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IBM Teams With Google and Continua Health Alliance to Move Data From Remote Personal Medical Devices Into Google Health

Digital health records for every one! Not only it allows doctors/families to remote monitor health status, now you can save data online. Finally doctors can stop those file cabinets and leverage a real health system.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/IBM-Teams-With-Google-and-iw-14258848.html

Malaysia..my project trip in Asia

Finally, back at it again! I was away for 3 weeks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for one of my mobile projects. After the trip, I took my vacations and holidays and stayed away from anything I consider hard work (Yes, blogging may fall into one of the hard work category). I have been cooking this blog in mind for a while, but just the effort it would take to select a couple of photos from the huge batch, post them, and embed them on the blog – kept me away from writing anything at all.

So back to Malaysia. What a country! It has a unique blend of Asian culture and modern infrastructures and entertainments. I was surprised to see how good everyone was in speaking English and the writings everywhere on the city is also in English. They even write native Malay in English. It helps that they have a good mix of original Malays with Chinese and Indian immigrants. We all know the weather is nice and hot in Asia, but the fall/winter time I went was the perfect conditions with temperatures around 25 C.

Public transportation is really sophisticated in KL with a mix of buses, subway, monorails, express trains, etc. Some of the shopping malls were huge, even much larger than what I am used to seeing in Toronto. I could not think of anything from Canada that was not there, including the fast foods.

Because I was busy on the weekdays, we could not really venture outside of KL too much. I really would love to check out Penang and some other beach areas, but I guess that will have to wait for the next time. However, we did get a chance to visit Genting, where you take World’s longest cable car (over 4 Km) to go up 6000 feet high. You get casinos, varieties of hotels, and even a theme park when you go up there. It was an awesome day, I mean how many times can you be on a roller coaster on top of a mountain with clouds going through you.

I have to give a big shout out to Pan Pacific hotel near KLIA Airport. The hotel was beautiful, had all the facilities I could think of and their hospitality was out of this world. Even though I stayed there for 3 weeks, I never felt like I was stuck in a hotel room. The singers they had performing at nights were really top notch as well. Any food I had there or anywhere in KL from authentic Malaysian, Chinese, Continental, or Italian – the taste was incredible. Some of my favourite Malaysian dishes includes Nasi Lemak, Roti Kanai, Goreng Kimpeng, Mee Rebus. They have perfected the art of spicy food mixed with tropical and Chinese flavours, mmmm.

The hotel was really busy on one of weekends , I found out Malaysian Motor Cycle Grand Prix was happening and it was in nearby Sepand Circuit. So I had to go check it out. My first time ever in a Grand Prix, courtesy of Malysia!

So there you have it, a brief walk through some of the great times I had in Malaysia. No matter where you are from, I highly recommend that you check out this region. Sometimes (especially winter days like today) I wonder if living in KL would be better than life in Toronto. And I love my Toronto and think it’s the greatest city in the world.

Introducing IBM’s MAP

You may have seen IBM’s recent announcement on making a big push to enable mobility@work. At CNN Money’s Fortune Magazine site, you can get a good sense of the industry view points of IBM as we help the entire mobile ecosystem by enabling key business software and services, http://bigtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/08/08/ibm-makes-mobile-push/

When it comes to big-business technology, you could argue it’s not a party until IBM shows up. Not only is Big Blue the top seller of business software, its services division is also the biggest global provider of hands-on tech advice. So when IBM makes big mobile announcement, it’s worth a listen….

I would take this opportunity to introduce IBM Mobile Applications Practice (MAP) and some of the business applications we are developing for mobile web. As a Practice under IBM Global Business Services, we are focused on developing both customer and employee facing interactive mobile applications.

Located at Toronto Innovation Centre, we are also part of the network of IBM Interactive Centers for Solution Innovation. There are 8 such Innovation Centres around the world: Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Toronto, Vancouver, Milan, Hamburg, where user experience, creative design, and interactive application development are core to the success of the solutions that are enriching customer touch points.

We have already gotten applications such mobile check-in, sms check-in, and mobile workforce manager out of the door for some of the world’s biggest airlines. Next we are looking to take on the media and retail industries under the distribution sector and government agencies from the public sector (with mobile content delivery, communication services, and mobile web applications). Some pilot projects that can make your retail experience Minority Report like is already underway to showcase how mobile can revolutionize user experience and information uptakes. All our solutions also come with key analytics to discover usage patterns, distribution statistics, or product market intelligence.

Check out the overview and offerings of MAP along with some of the mobile articles, conferences, press release, etc we have been part of at our IBM multi-channel solutions website, http://customerfacingsolutions.com/offerings/offering_mobile.html
Here is a teaser,

Blogging from the WordPress iPhone app

Recently got the iphone2.0 update on my iPod Touch. Now I can install any of the Appstore goodies. Like how I am typing this from the WordPress app I just installed and it’s free. With these apps and my Nokia N95, I’m feeling the power of mobile user experience ‘firsthand’.
Screenshot (press power+home) of the Labyrinth game.

Bat-mobile

I love the new Batman movie. Watched it during the first weekend of release, reached the movie theatre four hours early, lined up for over an hour just to get good seats and it was all worth it. It is not just a cartoon super hero movie, but also takes a deeper dive into the root of human emotions. For example, Joker, like batman, may have had a traumatic childhood, but it is how he dealt with adversity and the choices he made that separates Batman and Joker. At the end, ‘Choices’ also play a key part in deciding the fate of two other major characters. I won’t give it away just in case you haven’t watched it yet. Anyway, what does batman got to do with mobile? – A loooot.

Batman: The Dark Knight is a movie that is based on current day emerging technologies and mobile is one of them. Cell phone acts as the trigger and the receiver for Joker’s bomb blasts. The sweetest example was when Batman hacks into everyone’s cell phone in Gotham to locate Joker (mobile security hmmm). When asked, “how cell phone can help you find joker?”, Batman answered, “…using cell tower information you can triangulate his position….”. When he said ‘triangulate’ I almost jumped and fell out of my seat, lol!

Talking about batman and mobile brings me to another topic The ‘Batmobile’ itself. I was fortunate to see the newest Batmobile up close and personal as I was walking around in Toronto downtown. Here are some pictures taken from my Nokia N95 and uploaded to flickr directly from the phone’s photo sharing application,

Want to see some cool history of batmobile, visit http://superherouniverse.com/wiki/Batmobile

Featuring the IBM session for 2008 Wireless & Mobile Conference

I will present a feature discussion entitled “Mobilizing the Web – A Handheld Experience” at the upcoming 2008 Wireless & Mobile Expo and Conference, scheduled on July 15 & 16, 2008 in Toronto, Canada.

The Wireless Mobile Expo and Conference will bring into light the latest products and solutions that brought appreciable revolution in the worlds approach to the technology in the Wireless and Mobile service industry. For more info and schedules, check out wirelessandmobile.wowgao.com. Furthuremore, if you type ‘Mahmood Ashek’ in Google, you can see my session being highlighted in multiple press releases 🙂 (eg. IBM will present..)

In this feature presentation, participants will learn about emerging opportunities and challenges facing the mobile Web, cross-platform development using mobile web technologies, and how IBM Customer Facing Solutions Group (CFS) is developing concurrent Web, kiosk, and mobile solutions for a seamless multi-channel user experience. Mobile applications that can revolutionize customer experiences and are excellent business opportunities for various industries will also be highlighted. In addition, experiences from our development of a mobile check-in solution, which enables customers to check into flights while using phones as boarding passes will be discussed.
You can download the presentation slides from SlideShare. Here is the link.
Here is a sneak peak,

My resume as a tag cloud

Mobilizing the Web: Extending Human-Computer Interactions

‘Mobilizing the Web’ is a new blog series, here I will take a deeper drive at the topic of Mobile-Web Convergence. The goal is to help business owners determine how their organization can mobilize its on-line strategy and provide solution developers with enough knowledge to get started with the development for mobile context. The series will provide an overview of emerging mobile technologies, the industry opportunities, and IBM’s mobile application initiatives.

In today’s society, the Web has revolutionized how we consume, publish, and interact with information, but up to now it has only been accessible to people with desktop computers. But in our fast-paced always on the go society – businesses, organizations and individuals need to interact with others while being mobile. Today the Web and the mobile ecosystem are truly converging as these mobile devices are becoming more sophisticated and the web is extending to embrace the mobile platform.

Moreover, with four mobile phones purchased for every one personal computer, there’s a world of people for whom the mobile phone is the main access point to the Internet. The number of total subscribers is expected to reach half of the population of the planet by then end of this decade.

Take a look at this world map displaying countries with over 70% of population subscribed to mobile (darker orange shades indicate higher penetration of mobile devices).

US and Canada, with over 80% of mobile users, still don’t show the darkest shades of orange found on countries in Africa, South East Asia, or South America. In fact, most of these emerging countries have over 90% of population with mobile subscription. This is likely to be very significant in developing countries, where Web-capable mobile devices may play as similar a role in deploying wide-spread Web access as the mobile phone has played for providing “plain old telephone service”.

Truly, by leveraging on mobile devices, the Web can reach a much wider audience, and at all times in all situations. It has the opportunity to reach into places where wires cannot go, to places previously unthinkable (e.g. providing medical info to mountain rescue scenes) and to accompany everyone as easily as they carry the time on their wristwatches. To end this post, I will show another world map displaying Countries with IBM revenue growth greater than 10 percent in local currency in 2007.

Now compare this map to the previous and you will quickly realize why mobile is the next big channel for human-computer interaction for all markets.

Next Up: Introducing Mobile 2.0

Ashek’s here…IBM’s Mobile Solution Architect

I was recently invited to present at IBM Web 2.0 Summit in New York. It was a great opportunity for me to meet the thought leaders of IBM and get a tour of the Big Apple at the same time. The summit was held at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center near Yorktown, which is about 1 hour north of NYC. It was a serene place with lots of mountains and rivers, where I enjoyed 3 days of great discussions on web, mobile, virtual worlds, social computing, and other emerging technologies and IBM’s overall global business outlooks.

The summit wrapped up on Thursday and I took Friday off to enjoy a weekend in Manhattan. We stayed in a suit at Benjamin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (highly recommended) and in a fast NYC weekend, did some shopping, met a few friends and went to a club lounge, walked around at Times Square, visited Madam Tussauds wax museum, watched standup comedies.

We hopped on a flight back to Toronto on Sunday night and on Monday, I attended IBM Canada’s Blue Horizon Conference, where once again I was presenting ‘Mobilizing the Web’ (my topic for Web 2.0 Summit in NY). I talked about the emerging mobile technologies, new age business applications we can build, and provided mobile user experience best practices. My presentation was liked by many and I was very pleased with all the feedbacks. Some pictures from Blue Horizon to end this journey.