Dave:
Gartner: “The Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users' Digital Lives by 2014”
Building on the fact that the use of cloud computing is freeing us from dependence on a specific device, Gartner may be spot on.
According to Gartner, the personal computer as the sole access device is coming to a close by 2014. What’s replacing it? The personal cloud. Okay, what the hell is a personal cloud?
“Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”
Actually, this is building on the topic of my last blog, which I produced without seeing this release. The concept being that the use of cloud-based resources is providing use with the flexibility to use many different devices, and thus the rise of the personal cloud that becomes the new center of our digital universe.
An insulin pump, attached to the body with Velcro, connects wirelessly to a touch-screen activity monitor that resembles an Apple iPhone but doesn't make calls. Cellnovo has disabled the voice capabilities of the mobile monitor as a safety feature.
"We have many sensors on the pump that measure the temperature of the insulin," said McKeon. "All of that information is constantly being communicated to the handset, and once that information is on the handset, that information gets moved up over the mobile network."
By wearing the pump as a patch, patients don't have to keep a journal, according to Cellnovo.
Cellnovo is conducting trials with 100 type 1 diabetes patients in 10 leading diabetes centers in the United Kingdom to determine how connecting a wireless insulin pump to a wireless data-transfer system will help them regulate their diet and take the proper amount of insulin.
The usability trial allows patients to share data and caregivers to evaluate it remotely in real
time.
Professor John Pickup of King's College London School of Medicine is the principal investigator for the trial.
"The Cellnovo system provides us immediate access to the clinical status of all our patients on a single screen," trialist Stephen Greene, a professor at the University of Dundee, said in a statement.
The Cellnovo diabetes management system is part of a remote-monitoring trend in health care, according to McKeon. Mobile technology will become embedded in medical devices on a regular basis, he predicted.
However, McKeon believes that eventually the device will matter less and the real value is with the cloud-based platform. In a way, it mirrors how the iPod became less important as Apple's iTunes moved toward a more cloud-based model.
"That's the real seismic shift, moving from MP3 players to iTunes," said McKeon. "The device has become less important. What's most important is in the cloud, and it's the same way with managing a patient."
"In five years when we're talking about medical devices, people are going to look back to when patients would drive to a diabetes clinic or cardiovascular clinic four to 10 times a year when a [wireless] radio could have done that for us," McKeon explained.
Following trials in the United Kingdom, Cellnovo will show the diabetes management throughout Europe and then seek 510(k) clearance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to try to begin selling the device by midyear in the States, said McKeon.
With the real-time data provided to doctors, McKeon hopes that more diabetes patients will be able to avoid losing limbs and eyesight. By using software to record blood sugar and diet numbers and by connecting to cellular radios to transmit the data, people could possibly live longer and healthier "without the burden of this disease," he said.
JP:
Jeff (pick one story Jeff):
Microsoft courts big data market with SQL Server update
http://www.infoworld.com/d/computer-hardware/microsoft-courts-big-data-market-sql-server-update-188123
Guess who is invited to the big data party….its your favorite desktop buddy Microsoft. With Azure issues behind them, Microsoft is touting the next release of SQL Server (2012) RDBMS as a “big data” platform. In short, Microsoft…a late comer to the “big data” movement is showing signs of wanting a piece of the action. According this article by By Joab Jackson from IDG News Service
Microsoft, customers can use SQL Server 2012 as a connector to Hadoop to access harvested data from Hadoop data sources.
In my opinion why go through an intermediary system to access Hadoop aggregated/harvested data when there are tools out by several vendors to access the data directly. In addition many of BI vendors are now building Hadoop connectors within their BI stack to access Hadoop data sources.
Supersize me: Hadoop upgrade will handle even bigger data
The key objective of this upgrade (0.23) is to increase the number of nodes within a given Hadoop cluster from 4000 to 6000, rewrite the MapReduce framework (version 2.0) to allow for higher throughput on larger node clusters and an upgrade to HDFS to allow high availability of data across a given cluster nodes.
Hadoop is no longer a “big data” technology but a “massive data” technology…this is a first here by the way. With this level of scalability; a “wide area” distributed data warehouse is possible. In addition, it makes the HDFS more stable and highly available because you can now configure the “Name Node” as an “active/passive” cluster enabling a failover capability for high availability.
