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The Buy-In-Bulk Edition Sunday, March 19, 2017

iPads In Every Hospital: Apple’s Plan To Crack The $3 Trillion Health Care Sector, by Christina Farr, Fast Company

An iPad might not seem revolutionary in the internet age, but it’s actually a big step forward for patients to have digital health information at their fingertips. Many doctors, like Cedars Sinai’s Shaun Miller, remember a time even five years ago, when many processes were still paper-based and medical information sat in silos. It took a $35 billion investment from the federal government back in 2009 with the HITECH Act to kick-start the process to digitize health data. Even today, many patients still receive their health data on a USB stick or CD-ROM, making the shift to mobile at some hospitals truly cutting-edge. [...]

For Apple, the $3 trillion health care sector offers a lot of potential for growth for its iPad. The company is likely to restate its commitment to the tablet device as early as next week, with the rumored announcement of the 9.7-Inch “iPad Pro 2.” From an enterprise sales perspective–a priority for the iPhone maker in the wake of recent partnerships with Cisco and IBM–large hospitals and health systems that shift to iOS tend to buy devices in bulk. “We now have hundreds of iPads for patients to use,” says Miller, who uses a compliant iPhone app called Voalte to text with other providers. “As we expand to more wards, it’ll be thousands.”

Ida Tin’s Battle To Build Clue, A Period-Tracking App, by Lindsay Gellman, New Yorker

Tin’s experience highlights a blind spot in the global investment community, which has been eager to throw cash at the next food-delivery or ride-sharing app but tends to shun products by and for women—or else hangs back and lets them twist in the wind for too long. When it comes to menstruation-related products, and technologies catering to women’s health more broadly, Tin said, “there’s still a social taboo.” This squeamishness may come as little surprise, given the demographics of the venture-capital world. A recent study of the top hundred V.C. firms around the world found that just seven per cent of active investing partners are women, and that companies founded by women have received just a tenth of global venture-round funding. Yet the demand is inarguably there. The international market for feminine-hygiene products—physical items like tampons and sanitary pads—is projected to hit forty billion dollars by 2020, according to the market-research firm Global Industry Analysts. For decades, the space has been dominated by consumer-goods giants like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, which have had little incentive to develop new technologies. And the barrier to entry for newcomers, no matter how scrappy, is enormous. It took more than a year for Ridhi Tariyal, a Harvard engineer, and her business partner Stephen Gire to find investors willing to stomach their invention—a “smart” tampon dubbed NextGen Jane, capable of testing menstrual blood for warning signs of cancer and reproductive diseases.

A ‘Community’ Of One: The Times Gets Tailored, by Liz Spayd, New York Times

Scholars of mass media long ago established the theory that part of a society’s bond comes from the shared experience of consuming the same news. We shape our worldview, our opinions — however different they are from one another — after reading about and watching many of the same things. We gain a sense of community, however false or fleeting.

Even as social media and algorithms started changing all that, there remained media giants like The New York Times that gave millions of readers around the world a unified news experience.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. By midyear, The Times will begin an ambitious new effort to customize the delivery of news online by adjusting a reader’s experience to accommodate individual interests. What readers see when they come to The Times will depend on factors like the specific subjects they are most interested in, where they live or how frequently they come to the site.

Apple Engineer Converts Used Van Into Mobile Laundromat, Offers Free Loads To Homeless, by Garvin Thomas, NBC Bay Area

Driving the streets of Santa Cruz in a van he outfitted with two washers and dryers, the Scotts Valley resident visits homeless shelters and encampments, offering to help keep what few clothes they have clean. The service he offers, Powers said, is not only a chance to do some good but make a connection.

“It's one thing to wash someone's clothes, even to feed them and help them, but it's another to feed the soul,” he said.

Stuff

Four Of The Best Casual Photography And Filter Apps For iPhone, by Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider

Unlike a traditional filter app where you add after you take the picture, Hipstamatic allows you to pick films, lenses, and flashes and layer them together before the picture is taken.

Hipstamatic is designed to emulate the feeling of using a traditional camera with specialty lenses and films. However, the apps more modern incarnations actually let you change the filters in case you're not a big fan of the result.

'Incidence' Review - Follow The Bouncing Ball, by Chris Carter, TouchArcade

Puzzle fiends should have a grand old time picking it up while it lasts.

Notes

Apple Dodges Questions Over NZ Tax, by Radio New Zealand

Technology giant Apple has dodged questions over a report it paid no tax in New Zealand in a decade.

Instead, Apple responded by saying it paid most of its tax in the United States, where the company was based.

Tim Cook Says Apple Not Aiming For Specific China Market Share, by Bloomberg

China has unique characteristics, in that its mobile payment market is well ahead of the U.S. and local consumers have a greater willingness to change habits, Cook said at a panel discussion at the China Development Forum in Beijing. He added that Apple’s new research and development centers in the country should help the company reach China’s university community.

How I Became Addicted To Online Word Games, by Liesl Schillinger, New York Times

This revelation came after a friend spotted a battered Boggle box on a shelf in the rental house and asked me to join her in a round. I hadn’t played the physical, letter-dice-and-egg-timer version of the game in a decade, but in my teens I had been a Boggle demon, the terror of my high-school word nerd crowd. Afraid I would demoralize my friend if I unleashed my full word-seeking powers, I resolved to lose the first game. And then she flipped the timer, and I looked down at the letters on the tray, and despaired. I saw F-E-E-N and F-E-A-N; F-E-A-Z-E, F-A-N-T and F-E-N-T; S-P-E-E-R and E-T-H-S.

Were they real words? I had no idea. I had played them countless times in Words With Friends, but couldn’t remember which ones had scored points and which had been rejected, or what any of them meant, if anything. Unlike the tabletop games Boggle and Scrabble, Words With Friends has no penalty for guessing.

Bottom of the Page

Doesn't the sale of Apple products carry Goods & Service Tax (GST) in New Zealand? And, if I am reading that Wikipedia article correctly, even Apple services -- iCloud, Apple Music, etc -- incurs the collectio of GST? I am genuinely confused.

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Given Apple's apparent love of the album covers, I am surprised to find there are screens in iTunes where album covers are not being prominently featured. For example: Library > Genres > * in iTunes for macOS.

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At the rate which we, all over the world, are voting people to destroy civlisation, I will like a newspaper for one, where it only brings me news that I can stomach.

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Thanks for reading.