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Recent posts
- Future Tense becomes Marketplace Tech Report
09/17/10 06:12 PM
Hi everyone. John Moe here. Starting Monday, September 20th, Future Tense will be going by the (more...) - Google and competition
09/17/10 02:40 PM
On Thursday, a House subcommittee heard testimony about Google and the issues of competition and (more...) - Bronado is the new Double Rainbow
09/17/10 12:53 PM
There was some heavy weather in Brooklyn yesterday. A tornado? A funnel cloud? Regardless, these (more...) - Best Buy CEO: iPads are murdering laptops
09/17/10 12:02 PM
Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal as the holiday shopping season approaches. People (more...) - New marketing: getting it right, getting it wrong
09/17/10 11:16 AM
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09/16/10 02:04 PM
That’s the dollar estimate in the first 24 hours in the US and Europe. That’s compared to 170 (more...) - Oakley to release 3D eyewear
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09/15/10 05:49 PM
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09/15/10 05:49 PM
We’ve been waiting for the alleged “Google Me” project to surface for a while (more...) - What all the hipster cyborgs are wearing this year
09/15/10 11:23 AM
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09/15/10 11:12 AM
Google has fired engineer David Barksdale for accessing private information from users’ Google (more...) - Walmart gets into wireless business
09/14/10 05:34 PM
Walmart will begin offering their own branded wireless service (partnered through T-Mobile) (more...) - Weezer tries to go viral by lending themselves to people who have
09/14/10 03:06 PM
The rock band Weezer has a new album out and they’re approaching promotion of it in a kind of (more...)
The FDA elbows into the app store
Posted: 09/02/10 06:00 AM
By Steve Henn
This is my heart beat.
It was recorded and amplified by an iPhone app, iStethoscope. Then I shook the phone and instantly got this spectrogram, which I can e-mail to my doctor.
Cell phone apps like this are blurring the distinction between medical devices – which are strictly regulated by the FDA – and consumer electronics sold openly online.
Bradley Thompson is a lawyer at Epstein Beck and Green who focuses on the FDA approval process. He says businesses don’t know if the apps they are making will be regulated by the FDA or not.
“I think there is a good there is a good bit of ambiguity now about which of these apps require FDA clearance,” he says. “I know a number of investors who are interested ion those businesses that are kind of nervous.”
Johnson & Johnson’s working on an app that would connect iPhones belonging to diabetics to their glucose monitors. And others believe an app for ultrasound is possible. But the FDA is watching. It’s already forced some firms to pull their medical apps down if they are unproven or make claims the companies can’t back up.
MIMvista created an app that would let radiologists view CT scans, MRIs and x-rays on their mobile phones. The app was slick and beatiful, and it caught the eye of Apple executives. They asked the company to present it at Apple’s world-wide developers conference in 2008.
The FDA was less impressed. Regulators expressed concerns that doctors would be viewing these images under very different conditions than they encountered in a radiology reading room. They asked the group the reapply. After nearly a year of waiting, the FDA decided this app was so new and different that before it could be approved, the firm that made it would have to test it with full-blown clinical trials.
today's show
What will we do with all this "white space"?
09/26/10 11:15 AM
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ITUNESThere’s a vote coming up this week in Washington that will have a big impact on how you use the internet, what’s available to you, how much faster you’ll be able to get things online. On Thursday, the FCC is expected to open up unused parts of the broadcast spectrum, a lot of people call it “white space”. This is space that was positioned to be something of a buffer between television stations but such padding is proving less essential since the conversion to digital TV.
On today’s show, we talk to Glenn Fleishman from Wi-Fi Networking News and The Economist about how the spectrum works and what kind of new space we’re talking about. We also check in with Tim Wu from Columbia Law School about the companies that will look to use the space and what it all might mean for you and me as internet consumers.
Previous Episodes
- Can social networks help prevent the flu?
09/20/10 02:43 AM - The Wikipedia entry on the Iraq War in 12 handy bound volumes
09/17/10 01:02 AM - Free public domain classical music on the way
09/16/10 06:00 AM - Microsoft and political repression in Russia
09/15/10 06:00 AM
