Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Iltifat Husain
Editor’s Note: Iltifat Husain is the founder and Editor-in-chief of iMedicalApps.com, a physician-operated technology review publication and is currently an Emergency Medicine resident physician at Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine.
The significant adoption of smartphones among physicians has not only led to an explosion of medical apps aimed at healthcare providers, but it has also cultivated an emerging trend of health and wellness apps aimed at empowering patients.
While great innovation is happening in the health and wellness mobile ecosystem, it’s difficult for patients and physicians to navigate through the large database of apps to
find ones they can actually use. My experience reviewing health and medical apps as a writer, combined with my experiences in a high volume Emergency Department that sees a diverse patient population, has allowed me to get a unique sense of this space.
Looking back, I’ve come to realize that there are three apps in particular that I routinely prescribe to my patients, as they are not only meaningful to physicians, but truly empower patients (and their families) and help them better understand their treatment and what’s going on with their bodies.
These three apps help patients and their family members get a better understanding of the cancer treatment process, help women in pregnancy understand their baby’s development, and help children and adults learn how to manage their diabetes.
All three apps are backed by venerable organizations already trusted by millions of patients worldwide. And just to make it clear up front: I have no relationships, financial or personal, with the developers or companies of the applications mentioned.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Geoloqi - Geoloqi - A powerful platform for mobile location, messaging, and analytics
Geoloqi - Geoloqi - A powerful platform for mobile location, messaging, and analytics:
Geoloqi makes it easy to add location to your applications
'via Blog this'
Geoloqi makes it easy to add location to your applications
'via Blog this'
Friday, March 9, 2012
Blue or Green
Android has become the world’s best-selling smartphone OS, but with the platform made free to OEMs, it’s perhaps natural for observers to jump on every story that looks like it points to Google suddenly trying to make money out of it in ways that it hasn’t before.
The latest chapter in that story comes from the newsdesk of Reuters, which last night published an article claiming that developers have been getting heat from Google to stop using third-party payment services from the likes of PayPal, Zong (also a part of PayPal) and Boku, and if they don’t — they would get ejected from Google’s app store, formerly known as the Android Market and now being marketed as Google Play. One small problem, though: Google says that nothing has changed in its policy and that the story is a non-starter.
That’s not entirely accurate; a few things have changed: Google rebranded its in-app billing service when it changed the name of the Android Market to Google Play earlier this week. It’s now called “Google Play In-app Billing.” And the company is making a concerted effort to drive more business through that app store.
Reuters’ story suggests that “Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering,” and cites an incident from August 2011, when a developer was sent a note from Google ordering it to switch to Google’s own payment services, or else get rejected from the Android Market (now known as Google Play).
The rub is that Google’s service takes a 30 percent cut to Google on all transactions — same as Apple’s in-app payment service — but that some third-party payment services take less.
A Google spokesperson, however, tells us that in fact Google has had the same policies in place for in-app payments — requiring developers to use Google’s own service — since they were launched last March.
The exceptions to these, he notes, have been the same as before: if it’s a good that is not consumed within the app store — for example, a new clock from Amazon — then Google does not require developers to implement in-app billing to pay for it. But when it comes to content for the app itself, that’s when Google’s own billing kicks in.
“If [a developer] had been in breach of that, and we had only just noticed, that’s when we would send out a letter,” he said, explaining the letter that was sent out to a developer in August.
But while Google may not be changing its policies on how in-app payments are supposed to be used by Android developers, one area that does seem to be evolving is Google’s focus on making this into a more-used feature.
Given that the vast majority of app downloads are for free apps, there is always
The company last week expanded the number of currencies that it accepts for in-app payments — there are now eight: U.S. and Canadian Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Yen, and Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Krone. That gives developers who implement the service a wider market for distribution.
And in another incentive specifically for publishers, it looks like it is upgrading One Pass, the other in-app billing service it launched last year.
Unlike the in-app payments in Play, One Pass was Google’s specific offering for publishers, a route to selling editions and subscriptions via the Android platform.
Perhaps in a push to lure more publishers to Google’s own newsstand, Google takes only a 10 percent commission for One Pass transactions. Very little has been heard about One Pass since it launched a year ago, although the Google spokesperson noted that it’s in the process of getting upgraded “in response to publishers’ needs.” (We hope to find out more about what that means soon.)
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