Okay, I'm a little late on my show updates. Tim at HIStalk has been much better with his daily updates, as has Will at the Candid CIO. I went to a lot of the educational sessions last year - they presented at a beginner or intermediate level, and the best part was the questions and meeting the speaker. Since this year's sessions are all online (and on CD) I decided to give up the questions, skip the sessions and stick to arranged meetings and trying to find engineers or product managers in vendor booths. I'll review the educational sessions after the show - I can always call a speaker, tell them how much I liked their presentation and ask my questions later. Pictured at right are two of the San Diego Convention Center greeters, very friendly and helpful folks - some of them even wear white gloves.

My day started with getting stood up for breakfast; although we did get to chat for a few minutes before our next meetings. Later I hooked up with Shahid Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy, and Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog and hit some exhibitors. I even met a fellow Connectologist that afternoon. Later, George Hill of Leerink Swann & Company, was nice enough to invite us to a reception he was having at the Fleming Steakhouse where we chatted about the industry and speculated on the future prospects of various vendors - Andy Eckert, CEO of Eclipsys even made a brief appearance.

I took lots of pictures of products, which I'll be posting to my Flickr photo blog (click on the thumbnail photos on the left bar).

Lots of companies are refining their business strategies and growing the business. There don't seem to be any new product categories getting much mindshare. It also seemed that RFID, or real time location systems (RTLS), were getting a lot of attention. I was struck by how many companies don't get some of the fundamental changes going on in the market - more on that later.

Today I hit the booths and got to talk to some great folks about strategy, markets and underlying technologies. I'll be posting for weeks about these meetings, and some of the things I learned. I ended the day today meeting Arnaud Houette, CEO of Capsule Technologie. Arnaud is one of the godfathers of Connectologists, and we had a very interesting conversation.

If there is an overall theme to this show, it is business development. It seems that everyone's doing deals to gain connectivity, interoperability or a new feature. Everyone it seems has an API and SKD (software developer's kit) to facilitate integration. The RFID vendors dominated the API theme, as did many operational workflow application vendors - and as last year, Emergin dominated the messaging integration middleware space.

Good night.