KEY POINTS:
Have you been to the doctor lately? With Christmas coming, it could be a good idea to get the all-clear before launching into full-on feasting. I went and, happily, the GP found no cause for me to curb my indulging.
As I was waiting, I studied the surgery walls for signs of a technology I wrote about at the start of the year.
HealthTV was the subject. This North Shore company was about to begin using IPTV (TV delivered through the internet) to narrowcast magazine-style programmes into doctors' waiting rooms.
But my doctor hasn't yet got with the programme and there was just the usual pile of dog-eared magazines.
That doesn't mean HealthTV isn't flourishing. The company said last week that it expected to achieve the milestone of reaching "a million eyeballs a month" early next year, when its flat-panel TVs will be in more than 160 waiting rooms.
The beauty of its system is that programming can be highly customised. From its Takapuna offices, it uses the internet to send specific content to GPs in different parts of the country.
Information on the Ministry of Health's cervical cancer screening programme, for instance, is being targeted at the Maori and Pacific communities, so is fed to doctors with a high proportion of those patients. And HealthTV sends doctors UV index updates six times a day.
The Ministry of Health is one of half a dozen agencies paying HealthTV to spread their messages. The company expects to break even early next year.
Not all the content is relentlessly wholesome, and re-runs of TVNZ programmes are also part of the diet.
Speaking of diets, Syft Technologies, of Christchurch, another company written about during the year, is finding a market in the food and flavour industry for a device it has developed for detecting volatile organic compounds, or VOCs - carbon-based compounds produced by living organisms and a range of domestic, commercial and industrial processes. Explosives give themselves away by emitting VOCs. In a paranoid world, there are potentially big opportunities for Syft's Voice100, which gives an instant reading on analysis of air samples. But, says company head Geoff Peck, the security market is a hard one to crack, so he's chasing sales in the medical and food industries.
With deals this month with two universities and two commercial outfits in the United States and Britain for the Voice100, which has a six-figure price-tag, Peck says the food fixation is paying off.
But there has been a setback for another company for which opportunities abound. Manabars Technologies, of Auckland, has developed software for a "parallel" internet that would serve as a platform for everything from a micro-payments system to spam-free email.
Forty or so "blockbuster" applications were waiting in the wings, the company's technology head, David Hughes, told me in September.
Unfortunately, Computerworld reported last month that Manabars was insolvent, although Hughes remains upbeat about the future of the technology.
September was also supposed to be the month when internet service provider Orcon would begin hooking up the first customers in the land to get the benefit of local loop unbundling. September proved a little optimistic but, as of a fortnight ago, I've been enthusiastically doing my bit for the future of broadband as part of Orcon's LLU trial.
I now connect to the internet at nearly the same speed as when I first got Telecom's DSL service eight years ago - a couple more megabits a second and it will have caught up. What does that say about the dire state of the country's telecommunications infrastructure?
But at least we can now change our telco and keep our phone number. I'm among 50,000 to 60,000 subscribers who have opted to change landline or mobile service provider (in roughly equal numbers). The process worked without a hitch.
What technology story hogged the headlines like no other this year? It would have to be the arrival of Apple's iPhone. The great thing about it (the story, not the phone) is the way hackers have subverted Apple's best efforts to control distribution.
Buyers in the handful of markets where it is officially available (the United States, Britain, France and Germany) are bound by a costly contract with an exclusive operator. But in no time hackers such as Aucklander John Ballinger had cracked Apple's security - at last count he had unlocked 10 phones - so even before the company has given a date for the iPhone in New Zealand, you can buy one and use it on Vodafone's network. Now wouldn't an iPhone make a fine Christmas present? Almost as good as a clean bill of health.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.
