We sought to address three critical issues in real time disease modeling for newly emerged 2009 pH1N1: (i) to estimate the basic reproduction number; (ii) to identify the main turning points in the epidemic curve that distinguish different phases or waves of disease; and (iii) to predict the future course of events, including the final size of the outbreak in the absence of intervention. We make use of a simple mathematical model, namely the Richards model, to illustrate the usefulness of near realtime modeling in extracting valuable information regarding the outbreak directly from publicly available epidemic curves. We also provide caveats regarding inherent limitations to modeling with incomplete epidemiological data.