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Patent Trolls: They Do Exist

Posted by David Worthington on January 7, 2010 at 1:59 am

Stanford University has announced a new service for analyzing and tracking patent lawsuits called Lex Machina. Its use of legal informatics has already led to some interesting findings about the nature of patent lawsuits in the US software industry.

The database helped Mark Lemley, the William H. Neukom Professor of Law and the director of the Law, Science Technology Program, determine that patent trolls account for nearly 30% of suits in the IT industry, depending on who is defined as a troll, he said. The clearinghouse data shows that trolls are “disproportionately owners of the most-litigated patents — the ones that show up in dozens of different lawsuits,” he added.

Lemley has conducted research to identify the characteristics of patent trolls, and has testified as an expert for the US Senate on the topic of patent reform.

“I do think [trolls] have a larger impact than the percentage alone would suggest, especially in the IT industries,” Lemley said. He added that the data will help dispel myths about patent litigation from who sues to who wins, and how much defendants have to pay. “We are giving the world access to the facts in a way they’ve never had before.”

Lex Machina is an outgrowth of a research project called the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC). IPLC was developed to provide scholars, policy makers and citizens with open and instant access to data about intellectual property litigation in the United States.

The database grew so vast that Lex Machina was spun off as a separate venture to sustain development, according to Stanford. It now contains over 100,000 cases, over 10 million docket entries, and automates the parsing of that data. “The company includes more computer scientists than lawyers, and has people working at the very forefront of machine learning,” Lemley noted.

I applaud Stanford’s work, and hope that the IPLC database is used to drive patent reform, demystifying a complicated issue. Higher quality patents will protect investments in intellectual property while preserving the ability of start ups to do innovative things.

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Apple’s Next iPhone Must Resurrect the Wow Effect

Posted by David Worthington on January 7, 2010 at 1:52 am

The arrival of Google’s Nexus One smartphone is like the Beatles following Elvis Presley. Elvis revolutionized music and retained his immortal status, but The Beatles were great in their own right. The technological advantage that Apple had when it introduced the iPhone is diminishing (think Fat Elvis). And so the next iPhone will need to be another game changer for Apple to remain on top.

With the original iPhone, Apple addressed the shortcomings that most devices in the category had with fresh, innovative ideas. Initially, there were many second rate imitators, but now, products including the Palm Pre and Nexus One match if not surpass the iPhone in numerous ways.

I love my iPhone, and couldn’t imagine life without my apps. However, there are great alternatives for people who have not yet upgraded to a smartphone or want to save on their monthly service fees.

Case in point: A few months back, a friend and I were sitting in an East Village bar waiting for a bossa nova show to begin. We both whipped out our phones (his was a Pre) and had the proverbial “size contest.” I couldn’t knock the Pre, and he is very happy with it.

Moreover, AT&T’s decision to carry five Android phones is prescient–Android has no place to go but up. While it’s still not fully mature, Android is a great operating system for device manufacturers that do not have their own OS, and that is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of Microsoft Windows.

What is Apple to do? It will do very well due to the strength of its brand, and dedicated users like myself, but those strengths will eventually decline into inertia. Even a phone that leaves the Pre and Nexus One in its dust will not be good enough–Apple must bring back the “wow” factor in order to maintain its leadership of the market (or cede and focus on another groundbreaking product).

I’m confident that Cupertino has enough tricks up its sleeve that it could leave the rest of the industry chasing the iPhone again. There is room to play as the smartphone category grows, but anything less than a revolutionary product simply isn’t good enough for Apple.

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Nyko One-Ups Nintendo With Wii Wand+

Posted by Jared Newman on January 7, 2010 at 12:33 am

Despite the Wii’s innovative motion controls, Nintendo’s Wii Remote is nothing special to hold, especially compared to the elaborate design of an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 controller. That makes fertile ground for Nyko, whose third-party Wii Remotes, or Wands, feel just as mediocre for $10 less.

At CES, Nyko is showing off the Wand+, which is the same size as a regular Wii Remote, but includes the functionality of Nintendo’s accuracy-boosting Wii MotionPlus dongle, no attachments required. Best of all, the Wand+ will sell for $40 when it goes on sale in late February — the same price Nintendo charges for a standalone Wii Remote (Nintendo’s MotionPlus attachment costs another $20).

There are some other nice design flourishes, too, like a soft coating and rubber backing that includes comfortable grooves over the rear battery pack. And it comes in partial or all black.

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Nvidia Offers a Taste of Tablets to Come

Posted by Jared Newman on January 6, 2010 at 11:56 pm

Laying unceremoniously towards the end of Nvidia’s booth at a press event tonight was an early prototype of the Ultra, an Android 2.0 tablet developed by ICD.

It’s the same tablet (or slate — I’m as baffled as Harry by the terminology shift) that appeared briefly, of all places, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a 7-inch tablet with all the trimmings: Wi-Fi, 3G, Webcam, MicroSD slot, 4 GB of internal memory and, of course, Nvidia’s formidable Tegra chip. An Nvidia representative promised more and better tablets at the company’s booth tomorrow, but I had to take a stab at this one tonight.

The Ultra was a bit buggy, which explains why Nvidia wasn’t making a big deal of it. As soon as I picked it up, it crashed. Then it took a while to load up. Then the touch screen acted a bit dodgy. And yet, I walked away excited.

What most impressed me was the tablet’s speed and smoothness. Maybe it’s the iPhone effect, but lately I’ve become obsessed by this sort of thing. And because I’ve never seen Android running so smoothly — even the Nexus One phone on display elsewhere at the event showed some choppiness — using the Ultra was a pleasure. A 1080p version of Star Trek played without a stutter, and the e-reader function flipped nimbly between pages.

We don’t yet know what Apple has in store — or for that matter, whether Apple has anything in store at all — but even if it’s something completely surprising, I could get comfortable with Tegra and Android as purveyors of working class tabletslates. We’ll see what else is in store tomorrow.

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The Beginning of the End of Memory Stick? Hope So!

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2010 at 12:46 pm

In the great scheme of this, this is minor CES news indeed, but I kinda like it: Sony is releasing a line of SD and MicroSD memory cards. If it were any other company, I wouldn’t be writing this post, but we’re talking Sony–the company behind the venerable, eternally annoying, rather pricey, confusingly named, incompatible-with-the-rest-of-the-world Memory Stick format.

Sony, of course, would argue that Memory Stick is an argument in favor of buying its products. I’ve always found it a reason to decide against buying them–even though many of the products that take Memory Sticks, such as scads of Sony’s cameras, have been otherwise otherwise nifty. (I do admit to having a couple of them around somewhere, though–the one time I willingly used them was when I owned a Sony Clie PDA eons ago.)

Sony’s press release about the new SD cards stresses that Memory Stick is still a fabulous format and owners of Sony products should be grateful they have it. And I suspect that nobody within Sony even wants to deal with the possibility that its entry into SD is a first step towards winding down Memory Stick. I’d love to think that it might be, though. Anyone out there want to make the case for keeping the format, other than placating long-time Sony customers who have lots of cards stuffed in desk drawers?

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Steve Ballmer to Demo Slate! Or Not!

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2010 at 11:57 am

When the New York Times’ Ashlee Vance blogged that Steve Ballmer would demo a “novel” HP slate computer at his CES keynote tonight, people got worked up and wondered if it was the semi-mythical Courier prototype. Now sentiment seems to be running against the theory that Ballmer will show off anything extraordinary. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley thinks it might be a relatively prosaic new HP Windows 7 touch-enabled machine. Kara Swisher also says it isn’t Courier.

Sounds reasonable to me–Courier feels like something that’s most likely not ready to be a product just yet.

It’s amazing how quickly the tech world has stopped calling tablets tablets and begun referring to them as slates–a term that wasn’t bandied about much until rumors broke that Apple’s device might be named iSlate. Or can anyone explain to me what the difference is between a tablet and a slate?

Either way, I plan to be at the Ballmer keynote tonight. I’ll let you know what we see, or don’t see…

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Boxee’s QWERTY Remote

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2010 at 12:47 am

The Boxee Box, the Internet TV gizmo that D-Link will be demoing at CES this week, has a remote control with a QWERTY keyboard on its backside. Makes perfect sense. Actually, come to think of it, isn’t it kind of bizarre that there are so many TV boxes today that expect us to laboriously click our way through on-screen keyboards to enter alphanumeric information?

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Hands on With Google’s Nexus One: Questions and Answers

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2010 at 12:07 am

How long has the gadget-loving world been talking about the idea of a Googlephone? For at least three years–before there was an iPhone, let alone an Android.  The longer people talked about it, the more revolutionary it was supposed to be. Who better than Google, after all, to show what an Android phone can be and shatter people’s assumptions about how phones and phone services are sold while it’s at it?

On Tuesday, Google finally announced the Googlephone, in the form of the Nexus One–if you define “Googlephone” as a phone with Google software and Google branding, sold by Google on a Google site.  And…there’s nothing radical about it. Judging from the first few hours I’ve spent playing with one, it’s a good phone–a really good phone. The best Android phone so far, and (along with Palm’s Pre) one of the few phones worthy of being discussed in the same breath as Apple’s iPhone.

But everything that’s better about it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It’s a little bit better than Verizon’s Droid, which was a little bit better than HTC’s Hero, which was a little bit better than the MyTouch.  And considering that Verizon’s Droid spent just two months as the undisputed Android-phone-to-buy, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if the Nexus One was ousted by another little-bit-better phone by Spring. There’s also not nothing particularly remarkable about the way Google is selling the phone, although the company says to stay tuned for more phones with more hardware and carrier partners–including a Verizon Nexus One this Spring.

Bottom line: If Android-based phones are going to catch up with the iPhone–and they might–they’re going to do so in a series of baby steps, not through the Great Leap Forward that some folks expected this phone to be.

Like other journalists at Google’s launch event, I received one as a review loaner. Here are my first impressions. As is my wont, I’m going to provide them in the form of a FAQ.
Continue Reading →

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Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 Looks Rough, Still Neat

Posted by Jared Newman on January 5, 2010 at 9:59 pm

You may have heard earlier this week about Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, an 11.6-inch laptop with a fully detachable tablet screen. Lenovo had it on display tonight, and the press were clamoring to get a look.

Seeing the IdeaPad U1 up close, it’s hard not to get a bit giddy. You essentially get two machines in one, the base computer powered by a Core 2 Duo processor and the tablet running on a 1 GHz Snapdragon ARM chip. Peeling the tablet from its shell requires a simple pull away from the translucent red backing, then upwards.

Once separated, the tablet switches into a custom, Linux-based operating system that, sadly, is pretty jerky. However, the product is six months out, and Lenovo says they want to boost the smoothness factor before release. Otherwise, the tablet mode is easy enough to navigate, with four big panels for photos, videos, music and documents. There’s also a six-panel screen that includes a variety of widgets, such as weather and e-mail.

A couple other points of concern: the tablet’s screen got washed out pretty easily at off-angles — it was easy to notice this as other people handled the unit around me. And if you don’t like the red shell, too bad, because that’s all Lenovo has in store for now.

Still, the idea of a modular computer is exciting. It’s definitely possible to use both pieces at once, with the base plugged into an external monitor (or downloading files idly) while you browse away on the tablet. Put together, the computers combine resources, sharing storage and getting eight hours of battery life where the tablet alone gets less than five. Many of the other specs are up in the air, but you’ll definitely get 4 GB of RAM (512 MB for the tablet), 2 USB ports and a 1.3-megapixel Web cam.

Lenovo said they’re hoping to get the IdeaPad U1’s price under $1,000 for a May or June release.

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