I caught a small part of the live broadcast on the FCC website. While I was impressed that the presentations from GE and Philips were done using Prezi, even more compelling were the great applications of MBAN technology. In hospitals, it will eventually mean the disappearance of those clumsy, dehumanizing, and infection causing wires.

Instead, bandaid-like sensors will broadcast to receivers, which can then make this bio-data available to doctors down the corridor or in another city.

More intriguingly, patients with, say, a chronic heart condition can wear an MBAN device to transmit EKG to their cell phone, which can then relay it to the hospital. So the next time the patient has a checkup, doctors can review a month’s worth of heart data, rather than a less-meaningful snapshot EKG taken during a medical exam.

The Notice of Proposed Rule Making on this spectrum is now almost 3 years old. As with anything involving the FCC and spectrum, there were filings from lots of parties–the WiFi Alliance and the aeronautics industry to name just two key players.

This is good news for hospitals, medical researchers, and for, I hope, lots of new startups–perhaps some in NY/NJ area?– that will take advantage of this technology.

My calendar is filling up with appointments and presentations I’d like to attend. If you want me to hear and see your venture, contact me at: editor at technoverseblog.com.

By the way, there are pics from Disrupt NYC 2011 posted on our Facebook page. Gaze in wonder.

In my brief tour of the booths and desks at Startupalooza, I came upon a medical monitoring watch-like gadget, an inpatient nurse notification tablet, and a GPS-based cellular device for monitoring fleets and teenage driving patterns. All these startups are on the verge of attracting more investment and getting more attention in the marketplace.

Taking it from the top, Vesag focuses on personal medical sensor that can transmit bio-information over a wireless or cellular network. At their desk, I saw their Advanced Medical Watch. Think of it as one of those G-Shock-sized watches but with a built-in GPS, accelerometer, and wireless ZigBee router that links up with other Vesag sensors. The Vesag watch gathers temperature, blood pressure, and EKG, along with location coordinates and then sends this bio data over a cell network to notify doctors, nurses, and caregivers of potential emergencies.

Vesag’s Advanced Medical Watch has obvious applications in hospitals and independent living environments or any other remote monitoring situation. Company founder, Rajendra Sadhu, came up with the idea when he wanted to keep tabs on his elderly parents back in India and view in real-time their vital information. Necessity or distant mothers can be the mother of invention.

NYC-based StarlingHealth has another medical related product, called Starling, that takes on the patient-nurse communications in hospital settings. Anyone who’s ever tried to hail a nurse will readily see the value prop here. Patients are given a touch-sensitive tablet on which common requests for, say, food, medications, and bed adjustments, are represented as icons. Starling aggregates and prioritizes requests from all patients, feeding them to the appropriate nurse or aide, who can the view the medical situation on their own specialized tablet app.

Starling, by the way, will do any necessary language translations–I saw a demo of Spanish to English and back-again at their booth. The Starling back-end system supports workflows with standardized templates so nurses can respond with just a click to take care of the most common requests.

There is lots of competition here, with big players like Hill-Rom and Conexall– don’t ask how I know about them, I just do. But Starling appears to be a less expensive solution and may have a nice market in smaller hospitals or departments within larger institutions.

Global Telematic Solutions was my last stop at Startupalooza. They have a palm-size embedded system that can be used by fleets to monitor driving behaviors of their drivers. The driver, so to speak, behind this product are usage-based insurance polices–they are being offered!–in which insurances rates dynamically reflect driving patterns.

So with GTS’s Data Logger plugged into the truck’s computer system sending telematics through its CDMA chipset, the insurance company can monitor speed limits, mileage, and other behaviors. Good drivers are rewarded with better rates.

Dennis Lottero, VP of Business Development at GTS, mentioned that this same gadget has other applications, especially in the consumer market. Parents can monitor the activity of their teenage drivers, configuring notifications when they use the family car outside of given hours or beyond an electronic fence or over a certain speed. Lottero told me that GTS supports an SDK so that third-party developers can create their own apps.

I had to run out before the formal pitches were made in the evening, so I don’t have the judges final verdicts on this group of startups. Anyway, I’ll go out on a limb by saying that Startupalooza attracts serious, mostly NJ startups that deserve more attention that some of the things I’m seeing on the other side of the river.

Politis told me that with the success of DomainWatch, which has several hundred corporate users, he was getting feedback for new features. Ultimately users comments were transformed into the new FlashPanel product. While DomainWatch manages Google Apps resources, such as documents, calendars, and access rights, FlashPanel has its aim on email and user administration.

“FlashPanel helps with onboarding, it helps with de-provisioning users when you need to suspend someone’s account and backup their mailbox and let new people who are emailing know that person is no longer with the company. All of that is built into the product as predefined workflows,” Politis told me in our phone conversation.

Politis also emphasized the security aspects to FlashPanel, which included the ability to monitor email content. It’s a capability that companies who wanted to move from Microsoft Exchange–yes people, corporate email can be easily audited–to Google Apps had been asking Politis for.

In my own conversations over the last few months with IT directors, I have been more than a little surprised to hear Google Apps being mentioned. It’s especially popular at universities. Politis has seen the same thing, and in fact, has written a post for Mashable about growing up Google– you start out in college with Chat and Gmail, and then continue in the corporate world.

So with my beta login, I was able to play system admin with FlashPanel in my own mini Google Apps environment. In short: it’s got a Googley feel, and far simpler and easier to use than that other company’s software found in most Fortune 1000 servers.

Along with the new product, BetterCloud also pulled in $2 million in seed funding from angel investors with backgrounds in enterprise IT.

According to Politis, the money is being plowed into product development and also “on developing new channel partners as part of a longer term strategy.”

Peter Bergman, a “strategic advisor to CEOs”, gave his C-level readers a procedure that will quickly get them through their inbox chores.

Perhaps you may be following his method already? It is as follows:

Give yourself a half-hour to: (1) write and send new emails, (2) delete emails you don’t need, (3) respond to emails that are worthy of a response, (4) save to folders everything else, and (5) review emails in your saved folders.

This reminds me, that in just about every company I’ve worked at, with the exception of a few tech ones, the C-level crew and their immediate charges have been profoundly computer illiterate. They may know the part number of every product, have memorized their financial spreadsheets for the last 12 quarters, and can recite the pitch for their 60-page company roadmap Powerpoint without taking a breath.

But for CxOs, email, word processing, and that thing called Google are low-level skills that are not worthy of their time.

Bloomberg went as far as to hire one Gregory S. Crawford, Professor of Economics at Warwick University, to study the distribution of news channels in Comcast’s offering and to see if they were some kind of random occurrence. In other words, Crawford analyzed whether Fox, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN, to name just a few major players, just happened to be in adjacent channels in the Comcast network.

Seriously.

Crawford came up with the startling conclusion that this was not a roll of the dice, as Comcast kind of claimed, because four or five consecutive news channels would happen by chance a mere 1% of the time.

Well, this convinced me. But Comcast, of course, is a much harder case to crack, and besides they have lots of lawyers, who didn’t need to be told to fire off a response.

Remember when Comcast bought NBC-Universal? As a condition of the merger, an FCC order required Comcast to allow independent news providers entry into existing news neighborhoods.

In its defense, Comcast said even if these mythical news neighborhoods existed, the wording of this condition actually required it to let Bloomberg set up shop only in future newsy parts of the channel, not in existing ones.

Yesterday, the FCC’s Media Bureau decided against Comcast, and agreed with Bloomberg. Here is the key part of their stunning conclusion:

You got that Comcast? News neighborhoods exist, and the Comcast-NBCU Order requires that Bloomberg
can live in them.

It should come as no surprise that Comcast said it would appeal.

How about 40 or so hackers working with the Sphero SDK this past weekend to gain hacker glory and also win valuable tech gadgetry.

I got to see the results of their efforts at DevCamp Mobile NYC’s concluding demo hour on Sunday. In the minutes leading up to the final presentation, I gazed as Spheros careened around the hackathon room blinking and glowing different colors. Not your typical NYC hack event.

For those curious about what’s inside Orbotix’s digital spheroid, you may want to watch this video. It’s described by one of the founders as being a miniaturized Segway, which means its performing zillions of complicated positioning adjustments in real-time.

The other unusual gadget accessory the DevCamp hackers were experimenting with was NeuroSky’s MindWave. That’s the Star Trek-level EEG headset that can detect basic brain frequencies–concentration, meditation, and even eye blinking –and then, with their APIs, can be used to control just about anything that can be connected to an app.

Say, for example, linking to a Sphero.

The team known as Brattle mashed up these two technologies to create a battle of brain-waves app, pitting opponents’ ability to concentrate and thus move the Sphero’s in one direction or the other with their MindWave gear. Team Brattle ended up with a winning hack.

In a less competitive vein, the SpheroMynd crew instead focused their efforts on getting a MindWave wearer to direct the trajectory of a Sphero ball. The concept behind this hack is that if you could tune your brainwaves at the right level, Sphero would carve out ever narrower gyres. If not, the Sphero would instead orbit out to the next town. This team picked up an award as well.

I had the chance to chat with Adam Wilson, Orbotix’s Chief Software Architect, and learned about the amazing effort that went into engineering the Sphero. It’s built from commodity motor and digital parts, but with impressive IP that’s embedded and, yes, very well encrypted, into their firmware.

For those hackers inspired by this post, Adam tells me there is multi-city hackathon tour in the works. And there’s an event planned for NYC in the next few months. Check their blog for more details.

A casual observer of this event would not have failed to notice that DevCamp hackers had a strong urge to add a musical ingredient to their Sphero apps. For example, the Rock-n-Roll Sphero team managed to get this bot-ball to make right and left turns based on different guitar notes.

And a solo hacker, by the name of Jesse, took on the larger task of programming Sphero to dance in rhythm to different rock genres. Unfortunately, technical glitches prevented him from getting very far.

During his presentation, though, we all got a glimpse of this hack’s potential, as the Sphero bumped-and-grinded to the hard beat of “Born Under a Bad Sign”.

I was impressed.

If Jesse wants to post a KickStarter project to fund a Sphero-based adaptation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, count us in for $50.

Unlike the mobile app generators I’ve written about–EachScape, Infinite Monkeys, One Pager– Yapp is less of a generic tool and more of a focused appliance for scheduling and managing events.

With Yapp, you select from a gallery of cover-page templates for your virtual invite card, which then can be customized with a pic, and all the event details. Other pages in the card can include a twitter stream (with, say, the hashtag of the event), photo gallery, and the list of who’s attending.

There is also a function to add and manage invitees. And that’s about it.

Your guests receive an email with a link to Yapp’s app–say that three times–in the iPhone store or Android marketplace. The app is free of course.

For small businesses, Yapp can be a real time saver. Based on living in my small New Jersey town, it’s come to my attention I’m always receiving one-off emails from restaurants and stores inviting me to special events. Many times there’s minimal or clumsy use of graphics in these invitations. Yapp, on the other, hand can produce simple and professional marketing that would improve the brand-appeal for these SMBs.

Sure, Yapp can be used by everyone else for their own personal parties and gathering. That is a crowded space that they may not want to compete in.

Instead, I like Yapp more as small-biz software. If the developers can make it a little more interactive with a few special features for reservations or polling, then it would be more appealing.

Yapp is currently in beta.

There’s not much new information, but you are given a panoramic view of the existing terrain. I’d like to fact check the part about Verizon having 30 call centers for its customer base of 90 million.

I know a few things about call center technology–don’t ask–and the more interesting and harder to get data is on things like average wait time and first call resolution.

When I was at a Tech@NYU event on Monday, Adam Penenberg, NYU professor and journalist, from just about out of nowhere started complaining about AT&T’s service in the course of his interview of David Lee. This did make sense in the context of his next point on the power of social media. To remedy his billing problem, Penenberg tweeted about it. That finally got the attention of AT&T’s customer service, which does actively monitor the tweet stream.

I suppose you can consider Twitter, and the occasional blog post, as a kind of customer service interaction for certain companies.