HealthComm LLC

There’s been quite a bit of fretting lately over the ease with which in-app purchases can be made while playing games on the iPhone and iPad, particularly when it comes to children’s games. Some irate parents, whose children unwittingly ran up huge credit card bills, have pointed a pious finger at Apple, some threatening to boycott all items in the iTunes platform because of what they see as Apple’s "unscrupulous business practices." And a few members of Congress even took the step of asking the FTC to investigate the deceptive nature of these insidious little impulse items.

But hold on there just one minute.

The free or low-cost "trial size" offer has been a staple of promotional marketing as long as man has had goods and services for sale or barter, and in our culture of abundance, the idea of luring customers with a free sample is not only time-honored but often necessary.

I wonder if the folks complaining about the availability to purchase upgrades or special functions within a free or low-cost app have any idea how much time and effort, and therefore money, goes into its initial creation. To borrow from an old phrase, there’s really no such thing as a free app.

Furthermore, while it’s clear that some practices are more ethical than others, and it’s equally clear than anyone offering a $100 wagon of anything to a four-year-old is only in it for the money, the truth is the same now as it ever was: Parents bear the responsibility of keeping their children away from those things that children shouldn’t have, like car keys or medications or guns or credit card information, because they are either dangerous or expensive or both. If your child drinks your 200-year-old single malt Scotch, or even pours it down the drain for that matter, is it the distiller’s fault because he put a pretty picture on the bottle label? Heavens, no.

Nor is it Apple’s fault when your child uses your credit card information to purchase electronic whatnots. It would be easier to empathize with parents whose children are spending hundreds of dollars on these purchases if it weren’t so easy to do something about it. But the fact is, consumers already have a boatload of rights where Apple is concerned.

Parents, you have the right to disable the in-app purchase function of your iPhone or iPad. You have the right to enter your credit card information each time you make a purchase, rather than asking Apple to store it for you. You have the right to demand that your password be entered each time a purchase is made. You have the right to keep your iTunes password a secret, even from your children. You have the right to change your password if you think someone knows it. You have the right to monitor your child’s playing, viewing, and spending. You even have the right to keep your mobile devices to yourself and hand your child a book, a jump rope, or a pad or paper and a box of crayons.

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An introduction to HTML email . . .

You know when you wake up suddenly and find yourself not where you were just a moment ago? A heavy dissonance ringing between where your mind wanted to go and where you find yourself now. You take a moment to make sense of the jumbled jigsaw in front of you. This may repeat for what sometimes seems like an eternity. These folks know what I’m talking about.

Behind the continuous advancement of online technologies can be heard a constant call for standards. This establishes common ground upon which communities can build — agreements in language and foundations that aim to ensure innovation. But of the Internet technologies used today there is one that remains complacent in its compliance: email.

In a recent study by Radicati Group, Inc., the number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in the year 2014. Though most users may not be aware of the inconsistencies in standards (as a majority limit usage to plain-text emails) the application of HTML in email is akin to that of the Internet Stone Age.

In danger of deletion

Too often, this is the unfortunate reality of the HTML email. What should be a convenient way to deliver tasteful content to a regular audience can backfire. Left at the mercy of misfit email clients and browsers, email designers are unable to take advantage of techniques used elsewhere on the web. Would you be content with your telephone company only guaranteeing transmissions spoken in monotone 1920s slang? You might think it to be the bee’s knees now, but it’d get old real fast.

Dumb it down

For now there are tricks to getting around these shortfalls in standards. You just have to dumb things down. Forget what you know about the latest advances in HTML and CSS and travel back to a simpler time. Organize your information into nested tables. Avoid linking to external style sheets and rely on inline CSS. Keep imagery small and rather than embed (causing bloated file sizes), link to them using absolute URLs. It’s smart to keep an eye on what happens to your emails after delivery. Take advantage of the many tools like Google Analytics or Campaign Monitor. They can go a long way in measuring your effectiveness.

No matter the shortcuts you employ, the most important tip is to test. Test in each major email client (Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail to name a few) and test after each significant change. At first it can seem to be an endless loop but by distilling down to the essentials and progressively harmonizing your designs through testing, you’ll find yourself conducting quick and reliable HTML emails like a regular maestro in no time.

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Just a few months ago, we told you about a new application that we had integrated into our daily workflow: TimeThis, a desktop time-tracking tool built by our sister-company, MerryFools.

At the time, TimeThis had just seen a limited release to beta testers. And now we’re very happy for the Fools as TimeThis is officially out of beta and available for everyone to download!

The app integrates with activeCollab or Basecamp. So if you happen to use either of these online project management tools, TimeThis is for you.

Kick its tires, and give it a spin — you can download and try TimeThis at no charge for 15 days. Then, if you like it, a single license is a mere $30. Need more? They offer a break on the price if you need multiple licenses.

Why do we love TimeThis so much? How ’bout these reasons:

• Since it’s built on Adobe AIR, we can run it on any of our operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux)
• We can add tasks and to-do’s to projects from inside the app
• We can save the timers we use most often
• We can add a comment to time before posting it
• We can set rounding and billing preferences per project — not universally for all time posted!

And those are just a few. MerryFools has also set up a blog where they are keeping TimeThis users up to date on the latest changes and improvements. Be sure to check it out, and give TimeThis a try!

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Whether you and your colleagues are separated by just a cubicle, a couple of office floors or even ZIP codes, you may have experienced the benefits of using one of the many Web-based collaboration and project management applications available these days. Here at HealthComm, we’ve used a number of such tools over the years to differing degrees of satisfaction.

Two of the most popular services available are activeCollab and Basecamp. We’ve used both of these services; in fact, we still use both, so we hope you weren’t looking for a recommendation!

One of the limitations we encountered with each service was the lack of a desktop time-tracking tool with all the features we wanted. But now, we’re limited no more.

Our sister company, MerryFools, has just released TimeThis for beta testing. TimeThis is a full-featured desktop time-tracking tool for users of Basecamp and/or activeCollab. So, what sets TimeThis apart from other time-tracking tools for these two project management platforms?

Well, for one thing, TimeThis is built using Adobe’s AIR runtime, which means the same app can run on Windows, Mac and even Linux systems.

For another, if you need to create a task on the fly, you can do it from inside TimeThis without opening your usual browser, logging in to your project site, finding the appropriate project and so on.

There are other nice features, too, like the abilities to add a comment to time before posting it, to keep a bunch of timers saved for regular use, to set rounding and billing preferences and more.

We’ve been privately testing TimeThis for a while now, and we’re excited to see MerryFools finally move the app into a wider beta release. If you’d like to join us in continuing to test TimeThis (and help MerryFools perfect their product), you can sign up to be a beta tester at MerryFools’ TimeThis page.

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If you’ve got some computers running Windows XP that you still use regularly, or at least not infrequently, here’s a post for you on how you can possibly save some money (and the environment, too!).

In a post on his personal tech blog, Janos Erdelyi walks you through the steps of changing your minimum sleep mode on an XP machine for a significant reduction in power usage during sleep.

As Janos points out, there are some hardware limitations, meaning this will unfortunately not work for every XP user. But if your motherboard will support the change, you can be saving power and money in a matter of minutes.

And the cost? Only the price of a tool to measure your wattage before and after the change. Or you can just trust us that the savings are worth it.

Janos’ post: Saving more power in XP machines

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We all know that medical records will be moving into the electronic realm. This isn’t specific to medical records; it could be restated as “all data will be moving into the electronic realm.” There are many advantages to this migration: Data can be munched up, parsed, viewed from all angles, and compared against other data; trends can be discovered and analysed with far greater speed; anomalies and errors can be ferreted out; and the list goes on. There are also many disadvantages, and they’re largely the same things I’d list as advantages!

How can this be?

It depends on who has the data and how they are using it. Do I want an ER doctor to be able to rapidly build a health profile on me while he’s determining how to treat my failing heart? Sure I do! Do I want the state, the federal government, insurance companies, criminals, my neighbor, basically anyone but my healthcare professional to know my entire health history? No. You may want to share your information, but I don’t and won’t; I’d like to keep it as my choice.

For that matter, I don’t want my healthcare professional to have it any old day, either. What if a pharmaceutical company pays him several heaps of money to hand over my data — even blinded, aggregated patient data? For one thing, the doctor shouldn’t do it without my consent! For another, if that data is valuable, and it’s MY data, I want a say — and the money. It’s valuable right? That’s what I keep hearing.

Have you been reading the news for the past few years and seeing the many cases of massive data breaches? Millions of records exposed at any one time? Aha! This wouldn’t happen if my records were on paper in a filing cabinet! And you’d be absolutely correct, but the basic underlying technology of ink and paper versus bits and magnetic storage are not really the issue; they’re beside the point. There are really two problems, as I see it, that make data susceptible to theft: 1) centralization of data, and 2) the people who are handling this data are not computer or security experts, and I don’t think we should expect them to be.

So what am I suggesting?

My suggestion is one that is unlikely to be palatable to many because they will fear it, but i’m not terribly interested in people’s responses; my interest lies in minimizing security risk and ensuring that you are in control of your data. So in addition to some sort of standard of data and data exchange, I’d be in favor of rules and regulations about retention and visibility data between parties (i.e., you and your doctor) that primarily make you the guardian of your own data. I know this sounds scary. Print off your data if you like. Back it up in some encrypted format in some faraway place. By all means maintain the safety of your information, but also by all means YOU maintain the safety of YOUR information.

Afraid yet? So let’s look at some scenarios.

When the government mandates all centralized electronic medical records and our neither-computer-scientist-nor-security-expert federal employee somehow lets hundreds of millions records loose in the wild, how many people are affected? I think I already said it! Hundreds of millions. Do you even have a copy of this record? What does it even say about you? Do you know if your information was exposed or not?

Now let’s see what happens when you lose your fully encrypted electronic fob/doohickey in the parking lot at the grocery store. How many people are affected? Just one, and likely only zero: since it’s encrypted and unreadable to anyone else and you have likely printed it out and kept it in a fire safe, or have a duplicate encrypted fob in a fire safe as well, and possibly pay $5 per month to some service to store your information in encrypted form somewhere else (and while i’m dreaming, the cost of the storage is tax-deductible since this whole electronic migration was federally mandated and they are nice guys).

You may ask, “Well, smarty pants, how do I share the info with my doctor if the data is encrypted?” Suffice it to say there are numerous real, present-day security mechanisms that work just fine for this, things like public-key sharing (which I use daily). But dont be distracted from the main point: who is responsible for your information anyway?

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Last Saturday I stretched out on my supersize sofa with a supersize bucket of special edition Halloween Twizzlers and a bajillion technicolor options on my supersize HDTV, the one with visuals so big and crisp and lifelike it almost looks like you’re actually doing something with real people and real stuff in a real place. I flipped through the channels more or less brainlessly, without purpose or need or direction. I rationalized the wasting of time because I felt like I (A) had earned it after a week of work and (B) had nothing better to do.

But, wait. Yes, I did have something better to do. Lots of better somethings, in fact. Things that really did involve real stuff and real places and perhaps even some real people. The truth is, sometimes I just waste time.

Alas I am not alone. Indeed I can take comfort in the fact that plenty of other average Americans also mindlessly waste terrific amounts of time, despite presumably also having many better things to do. I know because so many of them document it on Twitter.

For those of you who haven’t yet hopped aboard the Twitter bandwagon, I can tell you that this “micro-blogging social app” has been successful for three reasons.

It appeals to the basic human need to be heard, regardless of how meaningless your life (or at least your current activity) really is. Think of it as promoting you to host of your own talk show, with an enormous potential audience, again regardless of how little of real value you have to say or even how affable you are in person. It’s nearly noon and I can’t believe I’ve only had one cup of coffee!!! Note how the repeating exclamation point is often used to simulate personality.

It appeals to the basic human need to be liked, to have people care for you so much that they’ll tell you what’s really going on in their pretty little heads, and with Twitter it’s often people who would never, ever, ever really be your friend in real life. Ever. All you have to do is “follow” them. Think of it as legalized stalking. Oooh, Ashton, thanks for the sweet Tweet. UR so awesome!!!

It’s free. Think of it as, well, free.

Wait a minute. Free? Is it really free? Uh oh. I think we better brace ourselves for some tough love here, folks, because just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there’s also no such thing as a free tweet.Twitter-Study-August-2009

Let me explain. (No, no, let me sum up.)

Twitter isn’t free. Fact is, Twitter is pretty darned costly. And I’m not talking about the kind of expensive that keeps teenagers from loving Twitter. (If you can send only a limited number of text messages per month, to whom should they go: a closed group of Facebook “friends” you have individually approved or an unlimited world of people that could easily include your parents, teachers, employer, coach, AND ex-girlfriend? The choice is obvious, assuming of course you remember being a teenager.)

Teenaged angst aside, Twitter was developed, and has been able to exist/grow/expand exponentially, with huge amounts of venture capital, including of course the recent mass infusion ($100 million) of VC that is allowing Twitter’s founders to “put on hold” any “plans to build up advertising in the service.” —-  And not only did they pony up the big bucks, but these latest fairy godmothers are actually patting themselves on the back,  smug as bugs in a rug that they’re getting a bargain, as Twitter’s valuation (a word that evidently means having more dollars than sense) is something more along the lines of a billion (with a b).  Seem they’ve taken in at least a few believers.

Others disagree and compare this situation to the ’99 dot.com bubble burst, but I’m reminded of something more along the lines of the late ‘80s collapse of junk bonds. I have to wonder if Twitter’s most recent investors even bothered to check the August ’09 study of Twitter conducted by Pear Analytics. If so, they would have known that a full 40% (actually 40.55%) of tweets are what they’ve labeled “pointless babble” and that 35% of all tweets are contributed by only 1%  (ONE percent!) of its users, or what they call “addicts.”

Whoa. Addicted to Twitter? Now that’s what I call wasting time. What this says to me is that 35% of their traffic is from people who are so busy using it that they couldn’t possibly have time to earn a decent living, which might come in handy should there ever be a registration fee attached (not to mention a sin tax).

Sure, once in a while you can find something meaningful, helpful, insightful, or newsworthy tucked into a tweet, but those little nuggets are rare, and a HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS is a lot of money to gamble on this particular longshot.

Yes, my friends, Twitter is far from free, unless by free you mean hasn’t made a dollar. And may never make a dollar. Even though it already employs sixty people who presumably earn paychecks. Bottom line: Don’t try this at home, kids, for the sake of your own bottom line. As a business model, Twitter defies logic, common sense, good karma, and everything else that is right with this world.

Full disclosure: Hey! Follow us on Twitter@healthcomm!!!

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