Blogging Live from the Forrester IT Forum 2008

By James Taylor of Smart (enough) Systems on May 21, 2008

By Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/WriteWeb on February 25, 2008

Adobe is launching out of Labs today the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR. AIR is a really exciting platform that combines qualities of the web with a presence on the desktop by making it easy to build attractive Internet connected applications that live outside the browser....

The Best Things About AIR

1. Cross Platform

   AIR lets developers write code once and offer their applications to both Windows and Mac users. If that was the only part of this announcement, it would be exciting.

2. It's beautiful

   AIR lets developers use Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and AJAX to create desktop apps. That means no more ugly desktop software! AIR apps combine the beauty of Flash with the responsiveness that AJAX brings to the web and that desktop software almost always offers.

   In addition to the gorgeous Twitter clients built on AIR, there are more serious AIR apps that leverage the same beauty and usability for more serious applications. See, for example, the company Acesis, which offers an AIR for the capture of structured medical data.  [more]

By Anthony Ha of VentureBeat on Febrauary 24, 2008

 The wall between the web and your computer continues to crumble with today’s launch of Adobe AIR, a runtime environment that allows you to deploy Internet applications on the desktop. AIR has already been available in public testing mode for several months, but the official launch should lead to greater usage — and, if we’re lucky, a flood of innovative web/desktop hybrids.

In what may be the first big wave, several companies are also launching their AIR-based applications today. eBay and NASDAQ will use Adobe AIR to keep customers up-to-date about market news and account status, cable TV children’s channel Nickelodeon has created a video jigsaw puzzle application and The New York Times is using AIR to build the desktop component of ShifD, which will allow Times readers to move newspaper content back-and-forth between their computers and their mobile devices....

By Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group on February 12, 2008

...Among the wave of new products coming out of DEMO 08 in January were a set that trace their roots to a previous DEMO conference, just a year ago when Adobe first previewed its “Apollo” platform to support the rapid development of rich Internet applications. Today, Adobe calls the platform AIR, and at DEMO 08, we saw the power of that environment as leveraged by several selected demonstrating companies.

• Acesis provides a point-of-care patient management system that enables doctors to quickly and efficiently gather patient intake information. Dynamic forms backed with real-time analysis and standardized medical vocabulary help doctors follow appropriate lines of inquiry and protocols. The AIR platform supports the creation and exchange of medical forms templates, allowing doctors to share best practices and better serve patients. [more]

Phreesia and Acesis Offer Strong Medicine

By Mary A. C. Fallon of DEMO on February 8, 2008

...Nationally, only 28 percent of physicians use electronic health records and most of them work in large practices or hospitals, according to a January 2008 study by Bruce Merlin Fried for the California HealthCare Foundation. And even when doctors have EHRs, they fail to take advantage of their capabilities by ignoring alerts about adverse drug interactions, abnormal lab results and reminders about preventive follow-up care for patients.

“The vast majority of practicing physicians, those who practice alone or in small groups, are no closer to using health information technology now than they were three years ago,” Fried reports.

That spells opportunity for Phreesia and Acesis....

The significance of Acesis’ approach is that the company has a repeatable business model because it makes structured data collection simple, and that’s a problem that has plagued more than the medical community.  [more]