Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning I’ve been reflecting on the debate about health care that’s happening south of the border.  Like many Canadians I’ve been in disbelief watching the rhetoric escalate.  The outright lies, and Orwellian double-speak by special interest groups in the US have me wondering how my American friends will ever achieve a resolution.

What caused this reflection?  It has been a week since my last posting, and that has partly been due to an experience with our health care system in Canada.

Last weekend I dropped my son off at McMaster University in Hamilton.  It’s his freshman year, so he is living in residence, and he was very much looking forward to frosh week and getting to know the other young people he would be living with.  By Monday evening however, he had developed a stomach problem.  He visited the on-Campus clinic.  The doctors there thought it might be a flu, and advised him to stay in bed, which he did all day Tuesday.

By Tuesday evening he knew it was more than a simple flu bug, as his stomach problem had escalated to extreme abdominal pain, accompanied by fever. He called McMaster Emergency Services and was taken to the emergency department at the university hospital.  We got a call from him at about 7:00 telling us he was there.

I grabbed the 9:00 PM flight to Toronto, cabbed it from Toronto to Hamilton, and was there by 11:30, by which time he had had blood work, and an ultra-sound, and the diagnosis was confirmed as appendicitis. At 1:00 AM he was prepped for surgery, and by 4:00 AM his appendix had been removed and the infection cleaned up.  The surgeon, a Dr. Kellsie, informed us that the appendix had been leaking but not yet ruptured, which made the job easier.

He spent another 36 hours in the hospital, and came home with me last night.  Today he’s walking slowly, but obviously on the mend.

For my American friends who worry about Canadian style health care, and who are enduring the rhetoric around “death boards”, and “protecting our seniors”, I offer the following observations:

• This was a true emergency, and it was dealt with promptly.  It was just 8 hours from admission to diagnosis to the completion of surgery.
• The quality of the care was world class. He was attended by a team of five physicians and residents following the surgery, and housed in a semi-private room on a ward with just 12 rooms.
• The cost to my family was $0.  Not only that, it didn’t drive up insurance premiums, or have any of the other negative effects associated with privately insured health care.
• The cost of the drugs he is taking during his recovery – two antibiotics, and pain medication, was just over $50, and I can probably get my drug plan to cover it.

I’m sure that the Canadian system isn’t perfect.  While I lived in the US I had gold-standard quality health care as a Microsoft employee, and there is nothing that I am aware of in this country that matches the best of the best in the United States.  However, for those confused or made fearful by the rhetoric being used on Capitol Hill, you need not fear “Canadian style” health care.  It’s head and shoulders above what the tens of millions of un-insured in the United States receive, and the quality is as good or better than what the average insured American receives today. I can only say that because I’ve lived in both countries and experienced both health care systems.

More to the point, however, I would ask the following of my American friends. As you listen to your leaders debate this issue, ask yourselves what three days of emergency hospitalization would cost in your country.  My recollection is that it’s probably well in excess of $30,000. Next ask yourselves whether it’s fair that families be ruined over routine, but unforeseen, medical needs.

These are questions only you can answer.

As for me, I am profoundly grateful for the incredible care that the team at McMaster hospital delivered, and the speed with which it was delivered.

The nature of meetings are changing, my friends.  As work styles have changed, so have meeting styles.  Once upon a time, we used to all gather in a room to converse.  More recently, groups of us have gathered in different places, crowded around a speaker phone and talked with people in far away places crowded around similar boxes.  And today, one of the most common scenarios is to have everyone in a different place — a symptom of the trends toward globalization and telework.

Meetings aren’t singular events.  They’re part of a repetitive cycle that moves business initiatives forward — organize, prepare, facilitate, share information, follow up and so on — that we have dubbed Active Conversations.

Users have told us that their overwhelming unmet need was not to have another point solution, but to have a single tool that could manage these complex Active Conversations. And when we looked at the market, most of the innovations being introduced are actually isolated features in search of integration solution — coordination, the audio call itself, document sharing, and text messaging to name a few examples.

Today at Under the Radar, we’re introducing that complete solution.  We’re making three announcements.

First, Calliflower has gone mobile, and is now accessible wherever you are. You can download it now for free until the end of the year from the Apple app store.  Apple willing, it will be in the store at any moment.

Second, Calliflower Premium is also launching today. Its signature feature is drop dead easy document sharing.  Clientless and seamlessly integrated with Calliflower, it supports collaborative markup, and… because Calliflower Conversations are active conversations, it creates a persistent record of those documents, annotations and markups for later reference.

For $50 dollars per month you get the document sharing plus local dial in numbers, unlimited conference calls and two conference accounts that you can that you can use at anytime. Every additional user on your account costs just 25 dollars more. Users can have a third party organize the meeting on their behalf and can conduct two separate conference calls simultaneously. And the first 30 days are free.

The pricing model for Calliflower Premium is truly disruptive.  In our trials, customers are saving hundreds of dollars per month on their conference calling usage, and they love the new features.  It’s a dynamite combination.

Third, with your Calliflower Premium subscription, you also get access to our global dial-in network.  We have 8 countries here today, but we’ll be rolling more out as fast as possible.

So, there you have it.  A mobile application, a new premium version with a disruptive pricing model, and a global expansion.  We’ve been really busy for the last few months, but this particular combination of document sharing, unlimited flat rate calling and a mobile application are just what customers have told us they wanted.  Let us know what YOU think!

One of the hallmarks of this US Presidential Election has been the incredibly effective use of the internet by the Obama campaign.  This particular video, by moveon.org, lets you send a customized message out to your slacker friends… the ones who might not be planning to vote.

Viral video is nothing new of course.  However, this one is spreading like wildfire.  Why?  MoveOn encourages you to load your Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail address book into their site and send custom messages to ALL of your friends.  As I was watching the site, the counter online seemed to be sending out 100 new custom videos every 5 to 6 seconds.  Over 13.5 million videos sent so far.

Over the last week we’ve had several large (100+ participants), but private, conference calls happen on Calliflower.  Without violating the privacy of the parties involved (no, I won’t say whether it was Democrats, or Republicans, where they were calling from or when), it appears that youth campaigns in this presidential election have discovered Calliflower conference calls.  With Calliflower’s integration with Facebook, these live conference calls are an ideal adjunct to the groups, fan pages, and other features already provided by Facebook.

Need to organize a conference call for a large group of people?  Check Calliflower out on the web, or try Calliflower conference calls on Facebook.

We discuss the Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog piece on whether virtual worlds have a place in business communication.

We also talked through some of the latest insanity from the entertainment industry:

Quote Unquote records is a label that provides it’s music under a creative commons license. For the last week, their website has been down, the target of an RIAA copyright complaint.  Naturally, they’re furious, but their ISP isn’t putting the site back up.

And… Blu-ray is bombing.  Because of the economic downturn, consumers simply aren’t moving to the new, and more expensive, format.

The RIAA now wants to avoid trial in Maverick v. Harper.  They’re worried, apparently, that a trial might undermine the bedrock of their copyright infringement cases, which is that “making a file available on a P2P network” constitutes infringement.

And finally we discussed the US election, and Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a CTO for the USA.

On the Calliflower Conference Call: Dan York, Jeb Brilliant, Bill Volk, Sergio Meinardi, Mark Hewitt and Phil Wolff.

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