ReadWriteWeb

Anything that can be measured can be optimized, and sometimes that optimization can lead to competitive advantage in inefficient markets. That's the lesson of the book and popular new movie Moneyball, about the Oakland A's baseball team and its use of statistics to overcome the limitations of its budget. It's a seductive proposition.

What if everything were run like that, though? What if measurement and optimization were the fundamental strategic approach brought to bear on all kinds of endeavors? That may be exactly what's happening with the rise of what's called The Internet of Things, the emerging network of web connected streets, buildings, sensors, objects and devices expected to dominate the Internet in coming decades. But the same approach is also being taken with regard to some of our most fundamental human activities: growing up, healing our bodies and spending time alone. Three examples in particular help shed some light on the good sides and the bad sides of a Web that would make all things measurable and subject to optimization.

How many calories have you ingested since last night at 9:35 pm? How many steps have you taken in the last 20 minutes? How many calories did those steps burn? What's your heart rate right now? How many hours of sleep did you really get last night? You don't know?

You will soon enough.

The real-time Web, though we often think of it in terms of websites like Twitter or Facebook, is changing the way we eat, exercise, sleep and more. And, soon enough, it will make that in-patient stay or doctor's office visit a thing of the past.

One of the promises of the cloud is the power to join computing resources to solve the scientific mysteries of our time. On the backdrop of biomedical research, the challenges to join minds and computers together are also immense. Not only is the subject material complicated, it also is sensitive from both a time and privacy point of view. It is critical to get it right as people's lives are at stake, and any new discovery requires comprehensive peer review and an unerring trail of evidence.

With these considerations in mind, the National Cancer Institute has been making significant progress with the caBIG (Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) project. It is focused on setting standards for sharing computing resources and data in the effort to cure cancer.

We've all seen how semantic technologies improve search results, but rarely do we see those results put to use in such a targeted way. Jens Tellefsen, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at NetBase Solutions spoke to ReadWriteWeb about today's launch of healthBase - a medical search and discovery application. Using a variety of semantic indexing techniques, the company crawls the web's leading medical and health players including the Mayo Clinic, PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) WedMd, Medical News Today and Discovery Health. What makes this a truly unique technology is that rather than requiring any data manipulation from humans, Netbase's search results are completely automated.