The year of the 'care'. As one VC executive, Andy Donner of Physic Ventures, noted recently, this is the year of the 'care'. There seems to be a growing list of vendors who are trying to offer some sort of 'keep in touch' product that connects an older person with family members who may live elsewhere. The basic element is to provide some means to signal 'concerned about you' from family members and obtain the response 'I'm all right' from the older family member back to them -- accompanied by the ability to react in the event that the response is not received.
So much iHoopla about the iPad. But as the famous saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity and folks at Apple must be having a great time with this. The geeks have weighed in, plenty of snippy negative commentary has been spewed about the Apple iPad (including lots of sophomoric humor about the product name).
Medicine turned into healthcare, doctors became providers, small coffee cups became tall, exercise became fitness, recycling became a sustainability tactic. So it has come to pass that politically correct eventually becomes...correct. And everything else, therefore becomes incorrect, inappropriate, or even offensive.
PCs and MACs represent growth markets in 2010... With the excitement (translate that -- lots of press) about a wide variety of PC-less connection choices for TV, radio, and books, one might almost think the PC and its MAC brethren were dead. Not so fast, PC sales are expected to grow 10% this year and MAC growth expectations are as high as 26%.
How is a market entrant doing? I have spent much of the past year looking at websites of tech companies in the aging-tech or digital health-tech areas. As part of this look, I am always trying to figure out how these companies are doing. Talking to the company executives is interesting, but the website, to me is very revealing and sometimes contradicts verbal descriptions of momentum. To me, these are visible indicators of company health:
Wait, wait, don't tell us. If we are patient, media reports will enable us to fully catch up with attitudes about technology in 2006. No, despite many of them in this blog, that's not a typo. So virtual doctor's visits were recently discussed in a NY Times article that I posted - "Are Doctors Ready for Virtual Visits?
Rant on. The Times New Old Age take on this weekend's Silvers Summit at CES: "American tech companies, taking notice of the unmistakable demographic trends, have launched a surge." Is Silvers Summit a surge? Are 'major tech companies' actively and broadly engaged? What you're seeing (as described and in CES press releases) is some innovation from small start ups -- and in an unproven market area, it is probably best thought of as experimentation.
