Monday, March 30, 2009

Way Behind in the blog

Over committed, I have just returned from the IDS meeting in Cologne Germany. I left for that meeting one day after I returned from the Hinman meeting in Atlanta. I have a few notes from that wonderful meeting, that I will post this week. IDS was an experience of a lifetime for me professionally. I will have many products to report about, although some are not yet available in the US waiting for 510K and/or FDA approval. Let me get past the jet lag type away here.

One of the greatest pieces of new technology that I used at both of these meeting as well as typing this entry, is thanks to Marty Jablow. It is the Dell Mini 9 laptop. weighing in at about 2 pounds, this gem has a solid state hard drive (only 16 GB) and no CD drive, but enough USB ports as well as an SD card slot to make up the difference in storage. It cost about $320 from delloutlet.com loaded with WinXP (home) and 1 GB RAM. I changed that out to the max 2GB for about $30. (if anyone needs a 1GB laptop memory stick let me know). Wireless works flawlessly and I was able to carry it around in my shoulder bag.
Need sleep.......

Monday, March 2, 2009

Chicago MidWinter Meeting

Let me go over this backwards. Sunday was a bust. Snow started lightly in Chicago and many people left early and skipped the meeting floor.

My 6 PM flight to Manchester NH was cancelled early in the day and I was told I could get out TUESDAY. With a little fussing I was able to get a 4 PM flight to Boston. 2 problems- I had to leave the floor early, thus missing my last dash around to report on new products I had seen earlier, and my car is still in Manchester NH. This is a real problem as it is a Subaru all wheel drive that I will need Monday as we are expecting up to 2 feet of snow overnight. For those of you who did not get out tonight and were headed east, see you Tuesday.

I was hoping to see Mike Williams ( allegedly the inventor of the intraoral camera) who was showing a new 3D monitor that does not require glasses and somehow allows the user to grab the image and manipulate it. Some limited info is at http://www.ifo2.com/

I also missed an introduction to CariFree - a caries risk assessment process that I need to learn more about.

I did see the trimara identifi 3000, the prodrive handpiece system, the ios3d intraoral scanner, a new mouthpiece for isolite, a couple of new intraoral cameras ( air techniques and rfamaerica). an iPhone app for Lexicomp and more. I will proabably have no patients Monday with the snowstorm so perhaps time to post a lot of products here.