The U.S. financial overhaul bill signed last Friday by House and Senate negotiators, has a provision that would highlight the use of ” conflict minerals ” by makers of computers, cell phones and other electronics. The Dodd-Frank bill will require companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission the nature and origin of some of the materials they use in creating their products. These minerals are used much in the same way “blood diamonds” were, by strong men and rebels to finance brutal wars and massacres. Sponsor Minerals affected by the bill include the following. + Tantalum: stores electricity in cell phones + Tungsten: creations vibrations in phones + Tin: circuit boards + Gold: used to coat wiring Of the countries involved in the sale of conflict materials, none has been so woefully affected as Congo , according to the anti-genocide group Enough . 5.4 million deaths, countless rapes and mutilations have been fueled by the country’s mineral resources over the past decade and a half. The groups fighting each other, primarily in the eastern part of the country, make $180 million off the four minerals listed above. Instead of fighting against this legislation, any of the major computer or cell phone manufacturers could come out against it. This would have few negatives in exchange for some titanic PR. Oh, and maybe fewer people would die too. We have a request for comments in to Steve Jobs. We will let you know if he responds. Photos from the Grassroots Reconciliation Group , devoted to helping ex-child soldiers. Discuss

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Late last month, China implemented new standards aimed at preventing “state secrets being disclosed and uncertified maps published online.” A major component to this push was a requirement that all online mapping efforts be housed in mainland China and we wondered at the time how this might affect companies like Google. According to an article today in China Daily , 18 domestic firms have gotten the okay for providing maps of China to Chinese users, but the list of approved providers is not yet available. Sponsor While The Next Web reports that Google and Baidu are not among the approved companies, China has yet to release the list of companies selected from the pool of 30 applicants. According to an analyst quoted in the China Daily article, however, Google looks unlikely to be among them. “Among all the foreign vendors, Google may have some trouble getting a license because currently all its servers that provide map services are outside China,” Ren Yanghui, an analyst of research firm Analysys International, told China Daily. The regulations went into action this month and gives Chinese authorities the right to shut down mapping providers that fail to get a license by the end of the year. Google told Reuters that it is looking into the new regulations and how it affects its efforts in the country. “China recently implemented a wide-ranging set of rules relating to online mapping. We are examining the regulations to understand their impact on our maps products in China,” a Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. As Chad Catacchio from The Next Web pointed out, crowdsourced mapping solutions such as OpenStreetMap could face the biggest problems in being shut out of the Chinese market entirely. The new regulations could also have a major impact on location-based service applications, such as Gowalla , FourSquare and Yelp , which often use Google Maps as a backbone to their service. Discuss

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“It’s almost impossible to describe how important the Web was for getting the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund off the ground,” said co-founder Karen Dalton-Beninato . Karen and her husband Jeff, who grew up playing music in the Ninth Ward, used Web technologies and social media to reach out to music fans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina . Now, almost exactly five years later, another crisis is hitting the shore, the Gulf oil spill . “With the current state of the economy, we get more used instrument donations than anything else these days, but it’s been an amazing ride. New Orleans is going to have a rough summer with Gulf Coast tourism dropping already after the oil spill. Hopefully people will keep the city and its music in their hearts.” Sponsor Karen and Jeff started the fund in a Chicago FEMA room when it became clear that many musicians and others wouldn’t be able to return to New Orleans for weeks if not months. Jeff, who grew up playing in the Ninth Ward and was a member of the 80s pop band the dBs, as well as playing with roots and jazz outfits, turned to the Internet. He and Karen put together a Website with an online donation function . Podcasts were a powerful way to reach out to both a distributed public and a fractured musical scene, as was the blog they started . They used social media and more old school Web tools to beat the bushes and pass the hat. Straight out donations, walkathons, downloads and t-shirt sales . Money came in to help get people home, to help them repair storm damage and to pay rent and, above all, to give them back their means of making a living: get them back their bones. In addition to money, people donated trumpets and trombones, traps and guitars and even pianos. There’s a feeling that once a certain amount of time passes after a disaster, people should have the decency to be OK. Unfortunately, given the sheer bulk of the mess, both physically and politically, that’s just not been the case with New Orleans, as co-founder Jeff Beninato reminds us. “If you think this tragedy is over think again. There are still families out there in corners of this country trying to figure out what they are going to do to get their lives back to some normalcy. There are so many musicians who were well known in New Orleans that are totally unknown where they are now. Imagine building your fanbase or your work base in your workplace and suddenly it all disappears.” And now what promises to become the single largest ecological catastrophe in the nation’s history, the Gulf oil spill, is bearing down on the city. The travelers and the money they bring are starting to dry up again. The resource economy, fishing, shrimping and crabbing, that all funnels into the city, is faltering. The need to plug in to this newest of technologies – the Web – to save the oldest – music – is pressing, again. There is some truth to the notion that this technology we cover levels and democratizes. NOMRF is using it to make the process of helping the men and women who provide the soundtrack to your hopes and dreams more egalitarian and more direct. Think trading tracks and files is “peer-to-peer”? Pass the hat at the Green Dragon and buy a guy a trumpet so he can gig and get his kids new shoes. That’s peer-to-peer, brothers and sisters. Can I get an amen? I said… Can I get an amen? Alright, then. Discuss

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Location-based service Gowalla announced this week that it has struck up a partnership with national newspaper USA TODAY to offer special content for the summer travel season. According to Gowalla community manager Jonathon Carroll’s blog post on the partnership, the deal will offer Gowalla users select content when they check in to more than 40 of the busiest airports in the country. Sponsor What happens is this – when you check in at one of these airports, the app will ask if you want to follow USA TODAY on Gowalla. If you do, you’ll get a “Jet Setter” pin for your Gowalla passport and access to airline and air travel news, trips (which consist of a number of recommended check-in locations to visit in the city you’re checked in to), and airport guides, which “let travelers know the cheapest place to park, the quickest way to get through security, the best options for dining and shopping, real-time flight information and more.” Once you’ve followed the USA TODAY account on Gowalla, any subsequent check-in at a selected airport will allow you to access this content. The partnership does something we don’t think we’ve seen much of before in the LBS sphere – it offers content that directly relates to the activity and reason for checking in to the location you’re checking in to. You’re at an airport, so you must be traveling and you obviously would be interested in information such as flight times or a guide for the airport you’re at. It’s precisely the type of catering of information that Robert Scoble argued for when he discussed the failures of LBS apps like Gowalla, Foursquare and others. Rather than simply offering users restaurant reviews from a local paper every time they check in somewhere, this new deal takes into account where the user is checking in and offers content based on that. While it is currently limited to a select number of airports across the country, we think it is an important step in the right direction. As Scoble argued, though, the real next step is for applications like Gowalla to recognize that when you check in to a car wash, the coffee shop two blocks away and the nearest public bathrooms should be suggested, not the lamp store across the street. Discuss

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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. Sponsor If there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that we all have a favorite topic in common – ourselves. While social networks and Web 2.0 sites like YouTube cater to our egos and our desire for social interaction, a whole new breed of real-time websites and smartphone apps are emerging that will let us study ourselves like never before. But beyond self fascination, these apps will change the way doctors observe and diagnose their patients, and give them entirely new ways of monitoring any number of medical indicators and managing chronic diseases. Real-Time Web and Mobile Monitoring Brian Dolan, editor of MobiHealthNews , said that the medical field is rapidly moving toward a more mobile and real-time future, with 72% of physicians now using smartphones . “There’s a ton of interest in apps for smartphones right now,” Dolan said. “That’s where a lot of the buzz has been.” According to Dolan, more than a quarter of the apps in the iPhone App Store’s health and medicine category are for health care professionals, and we’ll likely see more of this in the future, as remote monitoring becomes more commonplace. Apple’s own patent application for an embedded iPhone heart rate monitor is likely just the first step, for example. One company, AirStrip Technologies , offers doctors a way to have real-time information about their patients streamed to them on their smartphones, giving them the ability to closely monitor their patients from wherever they are. But even this is just a first step, according to Dolan. “Right now, you’re in the hospital and you have dozens of wires hanging off of you,” Dolan said. “There’s tons of companies trying to simplify that, with something that’s essentially a band-aid that’s wireless.” I Can Sleep Better Than You Can… This sort of wireless remote monitoring is the next step, and already there are examples. Zeo , for example, is a “personal sleep coach” app that works by having the user wear a headband at night that measures the electrical activity of the wearer’s brain. This information is sent wirelessly to a bedside unit that writes the data to an SD card, which can then be transferred to a computer for analysis. Zeo then uses this data to let its users analyze their sleep patterns in a multitude of ways and also offers them a “personalized sleep coaching program”. Zeo even allows its users to compete with each other, seeing who can achieve better sleep patterns. Who knew even sleep could be competitive? Can You Breathe Here Now? Beyond constant self-monitoring, the real-time Web is changing the medical and health fields on a larger, macro level as well, with crowdsourced solutions like Asthmapolis . The program uses a GPS device called a Spiroscout that can be mounted on an inhaler to determine the time and location when an inhaler is used. This information is then collected on a central server and used to “map and track asthma symptoms, triggers, and your use of rescue and controller medications”. Beyond offering a personal diary of asthma attacks, however, Asthmapolis is working with the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention to “map and characterize asthma in rural areas of the Midwest.” Should I Stay or Should I Go? Aside from monitoring, the real-time Web can merge together data in even more ways to provide us with useful information in relation to our health and well-being. iTriage , for example, will not only diagnose the seriousness of a medical problem according to the symptoms you provide, but it will help you determine the appropriate health care facility nearest you, even giving turn-by-turn GPS directions. In some parts of the country, iTriage even provides ambulance and emergency room wait times in order to help you decide on the best plan of action. The Future of the Real-Time Web and Medicine There are still a few hurdles remaining for the real-time Web in the medical realm. As Dolan points out, the medical field can be slow to adopt some of these technologies for a number of reasons. Many doctors, he said, still use pagers because they are more reliable. The iPhone, for example, will stop ringing after a certain point, whereas a pager can be set to keep buzzing away until the wearer responds. Cell network coverage is far from ubiquitous, also, while pagers are more or less fail-safe. And then there’s the Food and Drug Administration, which could be quite an impediment for some mobile, real-time technologies. Nonetheless, the reality is that next time we ask how many calories you ate since last night or what your resting heart rate is, you’ll likely have an answer. And if you don’t, we’ll likely tell you that, indeed, there is an app for that. Discuss

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