favours its properties over everyone else’s,” says Mr Reback. “What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening.” Google says its mission is to give users information they're looking for even if that means giving its own content priority and de-emphasizing sites it believes offer poor experiences. “Telling a search engine that it cannot innovate and show results in
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a way that benefits users would undermine the very goals of our competition laws,” says Matthew Bye, a Google lawyer. But Google’s decisions on such matters may soon be judged by higher authorities. Over the last several years, it has become the canonical way to search the Web, an information doorway that dictates what kind of knowledge is visible to the browsing public. That growing market power has generated both sky-high profits and unwanted regulatory attention.
Almost a decade after Google promised that the creed “Don’t be evil” would guide its activities, the federal government is examining Google's acquisitions and actions as never before, looking for indications that the company’s market power may be anticompetitive in the worlds of Web search and online advertising. “They are not just on the radar screen. They are the at the center of it,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University. “If you are in the federal government and are interested in antitrust, you
are looking at Google.” Google has managed to squeak by most regulatory reviews. On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission approved Google's $750 million acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising start-up. Staff members had initially planned to oppose the purchase, even saying in a statement that the deal “raised serious antitrust issues.” But the agency ultimately endorsed the deal, assuming that Apple’s entry in the market would facilitate competition.
Nevertheless, the search giant may get an indication this summer of just how uncomfortable Washington can get for such dominant firms. Federal Judge Denny Chin is expected to rule in the coming months on Google’s amended settlement with authors and book publishers and whether the agreement gives the search giant too much control over the millions of library books that it scanned. The Department of Justice has opposed the settlement on two occasions. — NYT
High-tech alternatives to high-cost care
STEVE LOHR
NEW YORK
Kapil Khandelwal is director and COO of Makven Capital and a leading healthcare and ICT expert
May 23: Mention health care reform and the image that instantly comes to mind is a big government program. But there is another broad transformation in health care under way, a powerful force for decentralised innovation. It is fueled in good part by technology — low-cost computing devices, digital sensors and the Web. The trend promises to shift a lot of the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of disease from hospitals and specialised clinics, where treatment is expensive, to primary care physicians and patients themselves — at far less cost. The new models emphasise early detection of health problems, prevention and management of chronic disease. The approaches have adopted a range of labels including “wellness,” “consumer-directed health care” and the “medical home.” The potential transformation faces formidable obstacles, to be sure. Some of those hurdles include get-
Technologies now aim at shifting diagnosis, monitoring, treatment of disease from hospitals to primary care physicians and patients.
ting patients to embrace healthier lifestyles and persuading the government and insurers to reimburse
at-home testing and monitoring devices. Yet the promise, according to Dr David M. Lawrence, the for-
mer chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, a private health care provider, is “an array of technologyenabled, consumer-based services that constitute a new form of primary health care.” For example, a start-up in the field of sleep medicine, Watermark Medical, offers an at-home device and a Web-based service for diagnosing sleep apnea. Characterised by snoring and pauses in breathing, sleep apnea is a serious health problem that often goes undiagnosed. Sufferers battle chronic fatigue, and sleep experts suspect that apnea is the cause of many workplace and car accidents. Treatments include a masklike apparatus that pumps air to keep the patient’s airway open; an oral appliance, resembling an orthodontic retainer, that helps open the throat; and surgery to shave tissue that blocks the air passage. If successful with sleep, Watermark plans to branch out to other kinds of Web-based personal devices to monitor chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. — NYT
Dalai Lama Tweets with China
May 23: The Dalai Lama tried to hold a rare direct conversation with people inside China on Friday, answering questions live on Twitter about the fate of Tibet. The hourlong session with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader was conducted by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese writer and convert to Tibetan Buddhism who lives in Beijing and who met the Dalai Lama for Friday’s online conversation in a hotel room in New York, where the Dalai Lama is visiting. Through a Chinese interpreter, the Dalai Lama sent messages criticising China’s policies toward Tibet and words of welcome to Chinese citizens. Twitter is blocked in China, but has become popular with thousands of Chinese, especially activists, who find a way around controls. Mr Wang’s Twitter feed, where the conversation was posted, had more than 8,000 followers as of Friday night. — NYT
Five ways to keep online criminals at bay
RIVA RICHMOND
NEW YORK
MCT
May 23: The Web is a fount of information, a busy marketplace, a thriving social scene — and a den of criminal activity. Criminals have found abundant opportunities to undertake stealthy attacks on ordinary Web users that can be hard to stop, experts say. Hackers are lacing Web sites — often legitimate ones — with socalled malware, which can silently infiltrate visiting PCs to steal sensitive personal information and then turn the computers into “zombies” that can be used to spew spam and more malware onto the Internet. At one time, virus attacks were obvious to users, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a training organization for computer security pro-
fessionals. He explained that now, the attacks were more silent. “Now it’s much, much easier infecting trusted Web sites,” he said, “and getting your zombies that way.” So it is more important than ever to protect yourself. Here are some basic tips for thwarting them.
● Protect the Browser The most direct line of attack is the browser, said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Security Response. Internet Explorer and Firefox are the most targeted browsers because they are the most popular. If you use current versions, and download security updates as they become available, you can surf safely. But there can still be exposure between when a vulnerability is discovered and an update becomes available, so you will need up-to-date security
software as well to try to block any attacks that may emerge, especially if you have a Windows PC.
● Get Adobe Updates Most consumers are familiar with Adobe Reader, for PDF files, and Adobe’s Flash Player. In the last year, a virtual epidemic of attacks has exploited their flaws; almost half of all attacks now come hidden in PDF files. Part of the problem is that many computers run old, vulnerable versions. But as of April, it has become easier to get automatic updates from Adobe. ● Beware Malicious Ads An increasingly popular way to get attacks onto Web sites people trust is to slip them into advertisements, usually by duping smalltime ad networks. Malvertising, as this practice is
known, can exploit software vulnerabilities or dispatch deceptive pop-up messages. A particularly popular swindle involves an alert that a virus was found on the computer, followed by urgent messages to buy software to remove it. Of course, there is no virus and the security software, known as scareware, is fake. It is a ploy to get credit card numbers and $40 or $50. Closing the pop-up or killing the browser will usually end the episode. But if you encounter this scam, check your PC with trusted security software or Microsoft’s free Malicious Software Removal Tool.
● Poisoned Search Results Online criminals are also trying to manipulate search engines into placing malicious sites toward the top of results pages for popular
keywords. Google and search engines like Microsoft’s Bing are working to detect malicious sites and remove them from their indexes. Free tools like McAfee’s SiteAdvisor and the Firefox add-on Web of Trust can also help — warning about potentially dangerous links.
● Antisocial Media Attackers also use e-mail, instant messaging, blog comments and social networks like Facebook and Twitter to induce people to visit their sites. It’s best to accept “friend” requests only from people you know, and to guard your passwords. Phishers are trying to filch login information so they can infiltrate accounts, impersonate you to try to scam others out of money and gather personal information about you and your friends.
HP expands recall of laptops
May 23: Hewlett-Packard Co is expanding a voluntary recall of laptop computers due to the risk of fire from overheating batteries, the company and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Friday. The commission said that since an initial recall in May 2009, HP has received additional reports of overheated and ruptured batteries, leading it to expand its recall to include more models. — Reuters
