Codex

2010-03-04T18:38:00-05:00

A lot of people have asked me about the nameOn the HealthCodex story page I have this text:

About Our Name: HealthCodex

A codex is a book made from bound parchment. Because such books were at one time rare, they connotated authority -- usually the book would be a compendium of law or scripture, although sometimes a codex would contain a collection of instructions for preparing a drug or treatment. HealthCodex is a reference point for patients who wish to better manage their health. With HealthCodex, a Medical Director can enter an authoritative set of instructions for evidence-based healthcare management. The system will send out reminders and facilitate patient communication so a patient can follow a known pathway to better health.

In the case of the Family Health Planner, the medical director is Dr. Janet Huber, my Aunt. But that's not the whole story.

There is a scourge on the internet today - cybersquatters. So, when we wrote out our idea we searched a long time for a name. Names like Health and Wellness were taken. Even names like HealthNavigator were gone. Just about any HealthXXX word you can think of was gone.

Well, we could pay $50k for something like HealthNavigator or we could keep searching. Most of the names were owned by cybersquatters who weren't doing anything with them. They were just hoping for someone like us who had an idea and needed a catchy brand. Well, that just meant we had to think harder.

My friend Preston told me that in one of his classes at Chicago Booth the professor had said a company name should be at most 11 letters and 3 syllables. Bob Brill, an IP lawyer friend of mine, said the name shouldn't be generic or it would be hard to Trademark. For instance, "You're Fired" is difficult to register as a trademark because people say that all the time.

After months of throwing names into godaddy and getting no luck, I had about given up on finding a good name. I went to Beijing with my family to celebrate my little brother Kenny's graduation. While there I setup my Bank of America laptop in the hotel. I checked the flood of emails occasionally and posted some pictures my little sister took. One night I came home exhausted and was about to go to bed. But I figured I'd try a few names and just see what happened. I typed in healthcodex and it wasn't taken. I bought it right there.

After that I had to get Janet, Dave, Bill, and Earl on board. Fortunately Dr. Mark Braunstein, one of our advisors had just complained to Janet. We talked about it for a while. The two objections I heard were from my Aunt Kathy who said Codex sounds like Kotex and some people who wondered if I was talking about codecs. Codecs are coder-decoders that many audio and video formats use to compress media data. Well, that codec isn't all that far from what we want. I bought healthcodec and healthcodecs. Somewhere on my todo list is pointing those sites to healthcodex (Not done as of February 25, 2010. Anyway, I don't think either of those is a deal killer, and the name sounds sort of cool.

I remember the name codex as a kid because there was a Codex of Ultimate Wisdom in the Ultima game. Codex is the name of the healer protagonist in the popular sitcom, The Guild. And, yes, codex is the name of the Application Support Management team's Plone (a plone is like a wiki, but with some accelerated search) at Bank of America.

Cross Words Relaunch

2010-02-25T00:58:00-05:00

Moving my blog here and changing the focusI played around with blogging on my personal ajaxchess homepage for a while. I haven't made many entries there in a while. That seems like a common fate for many blogs.

What I'm doing with this site is relaunching Cross Words. I'm going to write a lot of articles about using IT to promote better health. I'll also be talking about using the web to tell your story. And some general IT stuff. I'll also try to throw in a few fun posts, but nothing too off the wall.

The goal is to tell the story of HealthCodex. To talk about what we are doing and how we do it.

Pivot 1.40.4..

2007-09-03T20:47:00-05:00

If you can read this, you have succesfully installed a version of Pivot. Yay!! To help you further on your way, the following links might be of use to you:

The official Pivot Homepage.
The online documentation at Pivot Help should be of help.
There's always people willing to help on the Pivot Forums
If you're looking for a new template, go to Pivotstyles.net.

And, of course: Have fun with Pivot!

All text thay you write in the 'body' part of the entry will only appear on the entry's own page.