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.

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!

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.

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 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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why ISPs Shouldn’t Be Copyright Cops
• Barack Obama Talks About Colin Powell Endorsement at Fayetteville North Carolina Rally
• New trial for RIAA’s $222,000 defendant
• Inside the MPAA’s Understanding of Copyright Infringement

The other topic?  Tomorrow is Skype’s 5th anniversary.  How has Skype changed your world?  the communications industry?

On the conference call today: Dan York, James Body, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk, Jonathan Jensen, Sheryl Breuker, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown

Recently Michael has been focused on copyright reform here in Canada.  The Conservative government has proposed legislation that is remarkably similar to the widely discredited Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the United States, and Michael has been asking ordinary citizens to voice their opinion on what Fair Copyright Reform looks like.  In fact, his Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada has grown to nearly 40,000 members since it was started in December.

Enjoy the interview.  If afterward, you want to get involved, join the Facebook Group, and take a look at Michael's list of 30 things you can do, beginning with writing to your MP.   

• The Register reports half of all European calls will be mobile in 2008. They're raising the alarm for fixed-line carriers. Not exactly surprising, that.
• Microsoft will release Works 9.0 as ad-funded software. Finally. How long has the been speculated about? 
• The US House of Representatives has passed a unanimous motion demanding that Canada stop the slaughter of baby seals.  I guess now that they've debated Bush into a corner on Iraq, they've run out of other work.  Take a vacation, guys.

It began with Janice questioning my choice to label myself as having libertarian views.  She's not the only one either.  A few times recently friends have asked what libertarian on my profile means. The problem is that declared libertarians are frequently perceived to be a little nutty. In fact, that was the source of today's discussion.  Janice pointed out the platform of the Libertarian Party of Canada, which mostly stands for abolishing everything supported by government, including items like abolishing universal education. Of course I don't believe in those things.  And the Wikipedia entry on libertarianism is also full of similar radical views. 

Most political parties today are really about two things — economics and personal freedoms. They tend to define themselves on axes that range from controlled economies to free markets (left to right wing), and individual liberty (or libertarian) to authoritarianism. Traditional conservatives are authoritarian free marketers, for example, which explains the trend in recent years to a loss of civil liberties accompanied by less regulated markets. 

There's a fabulous survey tool at http://www.politicalcompass.org/ that you can take to see where you stand. I scored slightly left on the right vs left scale (-1), and feel deeply about personal liberty (-6.5) on the authoritarians vs libertarian scale. Makes sense, although I was surprised to see myself on the left side of the scale.  While I prefer open markets, I do not believe in the benevolence of corporations.  They exist to serve their shareholders, not society. And while I accept authority as a necessary requirement for society to function, I have a deep belief in civil liberties, individual rights and freedom of thought.  If there's one thing that makes me irrational it's the Orwellian idea that we should do or think something for no other reason than "it's the right thing to do".

So that's me — a small L libertarian. An economically moderate guy with a knee-jerk reaction to the arbitrary application of authority. 

Political Compass also shows where the parties in many countries would chart at various different elections.  Here, for instance, is Canada in 2005.  The chart also helps to explain why I had such difficulty in making a voting choice in the last election.  The Liberals and Conservatives were not that different, and both were much more authoritarian than I find comfortable.  The NDP, too far to the left. The Libertarian Party of Canada would be deeply libertarian and far right. The Greens, while not shown on this chart, were shown on the UK chart… as deeply libertarian and slightly left, and that's where I placed my vote.

It generated a fair amount of debate.  Stephanie Booth pointed out that prudish sex offender laws in many states lump acts between consenting adults into the same category as those preying on children.  You can read her full post, but let's just say that it's hard to imagine that most adults haven't, at one time or another, committed one of these acts.  That's why what MySpace and grandstanding Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal have done is nothing more than a placebo perpetuated on an unsophisticated public that really just wants to protect kids.  Their actions are a fraud.

Brandon Watson, the CEO of IMSafer, wrote an impassioned and lengthy post also. His point? Predators go where they prey is.  He backs it up with some statistics designed to show that the incidence of predation on MySpace may be higher than in society at large.  Like Stephanie, he also notes that it's not the young kids that are vulnerable, but the teens, quoting University of New Hampshire's David Finkelhor:

So these are not mostly violence sex crimes, but they are criminal seductions that take advantage of teenage, common teenage vulnerabilities. The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teams know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves.

Given the wide scope of definition around the term sex offender, it's nearly useless for identifying predators and for protecting the vulnerable in society.  Tools like the ones that Brandon's company, IMSafer, provides are whatreally help to keep kids safe.  IMSafer uses sophisticated pattern matching algorithms to look for text that might be considered dangerous in IM messages, and then alert parents to the conversations.  It goes right to the heart of the problem, which are conversations between our kids and strangers.  At the same time, it's not an intrusive or privacy busting solution because it only alerts parents when a potentially dangerous situation is occurring.  The rest of the time, kids privacy is preserved.

Brandon dropped me a note last week to say that since their launch they are now monitoring over 2,000,000 relationships, and have scanned 100 million messages.  What IMSafer is doing is far more meaningful than MySpace's decision to delete a few user accounts.  If you have reason to be concerned about your children's safety online, then you owe it to yourself to check out IMSafer.