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Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Google's quest to organize the world's information will no longer include one of society's most important and sensitive sources of data: our health records. The company announced this afternoon that Google Health will be closed forever and deleted in 18 months, along with a thematically similar and also formerly ambitious project, Google Power Meter.

Google says it's shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.

It's a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and health care is in the air. I'm sitting at the the Peet's in the SF Ferry Building eating a vegan ginger cookie and waiting for Matthew Holt, founder of The Health Care Blog and the leader of Health 2.0 conference to show up for an interview. He arrives wearing shorts and a Health 2.0 t-shirt, and has his dog with him. He tells me he jogged to our location on the bay from Health 2.0 headquarters seven minutes away. It's a beautiful day - and here in the United States, the health care reform bill just passed.

ReadWriteWeb's founder and leader, Richard MacManus, joins us, and we dive into a conversation on the revolution underway in cloud, mobile, and social health tools. By the end of the day, we were left with one question: Will health care reform build a health Internet, or will entrepreneurs do it because they can?

We've just been introduced to an interesting company: Doctations. This relatively new site aims to open communication channels and online services to turn any doctor's practice into a web-based community.

The software, an Internet-based healthcare transaction interface, allows doctors to upload and save medical data, to share test results with patients, and to analyze information with their colleagues. Patients in this system can manage their healthcare, schedule appointments, request prescription refills, research medications, access articles, and communicate with doctors - all securely, quickly, and cost-effectively. Our question: Why aren't systems like these in place everywhere right now?

This weekend, developers, UI designers and testers combined forces to share ideas and collaborate at the third annual iPhone Dev Camp. The event encourages individuals at all levels to continue to stretch the development boundaries of the iPhone and iPod touch. The event's Hackathon competition offers an exhibition of attendee projects and is a showcase of some of the industry's brightest innovators. Below are some of the latest trends amongst those innovators.

"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world.

According to Manhattan Research, a healthcare market research company, personal health records (PHR) are slowly becoming more popular in the U.S., but concerns about privacy and a lack of understanding, as well as doubts about the efficiency of PHRs are holding back widespread adoption. Only about 7 million adults in the U.S. actually use PHRs. Especially those without serious illnesses often don't see the need for using electronic health records.