Duke University in North Carolina and Oschner Health System in Louisiana are two of the first hospitals to incorporate HealthKit into their day-to-day operations. Duke’s Dr. Ricky Bloomfield and Oschner’s Dr. Richard Milani spoke about their experiences at the mHealth Summit earlier this week. MobiHealthNews reported from the summit.

About HIPAA and privacy concerns:

To allay any concerns about HIPAA and privacy, the programs Duke and Oschner are piloting take data from patients’ apps into the EHR, but don’t send any data back out, Milani stressed. In addition, HealthKit addresses the problem of physicians being overwhelmed with data by only providing them with the specific fields that they request.

HealthKit has a solid base but is clearly designed for growth:

Right now, Apple reads 50 to 60 data fields from tracking devices, but Bloomfield sees that as version 1.0 of HealthKit.

“Their intent with version 1.0 was simply to account for the use cases that are currently available in the market,” he said. “And that’s why you see things like activity tracking, vital signs, blood pressure. You also see elements related to asthma — number of times you used your inhaler, peak flow. There were devices already in market that require this to support them. As the use cases grow Apple wants to be there to support it.”

Later in the talk he speculated that as wearable devices become more common and more advanced, 50 or 60 fields will become “50,000 or 60,000″.

On Android:

Right now, only HealthKit integrates with the EHR. But Bloomfield and Milani are keeping their eyes on Google Fit as well. The problem right now is that Google Fit allows developers to create their own data fields, which allows the platform to be more open, but hurts efforts at standardization.

“I think Google needs to do a little bit more to get it into the place where HealthKit currently functions, but I can’t wait until we can use Android devices as well as iOS devices, one to the other,” Bloomfield said. “For me the most important thing is we give this ability to our patients. And I don’t care which device they have, I just want them to be able to give us the data so we can make good clinical decisions to help them out.”

There’s a lot more in the body of the article, but the pulled highlights should give you a sense of where this is going. The sophistication of both pilot programs is impressive. Both programs were incredibly well received. Finally, most importantly to Apple, the speakers were enthusiastic supporters of HealthKit, taking the good and the bad in stride, with eyes set on the future.

I love compressors, but multibands are a bit more complicated. This is worth reading.

Panic announced on Twitter that Apple is allowing them to keep the feature they previously had to remove.

Differences in what they can do, differences in syntaxes, different technologies involved, the new and the deprecated, and browser support differences.

And sadly there is quite a bit of outdated information out there. Let’s see if we can sort it out.

It’s the outdated information that gets me sometimes.

Financial Times:

This year has seen Apple’s chief step out of the shadows of his predecessor and imprint the company with his own set of values and priorities: bringing in fresh blood, changing how it manages its cash pile, opening Apple up to greater collaboration and focusing more on social issues.

There’s no doubt that this is now “Tim Cook’s Apple”.

Wired:

Pre-game presentations have long been excuses to trot out special effects. Indoor pyrotechnics, giant inflatable helmets, live wild animals running the field, and bone-rattling sound systems have been around for years.Turning a hockey rink into a lake of fire? That’s new.

The tech behind all of this is pretty cool but it seems like pointless eye candy to me.

This was a fun exploration, walked me round some excellent music without depending on bestseller lists. I love how much of this music is either completely self or independently produced.

Glassdoor released their seventh annual Employee’s Choice awards, honoring the best places to work in America. Apple is number 22 in the large company (1000+ employees) list. Google is #1.

The awards are crowdsourced, culled from input from full time employees of each company. If you are going to build a list of best places to work, this seems as good a way as any, given the subjective nature of the award.

At the very least, seems like there’s valuable feedback here for employers.

SpicyIP:

Yesterday, the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte injunction order against Chinese operator Xiaomi for infringement of Ericsson’s patents. The patents in question are Standard, Essential Patents (SEPs) which are subject to FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms.

There is some question as to the validity of this ruling. A more traditional approach would be to seek damages after the fact. But Ericsson has been pursuing this disagreement with Xiaomi for years.

One factor that the Court found persuasive was that Xiaomi had not responded to Ericsson’s repeated communications (6 in number from July 2014). However, it must be questioned whether Xiaomi’s purported laxity in this matter is a sufficient reason to grant an injunction against them. More so, when an alternative remedy in the form of damages is available which is one of the cardinal principles that goes against the granting of injunctions.

What does the injunction cover?

This ex parte order injuncts Xiaomi from selling, advertising, manufacturing or importing devices that infringe the SEPs in question. The judge also directed the Customs officials to stop the imports under the IPR Rules, 2007. Moreover, local commissioners have been appointed to visit Xiaomi officers to ensure the implementation of these orders.

India is a huge market, second in importance to Xiaomi only to China. Ericsson certainly has Xiaomi’s attention now.

Spain is introducing a new intellectual property law that allows Spanish publications to charge aggregators for using their content. If a newspaper publishes a story, they can place a price on it. An aggregator, like Google News, can decide whether to carry the story.

Google’s response to this new law is to shut down Google News in Spain. This is the ultimate chilling effect a law can have on a market. Ideally, the law would create a market for news. Aggregators can shop around for stories, carry all the free content, plus some budgeted “paywall” content for balance. As the market matures, publishers will learn what prices bring them revenue without pricing them out of the market.

Given the uncertainty of an emerging market, Google took their ball and went home. This is an understandable position.

Here’s the Google blog post announcing the closure.

This is an experiment with big implications. The news business is slipping from one side of the curve (high integrity, low revenue) to the other (page-view driven, revenue required). If the content producers and the aggregators can find some middle ground where the content creators can bring in enough money to keep the lights on, we might still be able to salvage the news-driven (as opposed to page-view driven) news business.

The paywall version (served up by ft.com and wsj.com, for example) asks the consumers to pay for their news. The aggregator tax (Spain’s experiment) spreads the payment for news across aggregators, who will either absorb the cost (perhaps offset by advertising) or pass it along to consumers in the same way. An interesting experiment, but one that will play out without one of the biggest aggregators in the business, Google News.

This is an interesting read. I’ll admit, I expected there to be more of a smoking gun in the story, but I can see why the DAs want Uber to stop saying they have the “safest rides on the road.”

It’s simply beautiful.

United Airlines today announced the carrier will equip its flight attendants with Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus, putting important safety and service information at flight attendants’ fingertips while enhancing their ability to meet customers’ needs.

The airline will begin distribution to its more than 23,000 mainline flight attendants during the second quarter of 2015. Upon introduction, the devices will have the ability to handle most onboard retail transactions and will enable access to company email, united.com and the company’s Intranet as well as policies and procedures manuals.

Future enhancements include replacing the flight attendants’ printed safety manual with an electronic version on their iPhones and providing real-time reporting and improved follow-up on aircraft cabin issues and repairs. Additionally, United plans to develop a number of customer-focused tools for the device.

United also renewed the iPad program it started for pilots in 2011 with the iPad Air 2. Great moves from United.

Slate:

You don’t speak Turkish. You don’t speak Finnish. You don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese. None of these languages is remotely related to English. In fact, none of these languages are even in the same language family. Yet you can recognize, within the two quick syllables of kah-vay, ka-vee, and ka-fay, the word you know as coffee.

I am always fascinated by where words come from and their commonalities. I’d never thought about why “coffee” is so similar around the world and in so many different languages.

Jim and Shawn talk about three months with an iPhone 6 Plus, Apple lawsuits, Apple’s Best of 2014 and connecting instruments to an iPad!

Macworld:

I’m somewhat paranoid about backing up my data files. And by “somewhat paranoid,” I mean “petrified.” If you’re not of a similar mindset, you should be.

Consider what it would mean to lose some irreplaceable photos, for instance. Or the please-let-me-keep-my-job presentation that you’ve been pulling together for months. Or your financial data. Being paranoid in every waking hour isn’t a great way to get through life, but when it comes to backing up your data it’s nearly impossible to go too far.

I’m constantly on people to have, make and verify their backups. As a victim of not having a backup in the past, I know the pain losing important data can cause. I’m doing this for your own good.

MacStories:

I’ve spent weeks comparing features and changing apps to understand the kind of experience they want to promote. But implementation details and design differences aside, I also kept wondering the same question: was the real Twitter different from the third-party clients I used for three years?

I use Tweetbot on iOS but am always interested in reading what others think of the other major iOS Twitter clients.

Graham Spencer, writing for MacStories:

Apple TV yesterday received four more channels, with UFC, The Scene, Fusion and Dailymotion joining the dozens of other channels available on the device.

Click here to jump to the original article, which features a graphic laying out the current channel lineup as well as a video from Google promoting the YouTube channel.

Interesting visualization tool. You start with a mix of triangles and squares. There are rules that determine whether a shape is happy or not, based on the neighboring shapes being the same type (bias).

Hard to explain, but spend a minute stepping through each scenario and you’ll see the point of the exercise.

Wired:

Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.

It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

The idea is more than just an idle suggestion. LeCun is the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, a team of AI researchers inside the internet giant that spans offices in both California and New York, and this rapidly expanding operation is now laying the basic groundwork for his digital assistant.

Interesting idea, but this is a bit of a slippery slope. Tricky when you allow AI to make judgment calls of any kind. Will Facebook step in when it disagrees with my parenting style? My purchases? My voting habits?

A very good, common sense article from Kelly Guimont. I know we’ve all seen those ignorant people in the stores—don’t be that person.

Wired:

The car, Bloodhound SSC, marks a bold attempt to set a new Land Speed Record of 1,609 kph (1,000 mph) by 2016. If successful, it will not only mark the biggest jump in land-speed history, but will also be the culmination of a decade-long experiment in education and open engineering.

What a great story about the engineering challenges of trying to push a car, and I use that term loosely, faster than any has ever gone before.

The Verge:

In an age where fans expect direct relationships with the artists they love, Prince has turned himself into a reclusive legend. But 30 years ago, he was still a young artist on the cusp of releasing his greatest record — and former Vibe and Spin editor-in-chief Alan Light’s Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain documents how the record and film came to be.

I’m all kinds of biased as a huge Prince fan but I think the album is still amazing and listen to it at least once a month. The movie doesn’t hold up as well but it’s still a lot of fun to watch every now and then.

File this one under sweating the details.

Many of those seminal steps occurred not in the Silicon Valley garages of lore, but in the stuffier labs and offices of Greater Boston, stretching back at least to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whirlwind Project.

We always think that many of the great innovations happened in Silicon Valley, but before that, there was Boston.

Artcurial Motorcars:

The Collectors’ Car Department at Artcurial has discovered 60 collectors’ automobiles, all major marques dating from the early days of the motor car through to the 1970s. Found following fifty years of lying dormant, the Baillon collection will be sold by Artcurial Motorcars in the first part of the traditional sale at Retromobile Salon, on 6 February 2015, in Paris. These motor cars have been tucked away in a property in the West of France, under makeshift corrugated iron shelters and in various outbuildings.

One of the cars, a Ferrari 250GT SWB California Spyders, is one of only 60 ever built. Another, a 1956 Maserati A6G Gran Sport Frua, is one of just three ever built.

Next time you drive past a barn, take a peek inside – you never know what you’ll see.

New York Times:

Napster did not last long, two years. But for a while at the dawn of this century it claimed to have 70 million registered users. It spawned a host of Internet music-swapping providers, more than a few of them falling on the dubious side of the law. Most important, it irrevocably altered not only the way in which Americans absorbed music but also their belief system in what they should pay. The conviction theologically held by many boiled down to a single word: nothing. “You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free,” Greg Hammer, managing director of Red Bull Records, a branch of the energy-drink company, told Retro Report. “It’s very difficult to change.”

The music industry is not alone in coming to terms with altered realities. As every sentient soul surely knows by now, the “culture of free” — words borrowed from the title of this week’s video — has turned the print world upside down, pushing newspapers, magazines and book publishers into a frantic search for financial safe harbors. With the advent of broad Internet use in the 1990s came a notion that information should be free. Never mind that the gathering and transmission of information can be a costly proposition and that (dirty word alert) money is needed if the survival of, say, a newspaper is to be ensured. As with music in Mr. Hammer’s observation, a generation now believes that the written word, whether on processed wood or in pixels, should come without charge.

Terrific article, partnered with the video below. Clearly, the culture of free is at the soul of many new business models. As you craft your business plan, you must consider the possibility that someone out there will do the same thing for free.

CNET:

Some of the last video footage taken of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs shown in antitrust court last week may see the light of day after lawyers representing the Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNN filed a motion with the court to have it released.

“Given the substantial public interest in the rare posthumous appearance of Steve Jobs in this trial, there simply is no interest that justifies restricting the public’s access to his video deposition,” attorney Thomas Burke, who is representing all three media organizations, wrote in the filing Monday.

Apple opposes this filing:

Today’s filing follows an official email request made Sunday by Burke, to which Bill Isaacson, Apple’s lead attorney, replied Sunday night, “Apple does not consent to your request. We are preparing a substantive response to your points and will get that to you tonight hopefully.” No such filing has yet been made on behalf of Apple’s request to keep the video restricted to the courtroom.

Personally, I’d rather not see this video be made public. It serves no one outside the courtroom.

The testimony from other witnesses may have been more germane to the case, but the never-before-seen video footage of the late executive has grabbed the spotlight and, Burke argues, deserves to be shown to the public because it is “far more compelling and accurate than any transcript could ever be.”

Burke’s argument is self-serving. He represents the media, not the plaintiffs.