Human Longevity and Virtual Worlds Day 2 Abundance 360 highlights

Phew... I'm exhausted. It has been a huge conference and every day - nay, every hour - has brought more exciting opportunities and topics that make my mind buzz with possibility: human longevity; integrated, personalised medicine; virtual worlds, virtual reality...

Here are some questions that came out of Day 2 that really changed up the level of thinking:

Human Longevity
1. How does life and your behaviours change if humans live to 150, if 100 is the new 60?
2. DNA contains all the necessary information for cellular life. We are just beginning to understand the interaction of the human system with the microbiome. How would you feel if your doctor prescribed you bacteria?

Virtual Worlds
1. Could virtual reality environments, like SecondLife, revolutionise the way we interact with each other? The conference attendees were excited about the possibility of improving the usual boring conference calls with avatars and (gulp) replacing the corporate offsite with "virtual holidays" to Maui...
2. You can buy property, virtual furnishings and even virtual clothes in virtual worlds. Real money is exchanged for these virtual items. With 39 million VR head mounted displays (to be covered in next article) expected to be sold by 2018, what does a new world (and a platform) mean to your business? Your life?

This is essentially a mindset shake up, another advent of totally different platform and technology, requiring different ways of thinking about some age old problems (quality of health, aesthetics, communication, connection, cost savings, entertainment...).

#virtualreality #longevity

Ever Forward - Abundance360 Day 1

Hi peeps, writing from the Abundance 360 conference  +abundance360. This is a conference for Entrepreneurs "passionate about generating extraordinary wealth while creating a world of abundance". Essentially, future focused decision makers and dreamers with exponential growth and change in mind.

My mind has exploded about two or three times just in the first module. (Thank you Roger James Hamilton for telling me I should come to this event) I totally thought I would be intimidated by these giants of industry and a bit reluctant to "network" but instead, found everyone here to be lovely, warm and totally like us: inspired by the future and excited about improving their businesses and taking life to the next level!!!

This was this morning's activity with Peter Diamandis that blew my mind: "Identify your 10x problem and its solution - and write it down like it's a science fiction story. What's the evidence that it's possible in the next decade?".

My big a-ha is that my businesses (ultimately) have all be about making healthcare sustainable in the face of massive and rapid technological change.

• What would the healthcare system look like if we lived to 150? 
• What would we as individuals have to do differently? 

Thinking about it like a science fiction story let me dream wildly. Thinking about the evidence let me consider the possibility of it coming into reality in my lifetime... and being part of that movement.

The example would be the vision of taking the 1970s reality of a solo 2 tonne computer and having the science fiction story of computers being small enough to fit into a watch and talk to other devices (and yet, here we are...).

In a discussion with another health entrepreneur, though, we had the realisation that it wasn't the science fiction writers that (arguably) created the most value per-say, but the engineers and business decision-makers that made the hard calls and thought creatively to step humanity in smaller bounds towards that vision. It took guts, determination, self-belief, lateral thinking, funding, community engagement and feedback. The gentleman next to me reflected on health as an orchestra, with a conductor and a composer and the various musicians doing their part.

So, not unlike all movements, or great opera of work: we've got to keep that momentum, that energy of a compelling future and take those shuffling steps and move them into single bounds.

Fail forward, keep moving forward, ever forward.

In this story: +abundance360, +RogerJamesHamilton, +PeterDiamandis

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality - What can Startups do?

If anyone had seen me this morning, I was *that* gym bunny in the Beverly Hills Hilton who stopped running just so she could read the paper.

What had caught my eye was the Financial Time's front page reference to Microsoft and Artificial Reality (full article on p14). It's a highly recommended read. Richard Waters' article is a quick, crisp guide to the Virtual reality (VR) vs Augmented reality (AR) landscape, drawing comparison to the advent of the #Realitywars much in the way the battle forces amassed in the www.Browserwars.com of the 90s and 00s.

There are the usual suspects, the big hardware players (Sony and Samsung), but where it gets interesting is that unlike the battle of twenty year's past, the software makers (eg Microsoft, Facebook and Google) are also wading into the war and arguably have more clout with cross platform applicability in the days of iOS vs Android vs Windows.

This puts the old hardware vendors (and all the startups in the VR / AR hardware space) into an interesting predicament.

To play well, to play beyond the niche, you'll need a bit of cross-platform cooperation from the same platform software vendors entering the VR / AR space.

This then becomes a game of strategy, particularly timing and niche appeal. It helps a little that the whispers around CES '15 for OculusRift's release date was as late as "early 2016".  So what can you do?

I spent the last 10 days in SF and Silicon Valley immersing myself in the AR / VR scene, attending as many AR and VR events, including talks by HealthTech Women, an excellent showcase by UPLOAD and a Meetup by SFHTML5.

Here's what I saw: the VR solutions, for its very ability to create a truly immersive experience, appeal to isolated environment experiences, mostly not requiring typing (feature not yet fully functioning) or interacting with text. VR vendors (small and large) have consequently focused on gaming or situational plays that lend itself to replaying and re-enacting scenarios (which have promising implications for therapy).

AR solutions attempt to walk a middle-ground: a balance of (currently, hardly) unobtrusive access to information when you require it and the ability to interact with your real-life environment. I've seen a variety of solutions and I'm sure there's more to come. The field of visual graphical language is evolving, with no small part being played by the illustrious Tony Parisi and co. The biggest challenges, I think, will be high-quality visual integration (how do you get a screen to be visible and unobtrusive at the same time?), content supply (volume of skilled talent and that old platform chestnut again), integration with existing eyewear and avoiding a completely scary-looking/socially-unacceptable device hanging off the front of someone's face.

For either AR or VR new entrants, the Holy Grail here is a mobile, untethered solution, with text and visual display interaction capabilities, ideally hooked into an augmented audio experience with voice command and bone conduction hearing. It's secure, not heavy on the nose, allows users to wear glasses (I mean, c'mon) and syncs effortlessly with your other devices. The basic features you want of your phone (call coming in, calendar, contacts and battery power) with the entertainment of your TV and the information access of your, well, everything.

And, just like that sacred object, may it endow its bearer with super powers.


Dr Grace Lai (+Grace Lai) is the Founder and Managing Director of a medical software business in Australia. She is an ex-IDC analyst, specialising in Infrastructure Software, Asia/Pacific and Japan business trends, as well as Strategy, Marketing and Operations. She also knows how to do a craniotomy, which nowadays comes in handy during awkward social situations.

+Financial Times +Tony Parisi @sfshtml5 @Healthtechwomen
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality - What can Startups do?

Finding the edge, SF 11 Jan, 2015

Headed down to Redwood City, to catch up with a friend.

"Over here is Box's new headquarters," she said, pointing to a open walled, multistorey monolith, rising above a suburban supermarket parking lot. "They IPO next month, so.... Once I got lost and found Sandisk around the corner. It's like driving through the Internet."

Ahh, Silicon Valley and its beguiling suburban charm. It is a long way from the rest of the world: its own ecosystem, which makes looking for the edge a little hard if you aren't immersed in the action.

So, I'm here to learn where the edge is in neurological health solutions, both software, device and services. It's partly because my unique career has provided experiences in neurological surgery, business operations and IT market analysis. It is also because it is one of the hottest areas to come in the healthcare IT market. It also helps that I will then join the Abundance 360 mentoring circle and be part of Singularity University's kick off in LA in late January.

The "systematic disruption" of technology through the field of health has a beautiful double meaning: not only has it thoroughly revolutionized the way we practice medicine (remember when the only way to see a film was to fumble through the archive boxes, one by one?), speeding up and informing (?well) our decision processes. Technology is also moving through each system of the body. We see heart monitors on chests, then wrists, then ears, then woven into shirts.... We have musculoskeletal splints then crutches, then prostheses and exoskeletons. Now we can even wire it into the spinal cord.

The challenge with the brain? That we don't know what we don't know. The majority of the anatomy and physiology of the heart has been well documented for over 200 years. Neurosurgery as a specialty has been around for about half as long as that and as recently as three years ago we accepted that it really did have a lymphatic (or glymphatic) system to explain what it did with all its metabolic wastes.

So, neurological-oriented innovations stands as the Great Challenge because of the nature of the organ, what man has been able to comprehend of it and the complexity of its utility beyond the structure and function we can discern (the role of the mind, for example). Think of the possibilities!!

Looking forward to meeting as many companies passionate about neurological technology, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, EEG devices, virtual and augmented reality companies... Come one, come all. Maybe we can crack this code together.