World Economic Forum Article Discussion

Articles of interest from the World Economic Forum:

23andMe -- the ability to find others with a similar genetic pattern opens many doors for healthcare. Imagine fighting a new disease and being able to network with others who are fighting the same illness. The ability to find donors for treatment and to share experiences could bring a huge paradigm shift to healthcare. If it wasn't $1000, I'd try it.

InSightec -- The issue I have with modern medicine is that some doctors feel that invasive surgery is the only way to treat certain illnesses and diseases. InSightec could do great things for treating breast cancer (which can have terrible physical side effects) and I'm an anxious to hear more about this technology.

Neurosynaptics Comms - With the idea of telemedicine, I am interested in when the technology will be good enough that doctors will be able to perform surgeries from a remote location using high speed internet to transfer back images of the patient and using robotic arms (or machines)to actually perform the surgery .

Kayak.com - I have used this service and I really like how it aggregates my results from other vendors to find the cheapest price on flights. I believe there are other competitors in this industry that are doing the same thing but perhaps kayak could use it's services in other industries (i.e. compare a clothing brand across 5 major retail stores, a model of car across 5 different dealerships). This will help consumers find the best price without the hassle of doing large amounts of research. The chart feature is really neat if the user is flexible on travel dates. I find this is one of the most difficult tasks to do is research different dates easily and quickly. This worked great.

Lumio - I have seen this technology many years ago when it was used to project a keyboard on an office desk. The person sitting at the desk was typing on this "virtual" keyboard and, from what I remember, the user found this very uncomfortable on their fingers. Perhaps other applications could prove to be more effective for this technology than the virtual keyboard. Correction: After looking on their website, this could be huge in the medical industry where keyboards must be kept clean. Same goes for clean rooms like clean rooms in the semiconductor industry.