It's Rishi

In case you haven’t heard, some company called MercExchange has filed a patent lawsuit claiming that eBay’s Buy It Now auction listing feature infringes on a patent of theirs. My first instinct was a resounding WTF? So I did some more reading on this and I thought you all might find it interesting.

So first of all, I found it hard to believe that one could actually even patent something like this. The idea of an auction listing having the option to sell immediately at a fixed price can’t be patentable… can it?

This type of patent is a “business method” patent. I found this really good article from Nolo press on business method patents.

Since 1998, an increasing number of patents have been issued to software and Internet companies that have devised novel ways of doing business — for example, new online ordering processes or a unique Internet advertising scheme. These patents, which usually combine software with business methodology, are commonly referred to as business method patents or Internet patents.

These patents are important because any company that develops or acquires such a patent can stop others from using the patented business method for approximately 17 years. And, of course, the owner of the patent can exploit it by licensing the method — that is, charging a fee for others to use it.

What really popularized the filing of patents for e-commerce business methods was the case of State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signal Financial Group, Inc. in July 1998. A court ruled that patent law does protect any method, computer-aided or not. A key factor that determines validity of a patent claim is that the described method has a “concrete and tangible result.”

As a result of this ruling in 1998, patent filings for Internet and software-related business methods increased by 40% in the following year. (This statistic is probably a little misleading since 1999 was pretty much the height of the dot-com boom so one would expect a rise in filings). An example that is given in the article is Amazon’s 1-Click ordering feature. Amazon filed a patent claiming rights to this functionality in September 1999 and as a result of it being granted, no other online merchant can offer this feature.

OK. So, yes, business methods such as these are patentable and many such patents have been issued. But if there’s thousands and thousands of such patents being issued all the time, then surely there must be a lot more infringement that’s going on. Right? Yep…

Of course, in the business world, everything isn’t that cut and dry. Patents are like weapons and lawsuits are the ammunition. A typical large technology company often have huge patent holdings (weapons). Just like in the real world, a war between two large countries with rich militaries is usually ineffectual. Each side is depleted in the end. In this sense, both parties lose. Even the victor ends up wasting years of time and money dedicated to fighting the war. Similarly, with patents, company A will only file a suit if it is very confident that there will be a great financial benefit to suing company B AND is very confident that company B cannot retaliate with their own suit. So, it happens rarely.

The big patent suits that we are seeing these days is a tiny company suing a big, profitable company. In many cases, these tiny companies are essentially patent hoarders. They buy up patents for cheap with the intent to find a large company to sue for infringement of the acquired IP. This practice is disgusting and stifles innovation. Smaller companies, which don’t have the resources to fight a drawn-out battle in the courts, often settle. An example of this is Ariba settled with some dump of a company called ePlus which filed a suit claiming – as I understand – that Ariba infringed on their patent on searching several product catalogs at once. Gimme a break! If I recall correctly, Ariba paid about $40 million in cash to settle the suit. Now, ePlus is filing essentially the same suit against SAP except this time SAP, with its deep pockets, is choosing to fight it.

OK. Soooo what’s going on with this eBay case and why is it garnering so much attention?

According to this NY Times article, MercExchange filed suit in 2001 against eBay claiming that eBay’s But It Now feature infringes on three e-commerce patents held by engineer Thomas Woolston, founder of MercExchange, a “network engineering firm”. In 2003, a Virgina federal courty jury ruled in favor of MercExchange saying that eBay is violating two of the three patents and ordered eBay to pay $25 million. The judge in that case refused to issue an injunction to eBay. The judge reasoned that MercExchange “exists solely to license its patents or sue to enforce its patents, and not to develop or commercialize them.” MercExchange responded by arguing that they are in fact commercialing the methods on their website. Rrrrright.

MercExchange appealed and the appeals court sided in favor with MercExchange and said that injunctions are within the rights of the patent holder and must only be disallowed if the invention is necessary for public health or national security. At eBay’s request, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Again, the emphasis needs to be made that the reason why the eBay vs. MercExchange Supreme Court hearing this Wednesday is so monumental is not about whether there is validity to the patent infringement, instead it’s whether or not the federal court ruling correctly interpreted patent law. As far as I understand, patent law gives a judge authority to issue an injunction but does not require it. However, injunctions have become very commonplace and proponents insist that it is the injunction that gives the “little guy” real leverage against the “big guy”.

According to this NY Times article, an eBay spokesman said that even if the injunction is upheld, it won’t make much of a difference to eBay since they have supposedly redesigned the Buy It Now methods/processes such that it does not violate the patents.

The issue of injunction manifested in many headlines in the recent patent suite against RIMM. An injunction in this case meant that millions of RIMM’s BlackBerry service users would be stranded. Did NTP, the plaintiff, care about inconveniencing millions of people. I doubt it. All they wanted was cash…lots of cash. And $600MM of cash is what they ultimately agreed to. Luckily, for both RIMM and its customers, an injunction was avoided.

I’m all for the rights of patent holders. Patents encourage innovation and are key to a successful, technology-driven free market. However, when patents are used for what I would call exploitation, it’s just wrong and needs to be curtailed. If not, companies lose, the US economy loses, and ultimately the average American – the average Joe who just wanted to sell some stuff on eBay at a fixed price – loses.

I stumbled upon a very nice essay by Danah Boyd which compares and contrasts MySpace and Friendster and in the process describes the DNA of a social networking site and its users. I have read just about every commentary on social networking, Friendster, Facebook, Tribe, MySpace,… over the past couple of weeks for some research that Andrew and I have been doing. I will go out on a limb and say that if you read one commentary/analysis, read this one. Kudos Danah!

Some quotes:

People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can’t chew gum let alone goof around and you’re told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. That said, there are plenty of folks who don’t want to be hanging out in a graffiti park and they are not sticking around on MySpace as a result.

This is the difference between tasks that people are required to do and social life. Social life isn’t about the easy way to do something – it’s about making meaning out of practice, about finding your own way.

the vast majority of Friendster users simply went back to email and IM, web surfing and the occasional blogging. Friendster didn’t meet their needs and the core practices of identity production and social sharing that MySpace offered were not significant enough for this group.

Oh and btw, if you think that you don’t need to care about MySpace, think again. A statistic from a few months back showed that MySpace had over 27 billion pageviews per month. All of Yahoo!’s properties combined is 32 billion. Google is around 10 billion. MySpace also has over 10% of the ad inventory on the Web. Un-freakin-believable.

I didn’t get the laptop of my dreams for my birthday a couple weeks ago. Why you ask? The answer is simple. It doesn’t exist yet. In fact, what I want – if it is to ever be produced – may not even really be called a “laptop”. I think I’ll call it a “lifetop”, short for lifestyle laptop. The purpose of the lifetop is to be a device for performing the simple, everyday computing tasks that you and I do in our daily lives. Tasks such as browsing the web, e-mail, RSS reading, text/voice/video messaging, and light desktop publishing. It does rely on the constant availability of a broadband connection. The lifetop is also not designed for intensive tasks like gaming, searching for extra-terrestial life, nor for mission critical work. However, I will emphasize again that this is a serious computing device. (Note that this is starkly different than, say, Microsoft’s recent unveiling of their Ultra Mobile PC, code-named Origami, which might be best described as the big brother to a Windows Mobile PDA)

Okay. So now that I have described what the lifetop can and cannot be used for, let me jump into an overview of exactly I envision it to be.

First and foremost, the purpose of the lifetop stems from its utter simplicity. After all, every day our digital lives are becoming more and more complicated. As fast access to information is becoming all but ubiquitous, our brains are being bombarded with constant streams of data. The last thing we want or need is our computing devices dictating our digital lives. The role of computers is only to provide us humans with effective, reliable, and secure means to access and manipulate the information in our lives. Nothing more. And this is where the typical PC fails. Why should you have to wait even a minute for your laptop to “wake up” so you can check your e-mail? Why should you have to waste time troubleshooting why there’s no sound coming out of your speakers? Why should you have to worry about whether you’re going to be a victim to the latest nasty virus? The answer is you shouldn’t. But, right now, you are.

Highlights:

Physical Design: Thin. Since there’s no hard disk or optical drive and not much requirement for air flow, the device can be absurdly thin. Combine that with the latest-generation LED-backlit LCD panels which are substantially thinner and I can’t see why a ¼” to ½” thickness wouldn’t be possible without trying very hard. Light. Less than 2lb. The only main source of weight is the case and the battery. The case can be made out of a carbon composite and the battery can be small because the power consumption of the device is very low. Durable. Because there are no moving parts and its light-weight, the lifteop can be handled roughly without worry.

OS: This is what really makes the lifetop. What I envision is a browser-centric UI. It’s not so much that the browser is the only application. Instead, it’s more like the browser is the OS. You press the power button and within a second or two you see a browser. Since the browser is the focal point of the UI, many of the UI elements that normally clutter up one’s screen are nonexistent. No taskbars and browser buttons (such as back, forward, stop) are conveniently located on the keyboard. So why a web browser?

The direction of software is towards being Web-based. Actually I don’t really want to say Web-based. What does Web-based really mean anyways? I mean yes a sophisticated AJAX application which provides a near-native feel is still a Web-based application in the sense that the UI is still delivered via HTML and currently that means you access it via a Web browser. But I like to think of it as rich terminal computing. If that makes sense.

The reality is that more and more of our computing tasks happen online. Think back 10 years. All computing tasks were done via local software installed on your PC. Nowdays, that’s changing very fast. The first big example was webmail. Already, in the latter half of this year we’ve seen the launch of several bonafide Web-based applications: Writely (word processing), NumSum (spreadsheet), Meebo (IM), I have to believe that we’re really just scraping the surface of what’s possible (ok uh that sounded eerily like Bill Gates in that Nasdaq commercial a few years back…I digress). Some people talk like the future is online Office. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the direction. Again, the lifetop, and the web-based applications that it will be used for, are meant for light-computing tasks. Writely has maybe 10% of the functionality in Word. It’s sufficient for 80+% of the users out there, and probably 99% of home users. However, it’s intent is not send Word into oblivion. Anyways, it seems like just about any software you want, there is a web-based equivalent that is under development whether it’s word processing, photo editing, or project management. So why deal with software license fees, install/uninstall hassles, crashes, etc?

The entire OS resides on the only permanent storage mechanism that the lifetop would have, which is a 1GB Flash ROM. A compact Linux kernel would be a good choice. There are standard releases of the OS which are automatically delivered like a 1-click firmware update. There are fixed revisions and the files in the OS are 100% read-only. At no point can any user operation make any modifications. No configuration files stored locally. And certainly no registry. Because the OS is small and stored on fast flash memory, loading is lightning quick.

Storage: There is none. Well, let’s say you have an SD card slot. The point though is that no user software nor user files are stored on the lifetop itself. Instead, they are stored on online file systems like Amazon’s recently announced S3 or Openomy. Storing files locally on your PC is inconvenient and really almost irresponsible. There’s so many ways you can incur data loss. It’s almost absurd that the average user needs to worry about whether his files are going to be intact the next time he needs them. Furthermore, online storage means access from anywhere. With the advent of online storage systems with full API’s, Web-based apps will surely be offering users the ability to store the files using them.

Multimedia: Since there is no local storage, the lifetop relies exclusively on streamed media. Which is fine because the lifetop essentially relies on a broadband connection. Streaming music has been around for what seems like ages now and video has arrived as well. Right now, streaming video generally means YouTube which is lo-def 320×240 400kbps. Soon, we’ll have DVD-quality 1500kbps XVid or maybe H.264 streams. Moreover, with software like Orb, you can easily stream media from any PC. So, if you’ve got massive music and movie collections from torrents you downloaded over the years, you can easily stream it, even over the web.

Ports/Interfaces: Ethernet to connect to LAN. 802.11 for WLAN. Bluetooth for communicating/sync’ing with your other lifestyle devices such as your phone, PDA, PC, and in some cases your car! Also it would support a Bluetooth remote. A remote for what you ask? Well, there’s a DVI out and typical audio in/out for hooking up to an a/v system for the purpose of home theater or presentations. Maybe even offer a nice little dock for this purpose. Another possibility is EVDO for broadband cellular access. There are no USB2.0 or FireWire ports since the lifetop will not support any third-party peripherals. Remember, we’re keeping things simple so no excess drivers or software to screw things up.

Price: Because the lifetop is light on hardware and doesn’t need expensive software licenses, it can and must be priced cheaply. I’m thinking $300-400 is the target. In the beginning, it would be marketed as a luxury device because for various reasons it would not be ready to be a primary computing device for low-cost users. However, as time passes, I could definitely see it taking large chunks of the home computing market.

So who’s going to build this lifetop? Well, remarkably, on the software side, I don’t think building at least a first iteration would be too difficult. Assuming you stick with a very low speed Pentium M processor, you could grab your basic x86 Linux kernel. Build some custom drivers and updating tools, add a customized version of Firefox and you should be ready to go. You would then need a nice AJAX desktop application (one can likely be acquired for relatively cheap since there’s about 10 companies which have relatively similar offerings). On the hardware side, the components are generally off-the-shelf stuff. You would need some snazzy designers to cook up a slick design for the device.

The real question is who has the marketing muscle to push such a revolutionary device. What the lifetop aims to do is nothing less than change the face of personal computing. Even if it is a great idea, you got to convince consumers to ditch their current PC’s, laptops, software, etc. that they paid good money for. Not only that, you’re asking users to leave their computing comfort zone. The one computing company that always seems to understand what people want and make it cool is Apple. However, Apple would be cannibalizing their own home-PC business (both hardware and software) so it wouldn’t be a realistic move for them. Sun is a big proponent of thin-client computing but they don’t know much about the consumer market. Motorola…hmmm…maybe. Nah. I think the best candidates would be the consumer electronics giants like Sony and Samsung. They have the money to influence markets, they understand the simplicity that people expect from their expertise in consumer electronics, they already know how to build portable computers and they have the brand image.

With the advent of Internet-based computing, The lifetop will be an amazingly simple, flexible and powerful device which will meet the needs of just about everyone. For light-computing consumers, the lifetop will be an absolute godsend and will be their primary computing device. For heavy-computing users, it’s the perfect device for when you’re not working on your primary computing rig. Best of all, though, it will be the cheapest, most reliable, serious computing device I will have ever used.

Take this quiz and find out. I scored a 33 and I don’t know jack about Star Wars. Scary.

No matter how technologically sophisticated the mediums for human communication become, ultimately success in business will rely on your ability to interact with people. Whether you’re trying to raise money from investors, sell your product to a prospective customer, build an effective online marketing program, or lead a team of employees to success, a fundamental understanding of human nature is essential.

So I decided that there was no better way to start my own personal MBA reading curriculum than by reading this book. Not only has it sold something like 20 million copies since it was first published in 1937 (yes almost 70 years ago), but it has been recommended by several people that I respect highly. After just the first few pages of reading, I knew that I had indeed made a fantastic pick.

Carnegie, and his team, put an unprecedented amount of research into this book. They searched all the respected published works on the topic, interviewed accomplished businessman (i.e. Charles Schwab, Andrew Carnegie, and others), studied the behavior of men famous for their handling of people (i.e. Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin, and others), and even studied philosophy. The lessons found in the book represent the recurring themes that Carnegie, and his team, found across all their research.

Some quotes:

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important

Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours

The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely.

A person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one. The person himself will think of the real reason. You don’t need to emphasize that. But all of us, being idealists at heart, like to think of motives that sound good. So, in order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives.

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it

You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. That will stop all argument and inspire your opponent to be just as fair and open and broadminded as you are. It will make him want to admit that he, too, may be wrong.

Many of the ideas set forth in the book you might read and think “oh yeah, everybody knows that!”. And you may be right. However, I can all but guarantee that while you may have this knowledge, you are not utilizing it in your everyday life to be more skilled in people relations. That’s where this book really shines. Carnegie not only tells you what you need to know, but included numerous examples of how the technique has been used in real life situations. These examples not only help you to relate to the material, but also make the book very enjoyable to read.

The key thing to remember about this book is it defines a new approach to dealing with people in nearly every situation one encounters. This is a very difficult thing to embrace because even though it makes a lot of sense on paper, after decades of human interaction, each of our approach towards people has become all but set in stone. Don’t expect to just read this book cover-to-cover and be a changed man. It will take work. Carnegie suggests some studying approaches in the book’s preface.

I really would encourage everyone to go out and pick up a copy of this book. If you even are able to employ just one or two of the components outlined in the book, you will be more likely to succeed. As promised in my earlier post, I have put together my own “cliff notes” for the book. I’m still deciding whether or not I will post it up on the blog, but if you want a copy of it, shoot me an e-mail (click “Contact” at the top of this page) and I’ll hook you up. However, even if you do read my notes, I still absolutely recommend you do yourself a favor by finding a copy of this book and studying it.

I was channel surfing earlier today and stumbled upon an episode of Modern Marvels (on the National Geographic channel) on Walt Disney World. It was cool to learn about the development and construction of the massive Orlando theme park. The narrator used the term “Imagineers” to describe the team involved in the development of the park. I hadn’t heard of the term before so I Googled it and found this on the Disney corporate site: Walt Disney Imagineering Overview.

Walt Disney Imagineering is the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company. Its talented corps of Imagineers is responsible for the creation — from concept initiation through installation — of all Disney resorts, theme parks and attractions, real estate developments, regional entertainment venues and new media projects.

I realized that this description is very similar to the teams you frequently see at young technology startups. Just like building a Disney resort, startup teams need to combine their collective creativity, engineering excellence, and sheer passion to make their vision a reality. Often I feel like I spend just as much time (if not more) figuring out what to build rather than building it. It definitely steps beyond the more rigid definitions of engineering that I was confined to in my prior life at Ariba.

Anyways, from now on, I think I’ll refer to myself as an imagineer instead of an engineer. If nothing else, it sure does sound cooler. =)

“Heatmap from eyetracking study, showing how many users looked at each part of the page.”

From Jakub Nielsen’s comment on Publishing 2.0:

When on non-search sites, users do not look at the ads. So if you value attention and brand-building, you’re not getting it, because users are not allocating their attention to the ads.

You can see one example of an eyetracking plot from a study I am currently running. All of the pages we have analyzed so far look like this: almost no fixations in the ads. (More formal results to be reported later, after the study is done.)

Memeorandum and other news aggregators are focused on what’s going on NOW which isn’t really always super interesting. However, geek bloggers know that news aggregators are a great way to build traffic to their own blogs. A simple trackback post to the news item will likely result in publicity for the blog in the form of a link in the discussion for that news item on the aggregator’s site. Keen to this, many bloggers are quick to post such follow-ups. Sometimes the blogger adds some great insight to the news item in which case their presence in the discussion is certainly merited, but often it’s the case that the follow-up post is light on value to the reader and thus adds little to the discussion.

Gabe, if you’re somehow reading this, my suggestion would be to track out-going clicks such that if there is a link to a post in a discussion where many users are clicking and then within a few seconds clicking browser-back and returning to Memeorandum, then treat that as a negative importance vote for that link (post). If the post has a high-frequency of users that do click thru and quickly return to Memeorandum and also if the post has 0 comments, just go ahead and boot it from the discussion links for the news item. Hopefully that would encourage bloggers to only post follow-ups if they truly have something meaningful to add. Furthermore, it would help keep a high signal/noise ratio for Memeorandum readers.

In my own experience, I have noticed that the most insightful and mind-tingling posts are those where the author/blogger has clearly spent some time composing their thoughts and not just trying to garner some quick attention. For some good reads, I suggest you check out some of the blogs listed over on the right column under “Some Feeds I Read”. Happy reading!

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and covservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man, than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes froms our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

– Christoper McCandless (click on the link and you’ll see that this man truly lived his words)

Seen a good video on YouTube or Google Video and want to store a copy of it locally? I found a nifty little tool that can do just that.

MyTube: YouTube Video Ripper

Basically you enter the YouTube or Google Video URL and the script returns you the direct URL of the video which you then can download. I tried using it for a couple videos and it works great. As suggested, I’d also recommend you download and use VLC Media Player to watch the files you saved because the video format is On2 VP6 which your typical Media Player won’t play unless you download a codec.

UPDATE 7/17/06: It seems as if MyTube is currently broken and is in the process of being fixed. I found another site called KeepVid. I just tried ripping a YouTube vid and it does work. Just paste the YouTube URL, click Download, and then once the page refreshes you’ll see a link which you right-click save.
For you Linux people, try this nifty bash script