Bili Buzz - Popular Science, Nature, Medicine, Archeology, Future & Myths

I’m in San Francisco for the next few days, bringing you regular reports from the Web 2.0 Summit on some of the most interesting ideas and innovations at the leading edge of the Internet.

One of this evening’s most interesting presenters was Marissa Mayer from Google, who introduced a new application called Google Health, which will allow users to search for and create pages that aggregate all sorts of medical information, from symptoms and conditions to x-rays to personal medical records to Google Maps mashups that locate nearby doctors by specialty, and figure out whether they have appointments available and how other patients have rated them. The new app will also incorporate searches from Google Co-op, a feature that categorizes Web pages hand-selected by known experts in various health fields.

The idea of opening up your medical records and putting them online sounds scary, but Google plans to keep private information private with the same security that keeps snoopers out of your Gmail. Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages to online record archiving, but Ms. Mayer made a compelling argument by describing the loss, during Hurricane Katrina, of thousands of medical records in that could have been safeguarded if they were digitized and Web-accessible. She also mentioned the fact that x-ray data in North America, which is not centrally archived anywhere, currently numbers in the petabytes and could become a valuable research tool for physicians if properly tagged and organized. This, of course, is another part of the plan for Google Health.

The launch date for the beta site has not yet been made public, but as I’m one of those hypochondriacal people who constantly searches symptoms and treatments anyway, I’m particularly excited about the potential of this app.

The news that Sprint CEO Gary Forsee is stepping down could be a bad sign for the roll-out of the company’s planned WiMAX network.

WiMAX has been touted as WiFi on steroids, with better performance and range. But it’s not going to be cheap for the company setting up the network: Sprint’s estimated price tag for its proposed Xohm system would run to several billion dollars over the next three years.

Sprint’s plans call for an initial rollout to several U.S. cities at the end of this year. But then it really gets moving: Xohm is supposed to cover 100 million people by the end of 2008. Forsee was a big supporter of the program, and a few bloggers have expressed concern that his resignation could stall progress.

Here’s hoping that today will go down as a watershed date in the music industry—the day that a mass-market band finally got it right. I’m talking about the English rockers Radiohead and their innovative distribution model for their new album, In Rainbows, which was released for digital download today.

Rather than wait for it to be leaked online well before its physical release, the band decided to publish the recently completed album to the Web themselves, forgoing the many months of promotion and planning that usually come between an album’s completion and its arrival in stores. Better yet, the band allowed each downloader to pay whatever they wanted for the DRM-free record—anything from two cents to, well, hundreds of dollars if you were so inclined.

The beauty of this is that nearly every music fan I know (most of whom haven’t paid for music in years) was excited to buy this album. Excited because they could pay a very small amount of money, sure, but also because they knew it was going straight to the band they admired and not to a record company. They were also excited to play it however they wanted, on an unlimited number of MP3-capable devices or CDs, without DRM restrictions.

Radiohead discovered something important today: Once customers are not theoretically required to put up money for an album that they were going to download for free anyway, they instantly become more excited about actually paying money for it. It certainly also helps if the album is fantastic, which In Rainbows is. Let’s hope other major bands and labels follow suit. The future is now!