Juixe Techknow

Let me first state that I am not a legal scholar but that doesn’t stop me from having my own opinions of legal case study, especially when it doesn’t make any common sense. That said, I think there is a lot of value in trademarks, just like there is some intrinsic value in copyrights and patents. But the use of trademarks, copyrights, and patents are a common good and like most common goods it falls victim to the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of patents are it’s patent trolls. The tragedy of copyrights are these perpetual copyrights for works that were original derived from public works. The tragedy of trademarks is that you can say one sentence without infringement on someones trademark, or at least that is what the lawyers want you to think.

One of the most heavy handed and ill conceived use of trademark law was by Microsoft against Mike Rowe, a 12th grade student that owned and operated MikeRoweSoft.com. Microsoft based their 2004 trademark case in that MikeRoweSoft sounds like Microsoft and that this might confused consumers, maybe blind consumers.

More recently there have been too many unfounded trademark suits filed by large corporate entities against operators of small website operators. One recent case pits Facebook who filed suit against Teachbook.com, an online forum for teachers, for “misappropriating the distinctive BOOK portion of the Facebook’s trademark.” This makes no sense at all. Facebook has trademarked the term facebook, not book, but they claim that the book portion of the name is distinctive enough that they can sue another company that uses the term book in their domain name. This is a clear example of an overreaching use of trademarks. This also indicates that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerborg intends to claim any domain of the form [\w|\d]*book. Teachbook is an online forum for teachers, not for FarmVille addicts. Teachbook does not in any direct way compete in the commercial space with Facebook.

Perhaps following Facebook’s legal precedent, it has been reported that eBay has issued a cease-to-exist to a website operator because the domain name ends with bay. The owner of theplayersbay.com posted the cease-to-exist, go kill yourself, which reads in part, “Arbitrary use of the word BAY in a domain is problematic if the connected website is used in association with a business making use of eBay or operating in the same sphere of business as eBay.” Again, some law firm is protecting consumers because thepalayersbay.com is confusingly similar to the giant auction website eBay.

Another similar case that grabbed my attention was of Matt Cooper, owner of Addroid.com. Which company would you think sent Mr. Cooper a cease and desist? No, not Google the maker of the Android mobile platform. No, not Motorola, the maker of the Droid branded phone. Yes, you guessed it, Lucas Arts! You see, George Lucas owns the trademark to Droid, a pay on the word android. From what I understand from his defense Mr. Cooper claims that the term Addroid is a plan on the general term Android, and does not infringe on Lucas Arts trademark droid.

I want to trademark the ampersand (&) symbol so that I could file a trademark infringement to all law firms with names of the form Dumb Dumber & Dumbest. That said, I have to acknowledge that there is value in protecting your trademarks, as well as copyrights and patents. But the legal cases listed here are not executed in good faith of trademark laws. I believe that trademark laws, much like any legal code, is a public good that if abused by loopholes, bullying tactics, or partiality hurt people’s faith in those laws.

Has Google lost it’s focus? It sure sounds like when you take into account all the investments that Google has made recently, such as investing in social game developer Zynga, a myriad of wind and solar energy projects, and even in DNA analysis outfit 23andMe. But nothing can be further from web search and a self driving autonomous vehicle. You may ask, what does developing an artificial intelligence for a driverless car have to do with Google’s mission of indexing the world’s information. Another question is why wouldn’t Google leave autonomous terrestrial vehicles to the military, or Ford.

Most Silicon Valley pundits have been predicting that Google next project would be Google Me, a social networking site to compete toe to toe with Facebook. But no one predicted these investments outside of search, ads, and mobile.

Over the past few administrations, federal funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA have been cut while military spending has increased. Maybe Google is the new NASA. They are funding and starting projects usually considered the realm of large federal agencies such as NASA or DARPA. What other areas of scientific research will Google fund or get into next?  Will Google invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, much like the MQ-1 Predator?

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google was working on a Googlenet artificial intelligence engine and robots powered with the Android platform.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Foursquare style check-ins is a feature not a product. Facebook Places has proven that location base check-ins are a feature easily implemented. That said, Foursquare and other location based services have tried to wrap social games and compulsion loops into their products in the form of mayorships and badges to make the check-in process more meaningful. But as a feature, as opposed to a product, checking into a place, restaurant, or business does not scratch any real business itch. I understand that to a brick and mortar business, having an idea of how often your customers are near your business and marketing to them when they are can be beneficial, but if all Foursquare is doing is checking in then users will eventually experience check-in burnout.

Location based check-ins is a feature and to one degree or another you can lock in your location on Facebook Places, Yelp, Google Buzz, Twitter, Gowalla, etc. But aside from running for mayor of my local dollar store and racking up some virtual badges there is little benefit or purpose for the end user. The missing piece of location base services is commerce, making users into customers.

Like most folks, I hate waiting in line at a restaurant. Too often when you are stuck in line you have someone crowding into your personal space, you feel like you are just wasting time standing there waiting to order some food, and worst is when people call in and their order is taken before yours. Wouldn’t it be great if you can use a location base service to indicate that you are near your favorite taqueria and have the ability to order right there using a mobile app? If Foursquare could do this, I wouldn’t mind given them my credit card number, turning me from a free loading user to paying customer.

There a ton of apps on the iTunes app store that use users’ location to find a store or deal nearby. The Groupon app can locate deals nearby. The Macy’s iShop app has a store locator that uses your phone’s location. If McDonald’s or Starbucks had a location base mobile app that allowed me to order from half a block down by charging my card and had my items ready as I walked in, that would add so much more value to the mobile app user, establishment, and location based service.

Blippy is a site that allows you to automatically share the purchases you’ve made and the products you’ve bought with friends and followers. The way Blippy can detect products and services bought is by monitoring the transactions made on a given credit card. Blippy has been around for a while and many of the questions concerning privacy and security have already been asked. Blippy is just the next logical conclusion of all the information we make public on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With some common sense, extra precautions, and the correct privacy settings, people feel more and more comfortable posting about the products they purchase, the locations they visit, and their private lives including relationship status and political views. Blippy is one of few companies in the social commerce web space and it complements with the strategy at Amazon that I think Amazon should make an offer of no less $100 million dollars to purchase Blippy before it gets snagged up by a competitor. The social commerce space has just been validated by Apple Ping. Apple Ping complements Apple iTunes by being a social commerce community around music and possibly other entertainment media such as movies and books. Similarly, Blippy can complement Amazon by being a social commerce engine for the products sold by the online retailer giant. Blippy also compliments the large amount of product reviews Amazon has amassed and can easily be turned on for all the users accounts at Amazon with little effort, because essentially every Amazon user has already entered one or more credit card.

More and more companies will have niche social applications around their core business, right now news networks to car companies and everything between are using social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they will soon ask for more and more control over users data than these sites provide. Instead of being a Twitter or Facebook client to post likes and status updates, large ecommerce sites will develop their own social niche sites around their core competencies, like Apple Ping. Just like Apple has released Ping as a social engine for discovering new music, Amazon needs a similar product to compliment it’s online retail business and it’s social media strategy. The social graph provided by Blippy augments well around the data Amazon already has, such as previous purchases, reviews, and the information to generate recommendations. All things being equal, Blippy adds more value to Amazon which sells product than to Facebook that which impressions.

I’m not an insider, investor, or friends with anyone at Blippy or Amazon, but I just feel that these two businesses compliment each other very well and can take social networking to the next level into social ecommerce. When ecommerce goes social and viral it will mark the beginning of ecommerce 2.0.

When it comes to Apple you have two camps, the fanatical Apple fanboys and the Apple haters. The divide in between these two camps is wider than the digital divide and when it comes to real points both sides usually get them wrong. Since Apple announced iTunes 10 and its social commerce component Ping, I’ve seen this debate flare up again with new FUD and fodder. The first misconception between Apple fanboys and haters alike is that Ping is another social networking site. Ping is very much social, but it is not a networking or a site. Ping is a social commerce component integrated into iTunes via the iTunes desktop application and the iOS iTunes app available for the iPhone and iPad. Ping is a game changer, just like the Apple App Store was before that, and the iTunes before that, and the iPod before that. Ping is a game changer and tech pundits and press are trying to make it out with old rules from previous games/products, that’s their first fallacy. It is clear that one will use Ping to contact an old high school buddy or stalk an ex, like they would on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Ping is all about social commerce, not social networking.

Unlike Facebook, that is forced to make money by extorting advertiser to buy ads to their own Facebook Pages, or forcing application developers in using their Facebook currency that is as worthless as a $10 billion Zimbabwe bill, Apple Ping is not about connecting you to friends and family and it sure doesn’t care about your social graph, it care about your consumption graph. Ping won’t compete for users with other social networking sites at the same level that Facebook does with Google Buzz or MySpace. For the most part, social networking sites like Facebook aim to be nothing more than a time sink, and they have grown in large part by social games oblige users to poke and send virtual lasagna to each other. Ping complements the users iTunes experience when they are already on iTunes looking for new music. This is evidently clear especially when you look at how social networking sites like Facebook uses numbers to describe their growth. Facebook describes their growth by counting the number of users that were active in a given month and trying to track the average number of hours a user is on Facebook. Apple tracks its growth by the number of products it has sold. Facebook is designed to simply waste peoples time and have them click on clicks, and Apple designs products that appeal to users.

I want to be clear about the following fact, especially since it is what most Apple haters get wrong. Apple does not need to be the marker leader to make the most money!!! Even though Apple has seen a growth in its market share in laptops, for example, it still has a small slice. But with double digit margins, it means it can sell less product and still make more money than commoditized competitors like Dell or HP. Apple has played this card well before, for example it is choosing a similar approach in the mobile space. It would rather have a small market share, and simply have a better profit margin and more control over its products. Unlike Facebook, Ping doesn’t need market share to be profitable. For example, Facebook requires millions of impressions to make a buck or two on ads.

In its current release, Ping reminds me a lot more to the first generation iPod than the iPod Touch. Currently, Ping feels clunky, is sparely populated, doesn’t have enough bands listed, has a ton of spam, doesn’t support music or apps, etc. At this stage, Ping is still lacking many features to make it comparable to what we expect from a social networking site. For example, when it was released numbers where not formatted with a comma for values larger than a thousand. This issue was fixed within a day of release. I would also like more personalization of my profile page, the ability to add my homepage URL, my other social networking sites, etc. Basically Ping needs a lot more polish, but I’ve heard that Steve Jobs has done that once or twice before for a new revolutionary product line.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If developers think that QA is going to find all their design problems, they are doing it wrong.
• Code wants to be dynamic.
• Unlike what it sounds like, Extreme Programming isn’t a spectator sport where you jump off a ramp with your favorite IDE.
• The web needs an open standard API for user badges and achievements.
• Social network sites should adopt a open standard API for user badges and achievements!
• The user interface made me do it!
• Show me the money, show me the data.
• Technology will date you, as in it will give away your age, like if your used a floppy vs a thumb drive vs neural memory implant..
• I’m sure Hallmark has a card for that, to show our appreciation to the QAs in our lives.
• The meek shall inherit the earth, the geek shall inherit an earth simulation on some social virtual game running on the cloud.
• Can you debug dreams?
• Men are digital, women are analog.
• Refactor yourself!
• Trust No Technology

Team Leadership

• Good things come to those that make them happen.
• Cut out the 20% from Pareto’s Principle from your process.
• Follow your dreams and you will be your own leader!
• Our attitude affects the outcome of our experiences and that is reflected in our perspective which influences our attitude.
• Fear is a virus of the mind!
• Some people are proud instead of productive.
• Sometimes we need to accept and move forward before we can understand.
• One persons Epic Fail is another’s FTW!
• If you don’t remember when you took a vacation last, you need a vacation!
• There are somethings that we are just not going to understand, but that we need to accept.
• If better is not easier and cheaper then it’s not.
• Just because something is better (function) doesn’t mean it’s better (form).
• You have to feed, exercise, and train your creativity before you can make it work for you.

Product Placement

• GIA: Google Intelligence Agency. FBI: FaceBook of Investigations.
• Is Facebook too big to fail or just big enough to get regulated?
• And then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be multi-touch.”
• Cost Plus World Market should really rename itself to 3rd World Market since they mostly sell trinkets from under developed world.
• CVS has the widest and weirdest selection, they sell everything from hard liquor to underwear. It’s basically my party supply store.
• Someone should invent foursquare for fictional places, I would like to check I the Star Wars Cantina.
• I wish iTunes could organize songs by mood in addition to genre and album.

Overheard

• OH: Awww, that gansta cute.
• OH: Travel is my drug of choice, I rather go on a real trip than a hallucinogenic trip.
• OH: I woke up so tired from that dream because I was running in it.
• OH: It’s very hard sometimes to think on your own.
• OH: when you are a parent and are dealing with your kids, you have to be the bigger person.
• OH: I’m sorry for whatever I did in your dream that made you upset, trust me that is not typical of my behavior in other people’s dreams.
• OH: It’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that you didn’t do anything spectacular.

Quotes

• Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. – Anonymous
• Everyone specializes in their own area of weakness. – Rothbard’s Law
• Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. – Wirth’s Law
• It is not how much you make that counts, but how much money you keep. – Robert Kiyosaki
• All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you. – Prince
• Hope. Deleted – Emotionless Wine Bucket #futurama
• There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach
• Control the music industry? Check. Control the publishing industry? Check. Control-alt-delete? Never. – @ceoSteveJobs
• I bet if they had Yelp in 1850, nobody would have taken the Oregon Trail. – @badbanana
• People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. – Jeffrey Gitomer
• Welcome, to the real world. – Morpheus
• I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. – HAL
• Would you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict? – John Waters