Andy Kessler

Real world catches up to (Grumby) fiction - Sighting #2

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points out these video camera sunglasses. In Grumby, the shades are a lot cooler - Oakleys, naturally - and without the dorky extra plastic. Still, all these zShades30 need are Bluetooth and self generating power and a little code and ...

An excerpt below.

3:31 p.m., April 27, Milpitas

The counter on the plasma TV reads 387,428. Software sales are tracking pretty well to Grumby sales. People are buying at least one application, many two or three. The office is hopping as usual. People are everywhere. I saw someone sitting on the torture chair using a laptop. We’ve got a lot to do.

RecordAll is a hit. Meeta set the price at $20 if you store all your conversations on your own PC. Or for $1 a month, we can store them for you, on Amazon’s servers. We figure that even if someone leaves it on 24 hours a day and records everything, our cost from Amazon for storage and bandwidth won’t come to much more than 10 cents. Not bad.

Meeta walks up to my desk. I have to do a double take. I’ve never seen Oakley sunglasses quite like the ones Meeta is wearing.

“Cool shades, where’d you get them?” I ask.

“This guy,” Meeta says, pointing to a guy in a Hawaiian shirt at his desk.

“Does he work for us?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Oakley.”

“I can see.” I say, focusing on my screen.

“He’s from Oakley.”

“Ohhh,” I turn around. “Any more of those?”

“Sure, I’ve got a whole bag. The name’s David.”

I shake his hand, and then eye his bag as he reaches in and pulls out similar sunglasses and hands them to me. They have that classic Oakley tear drop shape and wire rims, but something is different. An expanded frame maybe. More of a tube than a wire. It looks spectacular.

“Awesome. You selling these?” Oakley’s are expensive, I figure these were probably $150 or $200. I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on sunglasses. I lose them too often.

“No, not yet. That’s why I’m here,” David says.

“Well you can’t have these back.” I put my face in front of my Grumby and then look at the image of myself on my screen. arMirror, Meeta calls it. I’m definitely stylin’.

“We bombed with our Thumper,” David says.

“Excuse me?”

“Our MP3 sunglasses. Right idea, wrong execution. And way too early,” David admits.

He’s talking about those huge Oakley sunglasses with an MP3 player built in and clunky ear pieces.

“I remember seeing those. Too bulky, right? And the earphones were awkward.”

“Guilty.” David pauses. “So we’ve been playing around with carbon fiber and Bluetooth and…”

“Oh, I get it,” I interrupt. “You’re not here to sell us sunglasses are you?”

David looks at Meeta, who just shrugs and then looks back at me.

“No. Well yes, sort of. I’m here to sell you ON sunglasses.”

“Uh-huh?” I’m confused but curious.

“Here, give those back to me for second,” David says as he reached for my face.

I backed up. “No way. Take Meeta’s.”

“OK, sorry, my bad.”

David digs through his bag and pulls out another pair.

“Here, check this out,” he says.

He pops off a small translucent cover on the front of the glasses, which I hadn’t noticed before. It seems part of the design. Inside is a small imager.

“Wow, is that what I think it is?” I ask.

“We pried that out of a Grumby. I was reluctant to do an autopsy, er, maybe biopsy on a Grumby, but Meeta had sent down about a dozen of them and we designed these sunglasses to precisely fit the same imagers you use in your Grumby.”

I looked over and Meeta smiles. I just shake my head.

 “And those tiny holes there are for the microphones?” I ask.

“Precisely.”

 “And speakers.”

“Nope, we weren’t going to make that mistake again. It’s all Bluetooth. We figure someone will have a phone in their pocket and a Bluetooth headset…”

“in-yer-ear,” I mumble.

“We tried those. They’ll work. We want to do sunglasses and even designer prescription glasses and what you guys have is the perfect front end.”

 “So what about power? We can shove tons of lithium ion batteries in our Grumby, you don’t seem to have any room.”

“Great question. We use tiny hearing aid batteries,” David answers.

“Won’t the imagers and Bluetooth kill those in a few minutes?” I ask.

“We think we can get a couple of hours in standby mode and maybe 15 minutes active.”

“Oh, that’s all.”

I must sound disappointed.

“Hold on. We’re experimenting with a motion charger into the tube of the frame.”

“Huh?”

“Try holding your head still for more than a few seconds. It’s always in motion. We put in these tiny magneto-motion sensitive chargers, every time your head moves, it recharges the hearing aid batteries. If you need a good charge, you just shake your head around for a few seconds and you get another couple of minutes of juice.”

“Too cool. I love it. We’re in. We can work out a deal pretty quickly so that…”

David reaches into his back pocket.

“Meeta warned me.”

He hands me a check, made out to Grumby Mogul Limited Company Inc., for $20 million.

“And I understand that’s against $5 per unit and your cut of application software that we sell?” David asks.

 “Perfect. Meanwhile, can you send a hundred of these new ones?”

“Three hundred thirty seven,” Meeta corrects.

“Is that how many people we have?” I ask.

Meeta just nods.

“Well, thanks,” I say to David, fingering the shades on my head.

“No. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he almost seems to bow as he walks backwards away from my desk. “This is going to be our biggest runner.”

After the Oakley dude left, I say “Meeta?”

“Yes, your lordship.”

I just laugh. “Cable?”

“Tolkien,” Meeta smiles.

“Well, at least he wrote his own stuff. Do we really need all these people?”

“More.” Meeta answers.

“For?”

“The ring.” Meeta quickly states.

“The…?”

“At this point, we’re going for it, are we not?”

“I guess so,” I mumble.

“It is very much too late to guess,” Meeta tells me.

“OK, the ring.”

 “Or else what?” I mumble.

“No else. Just the ring.”

I hear a chorus of, “One ring to rule them all…” from every Grumby in the building.

http://www.amazon.com/Grumby-ebook/dp/098271632X/ref=andykessler-20

 

 

Real world catches up to (Grumby) fiction - that was fast!

Not a week after getting my book Grumby up for sale on Amazon, Steve Lohr and John Markoff write a front page article for the New York Times with an almost, but not quite, real world example of a Grumby in action.

Eric Horvitz at Microsoft and others are using speech recognition and voice technology to displace medical assistants and receptionists.

Here is the Microsoft medical assistant:

“Hi, thanks for coming,” the medical assistant says, greeting a mother with her 5-year-old son. “Are you here for your child or yourself?”

The boy, the mother replies. He has diarrhea.

“Oh no, sorry to hear that,” she says, looking down at the boy.

The assistant asks the mother about other symptoms, including fever (“slight”) and abdominal pain (“He hasn’t been complaining”).

She turns again to the boy. “Has your tummy been hurting?” Yes, he replies.

After a few more questions, the assistant declares herself “not that concerned at this point.” She schedules an appointment with a doctor in a couple of days. The mother leads her son from the room, holding his hand. But he keeps looking back at the assistant, fascinated, as if reluctant to leave.

Maybe that is because the assistant is the disembodied likeness of a woman’s face on a computer screen — a no-frills avatar. Her words of sympathy are jerky, flat and mechanical. But she has the right stuff — the ability to understand speech, recognize pediatric conditions and reason according to simple rules — to make an initial diagnosis of a childhood ailment and its seriousness. And to win the trust of a little boy.

And here is a very short scene from Grumby:

I’m sitting in a somewhat stark room at Stanford Hospital. Lots of equipment is attached to the wall and on carts in the room. I’m talking to my friend Mark, who has been hounding me for more Grumbys to play with. What a doctor wants with all that technology, I have no idea. Don’t they just bang your knee with a rubber hammer? Mark explains that he got a pile of money from Cisco, the networking company that has had an effort to create doctorless clinics over the last five years with not much traction until Mark suggested a Grumby.

“Hey, it looks just like Meredith Grey…Grey’s Anatomy, right? The TV show?” I ask. It’s a stunning replica, cat like eyes, medium length brownish hair, everything, down to the funny smirk.

“We argued back and forth whether to use her or some old TV doctor, Dr. Kildare or something, but it became clear that no one over about 35 would use this thing, so we went young.”

“Can I try it?” I ask. “Sure. It’s an early model, but ought to work pretty well. Just say hello and introduce yourself.”

I look Meredith Grumby in the eye and say “Hello.”

And in Meredith Grey’s voice, the Grumby says, “Well, it’s about time you show up. We don’t have any information on you. Let’s get going.”

“OK.”

“Good. Now strip down to your skivvies.”

“Um,” I look at Mark, “is this part of the program?”

“I’m a doctor. Grow up.” Meredith scolds me.

“OK. OK.” I strip quickly.

Mark laughs and whispers, “It’s a power thing.”

“Wow, is that a roll of quarters or are you just…OK, I’m kidding. But I do need some personal information.”

She asks, I provide.

“OK, great, beats filling out forms, doesn’t it? Now grab that blood pressure device and wrap it around your upper arm.”

Mark whispers to me, “Grab the stethoscope instead, just for fun.”

I grab a stethoscope attached to a wire coming from the wall and put it up to my heart.

“That’s not the blood pressure monitor. You need to watch a little more TV. It’s that one over there, labeled blood pressure. Jeez, another Einstein,” Meredith berates.

I obey.

“A little high. Looks like we’ll be sucking out some of your blood in a moment. Meanwhile…stick that cone looking thing in your ear, will ya?” she says with a chuckle.

Over the next few minutes, I use the stethescope, a tongue depressor with a little mini-camera attached to it, I get weighed, my height read, all seemingly entered into a database.

“A little overweight there, aren’t you fella? Lay off the cheese doodles or I’ll get you on some unbearable no beer or martinis diet. That won’t be fun.”

“Well, I missed a couple of weeks of basketball and…”

“Yeah, whatever. OK, now bend over, grab your ankles and say yee-ha.”

Dealbreaker Interview and Excerpt: Healthcare Hedgies

Dealbreaker has an interview and an excerpt from The End of Medicine.
Ex-hedge fund guy Andy Kessler, recently took time to talk to DealBreaker's Carolyn Okomo about his new book, The End of Medicine, a witty, engaging examination of the heathcare industry in the not-too-distant future.

DealBreaker: Finance and technology has sort of always been your thing. In The End of Medicine, you utilize your expertise to analyze the healthcare industry. Was this an easy transition to make?
Andy Kessler: I spent 20 years looking for ever cheaper silicon that could change industries. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten bored. Wi-Fi and Wikis are cool, but a little dull. So I started looking for something else besides computing and telecom and music and stock trading and banking that technology would surround, squeeze, suffocate old business models and reshape in its image. In the meantime, a friend was diagnosed with cancer, only because he banged his head on a mogul skiing and an X-Ray showed a tumor on his neck. And a brother-in-law had a heart attack in the middle of the night. I wondered if there was some technology that could find this stuff early, before it was life threatening. Us baby boomers (I’m a late boomer at 47) are entering that fragile age. So I started following doctors around, cardiologists, radiologists, researchers at cancer centers and universities, looking for silicon.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Excerpt: Healthcare Hedgies

I was eavesdropping on two guys I recognized from the past. One guy used to run some tech money, I think I remember him getting blown out in 2000 for being long and wrong. But he’s obviously still in the business. I strained to read his name tag, without luck. The other guy was a classic popcorn hedgie. Always showing up where the action in, figuring out some angle and trading rapid fire looking for returns.

“For me, it’s just one thing.”

“Market size?”

“Nope, these are all billion dollar markets.”

“Management?”

“Nope, they’re all trying to hit fish with a baseball bat.”

“True. So what is it? Balance sheet? Partners? Their logo?”

“You just play the trials. I don’t give a shit what drug it is, it almost always works the same way.”

“Get out of here.”

“No, check it out. Preclinical is bullshit, you could get gum off the sidewalk to reduce tumor size in rats. So what? Even Phase 1 is a load. They are mostly bent around to get decent enough results so you can get to Phase 2. I’ve tried to time Phase 1 announcements, but no dice. You always wait until you are about a third of the way into Phase 2, then you buy the shit out the stock."

Read the entire excerpt here.

End of Medicine Excerpt: Breakfast at Bucks

This excerpt of The End of Medicine originally ran on GigaOm.

I never turn down a chance for breakfast at Bucks in Woodside. Any place with a motto of ‘Flapjacks and Tomfoolery’ gets my devotion. It’s a daily ritual for venture capitalists - the khaki patrol is out early, snagging the tables and booths with the best views of the room so they can spy who is talking to whom and have something to talk about with their venture partners over lunch.

I come here every so often, but it seems that the same folks – hey, there’s Steve Jurvetson doing another nanotech deal – are here every time I come, almost no exceptions. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know Jamis, the owner, proprietor, and self described Pancake Guy, and he made sure I had a table with a view of the viewers.

“Hey, sorry to be late. Don Listwin,” he said as we shook hands and he slipped into the booth. I could almost hear the gears sputtering and subtle whispers, ‘Hmm, hedge fund guy and networking exec - avert gaze - wireless, maybe, how ‘90’s, nothing of note here. Better to check out that other table with blog index guy and venture stud dripping yolk on each other.’

Excerpt: CT Anxiety

Originally posted on Slashdot
The same technology and silicon and 3D algorithms we play around with every day are about to invade medicine. The following is an excerpt from Andy Kessler's new book, The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor.

CT Anxiety

I always feel a certain anxiety when I walk into the Hyatt Regency at the bottom of California Avenue in San Francisco. The cutsie Trolley car outside, the Embarcadero tile pattern on the sidewalk — they are all part of the package. But as I've done every time I've been there, I head straight into the lobby, tilt my head back and scan the Escher-like floors, starting at the top and then down and outwards to the bottom until I start feeling dizzy. I thank Mel Brooks for this.

This guy was zooming through someone's brain like it was a Sunday drive. More like a Sunday afternoon video game.

With my head spinning from this "High Anxiety" flashback, I stroll into the conference, half expecting to be given a barium enema by a cross between Nurse Diesel from Mel Brooks' flick and Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I really gotta switch to decaf on days like this.

The 7^th International Multi-Detector Row Computed Tomography Symposium sounded innocuous enough. I assumed it would be a bunch of technical papers on the future of scanning, where I would read the paper in the darkened hall until lunchtime and then head off for some hot Hunan and home.

Instead, the place was like a carnival for cardiologists.

Excerpt: CAVE

An excerpt from my book The End of Medicine: CAVE

I was still chuckling when I stepped off the elevator on the sixth floor of Rhodes Hall. I followed signs for the CAVE - Computer Assisted Virtual Environment. The demo sounded good in the activities description, but it was past three and my interest was fading. I was due to meet friends at Ruloffs for bloodies. The door was closed, and as I opened it slightly, the room was mostly dark and thirty or so people were sitting around wearing funny looking oversized glasses. I spied an empty seat in the front row, tripped over a couple from the Class of '55 and sat down, almost crushing a pair of those glasses.

"You want to wear those. You won't get the 3D effect from that end." The voice came from a guy with a bizarre looking headset and a short Harry Potter like wand attached to a cord. He was standing on a 10 foot by 10 foot floor, and in front of two more 10 foot by 10 foot walls - three faces of a cube.

I'll remind you, these glasses are liquid crystal shutters, synched up to the display. We calculate and display images for your left eye and block out your right, and then every 60^th of a second flip over, display images for your right eye and block out the left. No more of the red and green glasses from the '50's."

The couple next to me nodded to each other and I thought I heard him whisper, "like at the drive-in, darling."

Excerpt from The End of Medicine: RAD or CAD

Excerpt originally posted at AlwaysOn

OK, nothing in that one, let’s keep going.” Dr. Solon Finkelstein was cranking through these at a pretty good clip. About a minute each.

The light box seemed like something out of the 1970’s. Films were clipped in two rows to some white flexible plastic. Dr. Finkelstein would hit a button and a motor would whir and the films would move to the left, wound onto some spool buried in the machine and a new set of films would roll into view.

“I’ve been doing these since 1967, you know. Not much has changed. Oh, the film is better, but the rest of this…” he waved his hands in front of the contraption.

To his right were color-coded files, the same ones I remember seeing in my pediatrician’s office in, well, 1967. Dr. Finkelstein wore a head mounted magnifier, one that you might see a jeweler wear. He would occasionally lean forward to look closely at the films.

“Some like to hold up a magnifying glass  but I like to keep my hands free for the papers and the dictation machine,” he  said.

After peering at the films, Dr. Finkelstein would push a button and a view of the films would come up on two small monitors that seemed to be gerry-rigged to the light box. He would then read a barcode on the patient’s records - how ‘80’s - and push a button on a phone and talk into a microphone “Patient Smith, negative, 12 month review, Solon Finkelstein.” Two marks with a pen on a sheet of paper and then “OK, let’s go onto the next one.”

I stifled a yawn. I had somehow neglected to tell my wife I was going to be checking out women’s breasts all morning. I think she’d understand. Staring at mammograms with a 70 year old radiologist is probably not considered, er, titillating.

“OK, here’s  something.” I shot up in my seat. Finally, some  action.

“Looks like some calcification there, no problem.” Oh. “But what’s this?” He took out a red grease pen and circled what he was looking at.

“Granular tissue, perhaps?” I was glad he was thinking out loud so I could understand what was going on, but I remembered that most doctors tend to think and talk simultaneously. It can be unnerving.

“Let’s see what R2 thinks.” He pushed a button those two tiny monitors lit up. They had the same identical views as the films we were looking at, except there were a few black triangles and asterisks on them as well.

“Uh huh, R2 sees it too. These triangles are just calcifications, but that asterisk means it might be a mass. Yup, we agree. Usually do. It might be a mass, let’s check last years film. Might be something. No, this is probably no problem. See, it’s the same size, it hasn’t grown. No problem. Good.”

Price Targets

Ah, price targets are back in fashion. And stupid investors will fall for them again. It's what we do on Wall Street while we wait for real news.

Analyst Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray made a splash with a $600 target on Google. Not to be outdone, an old competitor of mine, Mark Stahlman (is he still at it?) now at Caris & Co., declared Google will hit $2000, or about a $650 billion market cap. Yeah, maybe.

But all this talk reminded me of a few paragraphs from Wall Street Meat:

Signposts in the Fog

A chapter written by Andy Kessler for John Mauldin's book, Just One Thing.

Years ago, I decided to climb Mount Washington, dragging a reluctant friend, Paul, along with me. It was a beautiful August morning in New Hampshire, not a cloud in the sky, birds chirping—couldn’t be better. Paul ran marathons and had already run eight miles that morning but agreed to my “little hike.” He still had his running clothes on; I was sporting a fresh Blue Oyster Cult T-shirt.

hwgh

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