Jane Sarasohn Kahn from THINK-Health moderated a session at Health 2.0 2009 in San Francisco on Wednesday 7, 2009 entitled "The Consumer Aggregators." Wayne Gattinella, CEO of WebMD, Dr. Roni Zeiger, Director of Product Management for Google Health, and David Cerino, GM Consumer Health Solutions at Microsoft all weighed in on what their prospective companies have been up to in healthcare.

Jane started the session by commenting that this year 35% of Americans are using social networks online for health-related issues. That number is up sharply from just one year ago. She added that 1 in 5 Americans are going on line to look for financial tools for health care. She then turned to the vendors and asked for an update on what Google, Microsoft, and WebMD are doing with their technology for the healthcare market.

Panelists (left to right) David Cerino, Wayne Gattinella, and Dr. Roni Zeiger with host Jane Sarasohn Kahn

One of the world’s leading developers of low-emission vehicles has agreed to produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year starting in 2011, marking one of the most significant developments so far in green transport. In collaboration with the French car maker Renault, Better Place has plans to initially sell the cars in Denmark and Israel, with scope for expansion.

Green cars up to now have tended to be somewhat cramped in terms of space, so Renault’s promise to develop a saloon and a van along with the compact city car will be music to the ears of people seeking to convince customers to adopt the green cars.

Metropolis Magazine recently announced the winner of their 2009 Next Generation Design Competition where the entrants were challenged to "fix our energy addiction." A team of French designers have won the prize with an innovative, practical way to create renewable energy wind farms.

Their Wind Turbine Towers, called Wind-it, install wind turbines in out-of-use electrical transmission towers. The idea is simple and elegant. Because the turbines are installed into the old electric transmission towers, it is easy to get the power into the power grid.

Dr. J. Craig Venter and the team of scientists at his institute are at the forefront of synthetic biology. They are working on, among other things, the creation of a bacterium that will both pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create natural gas. You might think this sounds like a far off dream, but they are optimistic they can get this done sooner rather than latter.

Dr. Venter's track record makes the claim more noteworthy. Here's a list of thing's Dr. Venter has accomplished already:

In a trial by AT&T, consumers in Atlanta can get a "netbook" for $50 when you sign up for their internet service. The netbook differs from a regular PC because the new breed of PCs are built to connect to and run applications on the network. The netbooks are much thinner and smaller and are configured with less features than a regular PC. The also won't run out of battery nearly as fast.

Is this a game changer? DisplaySearch, a unit of the NPD Group comments, "With the economic crisis on everyone's minds, many buyers are adjusting their discretionary spending and purchasing mini-notes as lower-priced alternatives to notebook PCs." The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the market for netbooks will be growing by 65 percent this year compared to 3 percent for regular PCs. The New York Times suggests that the netbook could control 10 percent of the PC market by the end of 2009.

Wayne Campbell and Ashton Partridge of Massey University in New Zealand have made efficient solar cells made from organic dyes. The dyes used in the solar cells are efficient, made at low cost, and can even generate electricity on a cloudy day. What is more exciting is that the dye Cambell and Partridge developed ( made from a biological pigment called porphyrin, a component of chlorophyll) makes a dye-sensitized solar cells far more practical to produce. There has been a lot of research in this area since the early 90s when Micheal Graetzel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology first created such a device using dyes that contained the metal ruthenium. The issue with Graetzel's device is that ruthenium is not plentiful enough to practically mass product.

So what is the catch?

More than 22 million people have heart failure. Even with the major advances in treatment for heat failure, over 50 percent of these people die within five years or learning of the condition.

Dr. Doris Taylor, the Medtronic-Bakken Chair in Cardiac Repair and the Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota , is researching another alternative. She researches using stem cells, genes, and devices to create new cardiac and vascular technologies. What Dr. Taylor and her team have been able to do is to strip a rat’s heart of all cells and then to put the living cells from a healthy rat back into it. The new cells divide and can create the tissues needed to reform the heart and, miraculously, the new heart starts beating.