91d437f0fb56cfb5b64de81b60bd6738

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/medcommons/

One of MedCommon’s offerings, HealthURL is a personal account hosted on Amazon Web Services. MedCommons HealthURL provides a web-based storage repository for consumers to store and share access to their health records. These temporary or long-term accounts live on Amazon S3 where they meet HIPAA requirements of security and redundancy.

“We choose AWS because of their reputation and the scalability of their solution,” states Adrian Gropper MD, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer. “We use Amazon S3, EC2, Elastic IP to store and host individual HealthURL accounts. Compared to traditional hosting providers, Amazon EC2 was easy to set up and pretty inexpensive. The fact that there’s no bandwidth costs between our gateways and long term storage servers will be a huge cost savings.”

With HealthURL, consumers can open an account and upload PDF files, DICOM imaging, CCR information, and other relevant medical data. Then, using credentials, patients can share access with family members, physicians, specialty providers, large hospital networks, or even employers. The patient maintains control of their identity and privacy by granting or revoking access to others as needed.

HealthURL accounts are a $2/month subscription plus a hosting fee. To determine the hosting fee and charge the subscription cost, MedCommons utilized Amazon DevPay to charge and meter customer usage. “DevPay tracks the actual storage and communications expenses for very large diagnostic imaging objects as well as service fees to be paid by the patient/consumer. This billing system saves a great deal of work and enables our transactional business model to compete with the ad-supported model of Google and Microsoft.”

MedCommons also utilizes Amazon FPS to manage direct and third party billing transactions between consumers and MedCommons or patients and doctors. Both Amazon FPS and DevPay allow MedCommons’ customers to simply pay using the existing payment information stored in their Amazon.com account.

With a scalable solution in place, MedCommons also had to consider HIPAA compliance of their application. “Our app was designed to be hosted in the cloud and patient-centric from the ground up. In order to be HIPAA compliant, we had to design our application to allow careful identity management, detailed activity logs, a secure console system that facilitates audit of users and accounts, a clear access consent mechanism, and a locked down app deployment procedure that provides a minimum attack surface—encryption and SSL certificates.”

“We have saved many man-years of work by going with AWS for our in-the-cloud, on-demand healthcare information service. The capability of usage-based pricing at the patient level adds commerce capabilities not available anywhere else. The confidence in the Amazon brand by consumers everywhere makes it our best choice for in-cloud storage and computing,” says MedCommons’ CEO Bill Donner.

I spent some time in researching Web2.0 and predicting Web3.0. Web3.0 gets me confused until I purchased a Nokia E71 two weeks ago. Let’s see some pictures captured from my E71

This is the main menu that doesn’t make much difference.

A Firefox like browser, with built- in Google search.

An all-in-one instant communication tool – Fring – that connects you in Skype, MSN, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, GoogleTalk and so on.

GoogleMaps tells where I live.

Wah, this is cool. A mobile Putty to connect my Linux machine. Perhaps it could become a console to manage Cloud from mobile device.

Built- in 802.1x encryption enables communication over Cisco LEAP Wifi

This is the screen of Wifi configuration covering WEP, WPA and 802.1x

All these is cool. All these is captured by ScreenShot. Have fun

I found this article published at PCMag and thought I should highlight some in red

Source > http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2320619,00.asp
Author > John Brandon

Cloud computing is set to take over the world, or at least possibly replace Microsoft Outlook. The cloud concept is simple: It’s a way to access your data and apps from anywhere, via the Internet (or “the cloud”). Yet everyone from Gartner Group to Google has a slightly different take on cloud computing: It can be anything from storing and sharing documents on Google Docs to running your entire company operations using a remote, third-party data center. Some envision it as a way to compute without operating systems, or pesky local client programs, and with minimal hardware needs (just a basic client machine).

“The most important single characteristic of a cloud is abstraction of the hardware from the service,” says John Willis, a noted cloud-computing expert and blogger, explaining that the location of the servers is not as important as easy access to the data. “However you define it, I think cloud technology will have a footprint in every business that does IT within the next five years.”

The particular type of cloud computing that the business world could take advantage of requires massive server cluster farms and superfast network bandwidth. It also requires that companies be ready to hand over their data to a third party. A few small companies, among them Zoho.com (which offers business apps, such as word processing and task lists) and Box.net (which supplies online file storage) have established themselves as SaaS (software as a service) providers, with varying degrees of success. But SaaS is primarily a race between Google and Microsoft to provide advertiser-supported cloud applications to customers.

Security is one critical issue that both companies must address. Depending on the SaaS provider, data can be encrypted from point to point, and since services are Web-based, they’re very easy to patch. Google, for example, can respond to a new security threat without customers even being aware of the problem—or the fix. But end users essentially would have to entrust their data to an outside entity, which is a big leap of faith. Dave Girouard, a VP and general manager at Google, says that the company is working to allay the fears that make trust difficult to achieve.

“Google is investing enormous amounts of capital and sweat equity to ensure that we can protect your data better than you can do yourself,” he says. “Cloud computing will be additive. Usage patterns will change, and users will look primarily to the cloud for most of the things they turn to their PCs for today.”

Yet others aren’t as optimistic about cloud computing. Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett cautions that it’s not quite ready for prime time. He says that the framework is in an early phase of development—it’s almost experimental, rather than a reliable and trusted computing paradigm.

Ironically, even though Google is battling to dominate the cloud, some of its apps, such as Google Earth, still cache a tremendous amount of data locally to speed up operations. Add to that the privacy, network bandwidth, and political hurdles yet to address, and it looks as if cloud computing will have to drop down to earth a bit more before it can enjoy widespread adoption by both consumers and businesses.

What happened about Titanic in year 1912? Let’s check it out

This image comes from http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser – a Times Machine service from NewYorkTimes. You could possibly browse a photocopy of newspaper of NewYorkTimes of any day during 1850 till 1920.

The storage could be in terabyte. Behind NewYorkTimes, Amazon introduces this technology architecture and makes this happen, by using it’s Simple Storage Services (S3) + Apache Hadoop on top of its own Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) . It’s known there are more than 405,000 jpeg or tiff files stored in this cloud environment.

It is a real commercial cloud computing service… Check the detail written by Derek Gottfrid

How does TimesMachine look like?

What is Hadoop? What technology is used? MapReduce

How does MapReduce work?

see the briefing information from Google > http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

And a comprehensive tutorial > http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/mapreduce-tutorial.html

Source: http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/…Web+services

The Web Services Protocol Stack UDDI is used to register and discover Web services, typically described in WSDL. The UDDI transactions use SOAP to talk to the UDDI server, and then the application uses SOAP to request the Web service. SOAP messages are actually delivered by HTTP and TCP/IP.

Amazon EC2′s architecture & offerings

June 17, 2008, Red Hat has announced their second offering on Amazon EC2 – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Now available on EC2‘s flexible, pay-as-you-go computing environment, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provides developers with the most popular clustered Java EE application server and next generation application frameworks to build innovative and scalable Java applications.

…

Earlier in May, Sun Microsystems and Amazon Web Services are collaborating to offer two open source solutions on Amazon EC2: OpenSolaris and MySQL technical support. With OpenSolaris OS on Amazon EC2, you have access to a robust operating system on a scalable, cost-effective virtual computing environment. And now MySQL Enterprise customers can choose to deploy their database on Amazon EC2 and receive full database software and production support from MySQL. These new offerings extend the breadth and support of EC2′s on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing environment. Learn about OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 and MySQL on EC2.

See other partners of Amazon in EC2 offering > http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s…36L942TSJ2AJA

Information Source > http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=…A36L942TSJ2AJA

What should IBM do when we see these logos and services there?