Technology

Kobolatest e-reader is a complete about-face from its anonymous, cheap and highly practical Clara HD; the Forma is big, expensive and features a bold — not to say original — design. Itclearly meant to take on the Kindle Oasis and e-reader fans for whom price is no object.

The $280 Forma joins a number of other e-readers in using a one-handed design, something which is, we might as well admit up front, isn&t for everyone. That said, I&ve found that my reading style on these devices has been able to adapt from one form factor to another — itnot like they made it head-mountable or something. You still hold it like you would any other small device.

It uses an 8-inch E-Ink Carta display with 300 pixels per inch, which is more than enough for beautiful type. The frontlight — essentially a layer above the display that lights up and bounces light off it to illuminate the page — is a Kobo specialty, adjustable from very cold to very warm in cast and everywhere in-between.

The Clara HD, Kobobest entry-level device, left, and the Forma. (The color cast of the screens is adjustable.)

The screen will be very similar to that of the Aura One, Koboprevious high-end reader, but the Formaasymmetric design gives it slightly closer to square dimensions.

Where it differs from the Kindle Oasis is in size and a couple important particulars of design. The Forma is slightly larger, by about 20 millimeters (3/4″ or so) in height and width, and is ever so slightly but not noticeably thicker. (I didn&t have one to compare on hand, unfortunately.)

Italso worth saying that like all Kobo devices, there are no forced advertisements on this one, and you can load your own books as easy as that. To me Kindles aren&t even an option any more because of the &special offers& and limited file support.

Chin or ear

The shape is similar, as anyone can see, but the Kobo team decided to go against having a flush front side and instead give the device a &chin,& as we used to call it on HTC phones, though being on the side it would perhaps more accurately be termed an &ear.& The screen, of course, is flat, but the grip on the side rises up from it at a 15 degree angle or so.

Is this better or worse than having a flush front Aesthetically I prefer the flush screen, but practically speaking it is better to have a flat back so it lies flat when you put it down or prop it against something. That the Oasis sits at a tilt when you set it down on a table is something that bothers me. (I&m very sensitive, as you can tell.)

Itstill very light, only 30 grams more than the Clara, the same amount less than the Aura One, and nearly equal to the Oasis. Despite being larger than any of those, itno less portable. That said, the Clara will fit in my back pocket, and this one most definitely will not.

The device is fully waterproof, like the Oasis, although liquid on the screen can disrupt touch functionality (this is just a physics thing). Nothing to worry about, just wipe it off. The USB port is just wide open, but obviously itbeen sealed off inside. Don&t try charging it underwater.

I am worried about the material the grip is made of: a satin-finish plastic thatvery nice to the touch but tends to attract fingerprints and oils. Look, everyone has oils. But the grip of the Forma won&t let you forget it.

Although the power button is mushy and difficult to tell if you&ve pressed it right, the page-turn buttons are pleasantly clicky, and despite their appearance of being lever-like, they can easily be pressed anywhere along their length — which goes forward and which backward switches automatically if you flip the reader over to use the other hand.

This flipping process happens more or less instantaneously, with rare exceptions in my brief testing. Neither side feels more &correct,& for instance because of the weight distribution or anything.

The only one that doesn&t feel correct is the landscape mode. I&m not sure why someone would want to read this way, though I&m sure a few will like it. It just seems like a missed opportunity. Why can&t I have two pages displayed side by side, like a little pocket paperback I&d love that! I&ve already asked Kobo about this and I assume that because I have done so, they will add it. As it is, most books simply feel strange in this mode.

Familiar software, unfamiliar price

Text handling seems unchanged from Koboother devices, which means itjust fine — the typefaces are good and there are lots of options to adjust it to your taste, book by book.

Kobomuch-appreciated drag-and-drop book adding and support for over a dozen formats (epub, cbr, mobi, etc.) is here as well, with no changes. Pocket integration is solid and extremely useful.

The Forma (like Koboother readers) does have Overdrive support, meaning that with a library card and account there you can easily request and read books from your local branchvirtual stock. This is an underutilized service in general (by me as well) and I need to take advantage of it more.

So far, so good. But the real question is whether this thing is worth the $280 they&re charging for it — $30 more than the Kindle Oasis and an even bigger jump over the Aura One. In my honest opinion, for most people, the answer is no. For the dollar you get a lot more from the Clara HD, which also has the advantage of being compact and pocketable.

But it must be said that the Forma is clearly a niche device aimed at people who use their e-reader a lot and want that bigger screen, the waterproofing, the thin profile, the one-handed design. Therea smaller, but not necessarily small, number of people who are willing to pay for that. As it is, the Forma is among the most expensive e-readers out there, and ithard to justify that price for ordinary people who just want a good reader with the warmth control and good type.

The Forma is successful at what it aims to do — provide a credible competitor to Amazonmost expensive device, and beat it at its own game in the ways Kobo usually beats Kindle. That much I can say for certain. Whether to buy it is between you and your wallet. Pre-orders start October 16.

Over the years, Hadoop, the once high-flying open-source platform, gave rise to many companies and an ecosystem of vendors emerged. It was long believed that some major companies would emerge from the pack, and, sure enough, Hortonworks went public in 2014. Cloudera followed three years later, but the market slowed down and the two companies announced today they are merging in a deal worth $5.2 billion, based on the price at the close of business yesterday.

Part of the problem with Hadoop, even though anyone could download it, was the sheer complexity of it. Thatwhere companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera came in. They packaged it for IT departments that wanted the advantage of a big data processing platform, but didn&t necessarily want to build Hadoop from scratch.

These companies offered different ways of helping to attack that complexity, but over time, with all the cloud-based big data solutions, rolling a Hadoop system seemed futile, even with the help of companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Doug Henschen, an VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research sees the cloud eating into Hadoopmarket in a big way. &The move to the cloud is, in my view, sapping growth and revenue potential for these companies such that it won&t sustain three profitable players with strong, double-digit growth. Cloudera and Hortonworks have both moved to provide consistent hybrid- and multi-cloud capable services, but I see @AWS EMR and Spark services and similar Azure and Google services as capturing faster growth, and together, the lionshare of the big data platforms market,& he explained.

Photo:Garrett Heath on Flickr. Used under CC by 2.0 license.

In an interview in 2017, Carl Olofson, an analyst at IDC, described the differences between the two companies, differences that may help them now as they become a single company:

Olofson described Hortonworks as a &pure open source company,& one that packages, coordinates and manages that open source as a product for a subscription fee, and also sells support. He [said] the companyproducts are aimed mostly at &big data technologists.&

Cloudera is a bit different, he said. &[It] offers packages that are mostly open source, but with tooling that is proprietary, and that are aimed at various classes of business problems. They sell to business managers. So their approach is different, and as a result, they have a higher percentage of their income derived from software than does Hortonworks,& Olofson told TechCrunch.

Sometimes the best answer to a fragmented market is coming together, and thatexactly what the two companies did today. The deal involves an all-stock merger in which each partner gets equal ownership, according to a statement announcing the deal.

Tom Reilly, the long-time CEO at Cloudera, certainly sees the two companies as complementary, offering customers something together that they couldn&t separately. &Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic. By bringing together Hortonworks& investments in end-to-end data management with Clouderainvestments in data warehousing and machine learning, we will deliver the industryfirst enterprise data cloud from the Edge to AI,& Reilly said in a statement.

As you might imagine, Hortonworks chief executive Rob Bearden concurred. &This compelling merger will create value for our respective stockholders and allow customers, partners, employees and the open source community to benefit from the enhanced offerings, larger scale and improved cost competitiveness inherent in this combination,& he said in a statement.

The combined companies will boast 2,500 customers, $720 million in revenue and $500 million in cash with no debt, according to the companies.

Cloudera, which was founded in 2008, raised over a billion dollars before going public, the vast majority coming in one major $740 million burst from Intel Capital in 2014. Hortonworks, founded three years later, raised $248 million.

Suppose the next time you go to a new doctoroffice, you wouldn&t have to balance a clipboard on your knee, write down your whole medical history, remember the five-syllable name of every medication you&re taking and list all your allergies. Suppose that your smartphone could simply tap into the officecomputer system, where you could upload your entire medical history safely, securely and accurately.

Such an app could ease the frustration patients feel when they fill out the forms for a new doctor. More importantly, it could help solve a serious but lesser-known problem that plagues hospitals and clinics: While the increased use of electronic health records has helped streamline record-keeping, providers aren&t always able to reliably pull together records for the same patient that are held in different hospitals, clinics and doctoroffices.

That was the scene in Boston in 2015, when emergency room doctors were struggling to treat a patient namedMaureen Kelly — only to discover five different electronic records for Maureen Kelly, each with the same birthday and ZIP code. They had no way of knowing which record matched the patient in front of them. Was she the Maureen Kelly with diabetes The Maureen Kelly who had only one kidney And if they were to decide to send her record to a specialist outside the hospital, how could they know which of the five to send

Fortunately, Maureen Kelly recovered. But to make the best possible medical decisions in cases like hers, doctors need immediate access to accurate patient data — including those from records held in other facilities. Digital systems should be able to seamlessly match records from a pediatrician in Pittsburgh or a surgeon in San Diego each and every time. An inability to do so — which could mean physicians not having important details, such as a patientdrug allergies, chronic illnesses or past surgeries — can mean the difference between life and death.

Doctors using digital tablet together in hospital (Photo: Ariel Skelley/Getty Images)

Ithard enough keeping records straight within a single large hospital system; transferring them among different doctors& offices and other hospitals is even more challenging. As digital healthcare systems have proliferated, they&ve used a variety of formats to record essential pieces of information, such as addresses and birth dates, that don&t easily transfer from one system to another. And, of course, patients& identifying information isn&t static — birth dates don&t change, but people move, change names through marriage or adoption, and more. Matches among different systems have also been stymied by data entry errors.

And while patient harm is the primary risk posed by inaccurate records, cost is no small consideration. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology reported that each instance of a misidentified record cost the Mayo Clinic roughly$1,200 — and thatjust within the Mayo system. These administrative costs are magnified when data are exchanged on a nationwide scale.

No one solution can solve every patient-matching problem. But The Pew Charitable Trusts is investigating several ideas. Pew recently asked the nonprofitRANDCorporation to evaluate solutions that would let patients exercise more control over how their records are matched.RANDlooked at a variety of options and concluded that the growing use of smartphones offers a particularly promising opportunity to improve record matching in two ways.

Photo: Hero Images/Getty Images

First, smartphones could allow patients to verify their phone numbers at the point of care, perhaps by responding to a text message — a strategy already used in banking, travel, retail and other industries. Once a number was confirmed by the patient, the hospitalcomputer could use it automatically to match other records against that number with a higher degree of certainty.

Second, patients could use an app to enter their information — such as an address or even a driverlicense number — and have that information sent directly to the hospital when they check in for their visit. This would let patients update their information and voluntarily provide more accurate data to facilitate a match. Smartphone apps could eventually aggregate and transfer even more information — such as medication lists or health histories — and replace the paper on clipboards used today.

The smartphone approach will not solve this problem by itself. There are potential limitations — patients would need to own phones and know how to use them, and the system might not work in emergency situations when a patient didn&t have or couldn&t operate a smartphone — but the Pew Research Center found earlier this year that more than three-quartersof Americans now use smartphones, including nearly half of people older than 65.

To address the larger problem of patient matching, stakeholders must pursue a variety of solutions, including smartphone apps. Technology developers would be wise to advance and start pilot projects now of smartphones and a variety of other solutions, and demonstrate how they could be used to save lives, improve care and reduce healthcare costs.