Informatica

Yesterday, at the TechCrunch40 conference in the US, where "forty of the hottest new startups around the world will announce and demo their products", a service similar to Appointments Online was launched. ZocDoc provides appointment booking functionality but for the open market healthcare system that they have over in the US. A limited review of their presentation at the conference can be found here. You can see what people are saying about it on their blogs on Google's Blog Search.

Interesting link to the Healthcare 2.0 web sites active in the US.

"Earlier this month Adobe released their new cross-OS runtime that will allow developers to channel their existing web development skills including Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax, XML, Java, ActionScript and many others, into building and deploying desktop RIA’s or Rich Internet Applications. RIA’s are simply web-based applications that have the features and the functionality of conventional desktop applications.

And make no mistake, this is where the desktop computing environment for the enterprise is heading so read on and brush up."

For those of you interested in web technologies, these are two Adobe products that may well change the face of web applications in the future.

A great example of what you can deliver in a browser via Flex is FlexBook. For the medically minded among you there is an anatomy book example which is very, very nice. Try turning the pages of the book by clicking and dragging the corners with your mouse. (NOTE that you will need the Flash Player version 9 installed to run these).

Apollo is not yet released but its aim is to fuse web applications and the desktop. There are no demos that you can download yet but there are some videos to watch if you have some time on your hands. This video shows how ebay is experimenting with Apollo and this video shows some internal prototypes that Adobe has developed.

So is this interesting for web applications in healthcare? Let us know what you think.