I’m one of those computer-savvy geeks who’s absolutely awful about backing things up. But I think I’ve finally seen something that will change those bad habits. We launched Vembu Home today, and I think it’s a really usable backup application.

Clearly there’s no shortage of on-line backup solutions on the market, but our assessment is that Vembu has done a great job taking things to a new level. This isn’t just a blatant endorsement of a Rainier client – I’ve downloaded the product and am using it (to try it, go to Vembu Home and enter the limited invitation code: BACKMEUPSCOTTY).

Both in terms of flexibility and the user interface (it’s the first backup application built using the Adobe Air+Flex platform) Vembu’s come up with a good solution, in my opinion.

First of all, this is the first and only unified backup product, meaning you can backup locally or to the Amazon (web services) Cloud, or to both, from one user interface. Second, the user interface is gorgeous. Finally, the product is based on Vembu’s company’s StoreGrid technology, which already runs on something like 100,000 enterprise computers worldwide.

Basically Vembu Home is enterprise grade stuff repackaged and priced for home users who never back their stuff up. Until now.

In keynote addresses today at the Intel Developer Forum, Eric Kim (head of Intel’s Digital Home Group) and Intel CTO Justin Rattner discussed what happens and what’s needed when the full Internet converges with broadcast networks. The television, they said (both the device and the experience) has arrived at an inflection point.

Delivering interactive product placements, games and on-demand video on non-traditional TVs, such as digital connected CE devices, will require innovation in how that content is actually distributed from TV service providers.

This key phrase from Intel’s press release about the keynote address stood out for me:

“At the center of the TV evolution is more processing power.”

Processing, and the ability to differentiate products through software, will continue to be the key driver behind inventive solutions to problems such as the one Rattner describes, “By the year 2015, you can expect 15 billion consumer devices capable of delivering TV content with billions of hours of video available. We’ll need much more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand.”

Moores Law has given us the processing performance density and speed to make some incredible things happen. If we remove all the perceived barriers by considering the extremes – infinite processing at zero cost and using zero electricity (and perfectly bug-free code) – we can begin to imagine huge leaps of innovation far beyond the ones already happening in the immediate future of TV.

Intel’s full press release can be read here.

Medical device “Plug-and-Play” interoperability is a crucial issue today with the eventual goal being an integrated clinical environment, in which all devices are interconnected, in plug-and-play fashion, for better management. Most  medical devices used in hospitals don’t “talk” to each other in event the simpest of ways that our PCs “talk” to our printers!

Peter Szolovits, a professor of computer science at MIT who studies medical data integration says “where you have a bunch of data simultaneously, you can do a better job of trying to understand what’s going on with the patient.”

The issue is important enough for Mass General Hospital in Boston to have established the MD PnP program dedicated to “leading the adoption of open standards and technology to interconnect medical devices for improving patient safetyand healthcare efficiency.”

MD PnP is part of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and now the group has proposed a new set of standards for an”Integrated Clinical Environment.” Julian Goldman, director of MD PnP, calls the standards “a comprehensive [design] platform… that allows the global community to innovate and build cool things on top of it that improve patient safety.”