Do Patents Matter? Lynne Jolitz Says “There’s Gold in those parchments”

Ever since the Internet bubble burst, I’ve heard the same old refrain “Why file a patent? It’s costly – patent attorneys and research alone may cost up to a quarter of a million dollars. It’s slow – grants typically take 3-5 years, assuming you pass muster. And it’s useless – you’ve got to defend patents, and you get precious little for licensing them.

In my career, I’ve filed, fought for, and received patents, alone and with others. There’s no bigger rush than getting that parchment with the gold seal and red ribbon with your name on it. It is cool.

Recently an inventor of a granted patent, upon hearing of my latest grant and frustrated by his own lack of recognition, lashed out at me, saying “but what chance do you actually have of defending the patent?” Which got me thinking – Do Patents matter anymore?

Think this area is mined out. Hardly. Recent trends in patent litigation are proving very profitable to lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technologists. So dust off those patent portfolios and join Lynne Jolitz as I discuss Do Patents Matter?, a special In the DataCenter production.

All Aboard for the Video Train

According to this indepth Cnet article “2004 is the last year when people consider video an exotic application for broadband,” (Peter Barrett, CTO Microsoft TV).

So the Baby Bells are spending billions to become TV providers. “Voice is a dying business” and the bites from cable are costly. “If we are going to build the IP (Internet Protocol) pipe, we want all the revenue streams. The great thing is that several technologies are coming together now. We’re very happy about that” (Ralph Ballart, VP Broadband, SBC Laboratories).

The key is services, since most customers already have cable or satellite and are unlikely to change unless service offerings are more compelling. And bandwidth constipation is a real issue when dealing with poorly compressed poorly produced Internet video. “Digital video technology is in flux as technology providers develop potential replacements for the current standard, known as MPEG-2, which would require substantially less bandwidth to transmit video without loss of picture quality. A new standard, known as MPEG-4, would slash bandwidth requirements by about 75 percent, giving TV providers room for additional channels and high-definition transmissions, but it is still largely a work in progress”.

It’s not a “work in progress” at ExecProducer – we’ve been producing media of the Internet, by the Internet, and for the Internet for years, and continue to innovate on end-to-end quality, bandwidth resource allocation, and TCP/IP infrastructure issues along with production issues. So I suppose it’s just a “catch-up game” for those other guys. All aboard!

Fun Friday: We’re Just Collecting a Little Marketing Info, Please Just Don’t Move…

I’ve chatted on occasion about consumer issues like the built-in failure mode design of the non-titanium vaio (see Remember when “design” meant “reliable”). But these are primarily good tech designs gone bad for cost / supply reasons. What about when we make good tech go bad because we want it bad? Well, marketing people are exceptional at this, except when they get caught – then they yell and complain and say they didn’t understand the tech. Well, should we believe them? If you do, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Well, got another one for you. Speedstick is running a “win a roadtrip” contest. If you purchase a product, you have a pull-off sticker with a code. You go to the site http://speedstick.com/roadtrip, input your contest code under the peel-off label, and enter your personal info. So just to see how they run this little “contest”, I decided to visit the site and play exactly by the rules to see if they do. And would the answer surprise you? Maybe not…

Fun Friday: Bandwidth, Bandwidth, Not Enough Bandwidth

According to JupiterResearch, bandwidth requirements for homes with wireless networks will increase from an average of 3 Mbps to 57 Mbps in 2009 (tech-heavy users like me will supposedly use more – 84 Mbps on average). The number of homes with wireless networks will also increase from 7.5 million this year to 34.3 million in 2009.

This increase, according to the study, is driven by an “expected upsurge in streaming digital media brought into the home”, requiring “centralized storage, management and synchronization of that media”. This seems an enormous business opportunity as we start moving towards a real global EtherSAN and Storage Networks universe.

“Consumers are beginning to shift their paradigms for Internet access, home networking and digital content management,” Julie Ask, a research director at JupiterResearch, said in a statement. “The number of consumer electronics devices using a wireless network in the home could explode over the next five years”.

A Wandering through the Vintage Computer Faire

The Vintage Computer Faire was held last weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last weekend. Sellam Ismail, VCF Coordinator and vintage computer collector, was kind enough to send me a couple of passes. Unlike the cozy NASA-Ames location of several years ago, the Vintage Computer Faire, typically home of games, small computers like the Amiga, and the like, has begun to nicely complement the “Big Brothers” collection of DEC, IBM, and other gargantuans in the museum’s permanent collection. What better place to talk about the good old days but in a place surrounded by a VCF buff’s beloved machines.

Last year we did a presentation at VCF 2003 entitled Before 386BSD: The Symmetric 375 & Berkeley Unix (see the mention in Talk About Legacy Machines). Symmetric Computer Systems, a venture-funded company founded in 1982 by William Jolitz, was a contender in the hot race to produce a personal BSD Unix system. The Symmetric 375 was the first system out the door with hardware floating point and virtual memory, beating Sun by years. It was the first system with open source supplied, integrated, and tested, from EMACS to SPICE for use in scientific and engineering work. And it was the first to ship systems with all software fully installed and tested, ready for use immediately. William and Lynne Jolitz discussed the design and development of the 375 computer and its influence on 386BSD – the first open source BSD system for the X86 released a decade later. That was a fun talk!

The year before that, when the VCF was still at NASA-Ames, we put together a poster entitled Symmetric Computer Systems – The Story of a Systems Startup. And that was a lot of fun, let me tell you. Ever try to get an all-wirewrap handcrafted system running? We did…

Dreamworks PDI Makes Wishes Come True

“Shares of DreamWorks Animation SKG made their Wall Street debut today to rave reviews from investors, who sent shares of the producer of “Shrek 2” and “Shark Tale” soaring at the opening bell.” according to Josh Friedman and Jesus Sanchez of the LA Times. “The stock of the Glendale, Calif.-based animation house began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $38 a share — $10 or about 38% more than the $28 initial offering price set Wednesday. In later trading, DreamWorks shares had slipped below $37.”

So all those folks who watched IPO Fatigue? Watch PDI” last August, where ExecProducer CEO William Jolitz called it right with PDI/Dreamworks should be laughing all the way to the bank today. Oh, and if you missed it, you can still see what you didn’t know about at William Jolitz on ExecProducer MVP. Who knows – maybe his next company tip will put you on easy street.

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs Video – “FWE Success Story”

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs – Bay Area Chapter latest events video introduces Derinda Gaumond, Founder and CEO of workit.com. Derinda talks about the value of FWE to women in business as part of the SJSU Entrepreneurial Society and College of Business Neat Idea Workshop panel 9 Sept. 2004. Footage courtesy of Chris Surdi and the San Jose State University
Entrepreneurial Society.

“I’ve Just Got to Get Organized – If I Can Just Find What I Was Looking For…”

Michael Bazeley of the SJ Mercury News today takes folks to task for leaving all those digital photos and vids on their disk drive just waiting for it to die. He says people should be putting their personal stuff on other people’s sites (which does help with backup issues). And if you don’t have many photos, and you’re already organized, and you don’t mind transient views, that’s probably a great idea.

But what if you’ve got loads of photos – a lot more than a simple photo album page – and a lot of clips too. If they’re cluttering up a disk drive, surely they’ll clutter up a site. So you become disorganized in two places at once! Well that doesn’t sound too promising…

There’s one more way people can organize their photos (and vid clips). Make a movie with ExecProducer! Here’s how…

Fun Friday: Kuiper Airborn Observatory and SOFIA, Sun Fun, and Intel Bails Out Again

Wow, such a busy Friday. On the humorous side, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz is free to call Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX a “dying operating system” because HP-UX really is a dying operating system. At least, that’s what Sun said back to HP when they whined about Sun picking on them. Maybe I’d be sympathetic if HP was the size of a one-man op, but last I heard they’re a big fat corporation. Talk about not being able to take a taunt…

On the pleasant side, this “candy dish” mirror was unveiled as the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” today. Does anybody remember NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO)? It was a 1m IR telescope mounted on a C-141 that flew out of NASA Ames for about 20 years, ending in the late 1990s. Well, its successor is this telescope mirror destined to fly on the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Turns out William Jolitz has a lot of memories of the Kuiper mirror, as he worked on it when he worked at NASA as part of the NASA-Ames work-study program while he was a student at Lynbrook High School (before he went on to Berkeley). For some good inside stories, check out Memory – Mirror for Kuiper Airborn Observatory as a homage to all those great people who worked on this earlier project.

Finally, looks like Intel has cancelled a major chip for flat screen TVs that was their flagship consumer electronics semiconductor project. This after killing the 4 GHz pentium 4 last week. Looks like Intel President Paul Otellini is reevaluating some of his predecessor’s projects.