A New Clash of the Titans

Have you seen this Lawsuit?


This is some interesting news, wonder how it will shake out?

Shots have been fired in Silicon Valley. Yahoo has taken aim at Facebook, pitting a former internet titan against the social network behemoth over what has become the biggest open-fire range in the tech industry: patent infringement.

Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook alleges that the social media giant’s business infringes on 10 of Yahoo’s patents. The patents cover commonly used features of the social web: personalized advertising, customized portal pages and news feeds, recommendations to connect with other suggested users (and screen out spammers), social music and messaging applications, and authorizing some users (but not others) to see different sections of your content.

The wide nature of these patents, and the limited way that Yahoo itself leveraged them, has tagged Yahoo with the least lovely handle in the tech world: “patent troll.” The word is commonly associated with companies like Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures that ship no products and live off royalties and settlements from IP. It’s not a happy place for a big (if dysfunctional) online media company to find itself. Even if it’s also doing anything and everything it can to pull together as much value for its shareholders, the blowback at Yahoo’s audacity could be tremendous. Especially if the lawsuit fails.

In its complaint, Yahoo says that Facebook’s use of these technologies has been essential to the market share Facebook now enjoys (at Yahoo’s expense, among others). It says Facebook has refused to license these patents and payment for royalties past due is insufficent compensation for their willful and repeated violation. Yahoo asks the court for triple damages, pre-judgment and post-judgment interest on those damages, all court costs, and — ka-boom — that Facebook be “immediately, preliminarily, and permanently enjoined from further infringement of the patents-in-suit.”

Which is to say, Facebook either shuts down or becomes the lamest (but most widely adopted!) address book manager ever.

Back in June 2010, Yahoo made friends with Facebook, deeply integrating Facebook’s social services with Yahoo.com. If it saw a problem with Yahoo’s services then, it kept its reservations to itself. Now that Scott Thompson is in charge, Yahoo has become much more aggressive toward Facebook — and (should its suit be successful) potentially many other companies as well.

Things like this don’t usually happen in Silicon Valley. “Yahoo! has broken ranks and crossed the unspoken line which is that web companies don’t sue each other over their bogus patent portfolios,”writes venture capitalist Fred Wilson. “I don’t think there’s a unique idea out there in the web space and hasn’t been for well over a decade. Pretty much everything useful is based on prior art going back before the commercial web existed.”

The exception to this rule, of course, is Yahoo. Yahoo sued its once-partner Google in 2004, shortly before it, too, was headed toward a lucrative IPO. Then, Google settled, for lucrative stock in the company. If Facebook comes to any similar agreement to make Yahoo go away, I doubt it will be nearly as generous.

The lawsuit knocks out the wobbliest of the three legs from the tentative Yahoo-Microsoft-Facebook alliance in common defense against Google. Microsoft provides the search engine, Yahoo the original and aggregated media, and Facebook the social network. That’s gone now.

Where does Yahoo go from here? Just a month ago, it seemed like it was going to build its way out of its problems, ramping up political coverage for the 2012 election and hiring star columnists like Virginia Heffernan.

“They are basically capturing jewels. They’re bringing people in who are stars, because one of the next big phases of the company is to become a really big media powerhouse,” a source told Politico’s Dylan Byers after the Heffernan hire in January.

I guess that’s just one of Yahoo’s next big phases. I don’t know whether this signals rebuilding, or managed decline. Maybe both at once.

Reprinted from WIRED magazine!

How to be a Transformative Entrepreneur

Here's an interesting video interview
from Techcrunch.

"As a forty-year veteran of the venture capitalist industry and the Managing Director of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Jeffrey Harris has unusual insight into what makes CEOs like FedEx’s Fred Smith and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz winners. And to pass his insights into this successful entrepreneurial mentality, Harris has just authored a book, Transformative Entrepreneurs: How Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Other Innovators Succeeded.

So what did Steve Jobs and Walt Disney have in common? I asked Harris when he came into our New York City studio. It’s perseverance, he explained to me, the unwillingness ever to quit, an undying faith in one’s own abilities and ideas, which make the transformative entrepreneurs. Companies fail, Harris told me, because they lack leadership. Which is why, he explained, he always invests in people rather than ideas. And it’s why, he went on, “without entrepreneurial activity, we all lose.”

Thanks, Techcrunch!

"The Artist" Best Picture!

Lookie Here,
"The Artist" won the
Acadamy Award for
Best Picture.

I will watch it just for
the adorable doggie,
Uggie, what a cutie pie!


Here is the Trailer.



I hope you enjoyed the show.  I was busy and didn't watch.  There is always youtube for the highlights.  Here is Billy Crystal's contribution.




Our friends across the pond, The Daily Mail, has some STELLAR coverage, and marvelous photo's of the whole event!  See what you missed, RIGHT HERE!

I hope your upcoming week is worthy of an Oscar!  Go get 'em.

Facebook IPO, things that could kill it

You've probably heard about Facebook's HUGE IPO.

Here's an interesting article from
Mashable:

"Here’s one of the more painful parts of taking a company public: You have to make an honest assessment, in front of the whole world, of all the things that could kill your business. Facebook is no exception.

In its SEC filing, as required by law, the company outlined a whopping 35 “risk factors” that could “materially and adversely affect” Facebook. It’s a comprehensive list of every threat the social network currently faces. Some are head-slappingly obvious (they could lose users and advertisers), while others are more revealing (Facebook isn’t making any money from its mobile platform — so what if that grows and web users shrink?)

That may seem like a lot, but not in comparison to recent tech IPOs. LinkedIn listed 42 risk factors in its filing,Zynga offered 44, and Groupon had 55.

Does that make Facebook a better bet for investors? You be the judge. What follows is a summary, in plain (or at least plainer) English, of the things Facebook says could kill it.

In other words, here is every single little worry that keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. We’ve bolded the ones that sound particularly troubling to us.

1. We could simply lose users, or fail to add new ones.
2. We could lose advertisers — and new technology may let users block ads.
3. Facebook’s mobile platform doesn’t show ads — so the more that grows, the worse for us.
4. The platform for Facebook apps might not be successful.
5. The competition from Google, Microsoft and Twitter could heat up — not to mention other social networks around the world.
6. More governments could restrict access to Facebook.
7. Users could turn their noses up at new products.
8. The Facebook culture is all about rapid innovation and getting users engaged — and that could come at the cost of profits.
9. Unspecified future events could tarnish our brand.
10. Bugs might give people access to users’ information that they’re not supposed to see.
11. The media could turn on us.
12. Our quarterly financial results could be difficult to predict.
13. Zynga accounts for 12% of our revenue. If we part ways, that could seriously hurt us.
14. Our revenue grew by 88% last year — and that’s simply not sustainable. Growth is bound to decline.
15. The U.S. laws and regulations we’re governed by could change or be reinterpreted.
16. If our patents and copyrights aren’t granted — or aren’t effective — it could seriously hurt us.
17. We have some patent lawsuits on our hands that could end badly.
18. We’re also involved in class-action lawsuits, and we could lose them too.
19. Mark Zuckerberg has a massive amount of shares, which concentrates power in the hands of one man.
20. There’s a complicated tax liability connected to a particular kind of stock unit we gave out — one that will be taxed at 45%.
21. If we need more rounds of investment, the terms might not be reasonable.
22. Costs might grow faster than revenue.
23. A lot of our servers are handled by third parties, and they might be disrupted.
24. We’ve started building a lot of our own data centers to handle traffic, and we’ve got limited experience doing this kind of thing.
25. Our software is incredibly complex and may have a lot of bugs.
26. We can’t say for sure that we’ll handle our growth effectively — we have more than 3,000 employees now, and that could spin out of control.
27. If we lose our leaders, like Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, that would really harm us.
28. People might sue us over all sorts of stuff posted on Facebook — intellectual property, copyright, defamation, and so on.
29. Viruses, hacking, phishing and malware. Oh my.
30. Payment systems in Facebook apps could mean new government regulations.
31. We’re continually expanding abroad, and we may not understand all the risks in new countries.
32. We’re planning to acquire lots of other companies, which could disrupt everything at Facebook.
33. We might default on our leases or our debt.
34. Our tax liabilities, in general, are bigger than we thought.
35. U.S. tax code reform, if it happens, might hit us where it hurts."

Thanks for the insight, Mashable!

All I can say is I wish I was one of the WInklevoss Twins ;-)

GPS Ruling by Supreme Court Helps Privacy

Good News for Citizens!

  Read the News Below from USA Today.

"WASHINGTON – In a major decision on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police need a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car.

The ruling, which marked the justices' first-ever review of GPS tracking, was unanimous. The justices divided, however, on how the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to such high-tech tracking.

The case, which during November oral arguments prompted justices' references to George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984, ensures that police cannot use theGlobal Positioning System to continuously track a suspect before presenting sufficient grounds and obtaining a warrant from a judge.

Monday's decision specifically applies when police install a GPS tracking device on a person's car, but five justices suggested in concurring statements that a warrant might similarly be needed for prolonged surveillance through smartphones or other devices with GPS capabilities.

The Global Positioning System, originally developed for the military, relies on satellites that transmit to receivers that calculate the latitude and longitude of a location. A GPS device installed by police can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day. Data can be collected and analyzed far more efficiently and economically than if a team of agents followed a person.

The court reversed the cocaine-trafficking conviction of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. In 2005, police attached a GPS device to a Jeep owned by Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. Agents then used evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks to help win the conviction on conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Civil libertarians and defense lawyers praised the ruling in United States v. Jones. The "Fourth Amendment must continue to protect against government intrusions even in the face of modern technological surveillance tools," said Virginia Sloan, president of theConstitution Project, which was among the groups that sided with Jones. The Justice Department, which had appealed a lower court's decision requiring a warrant for GPS tracking, had no public response to the decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the main opinion for the court, said "the government's physical intrusion on the Jeep" to obtain information constitutes a search. He based his decision on the original roots of Fourth Amendment protection for property against government intrusions. Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

The four other justices, led by Samuel Alito, concurred only in the judgment for Jones. Alito said the case would be better analyzed by asking whether Jones' "reasonable expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove."

Alito contended the attachment of the device was not itself an illegal "search." Rather, he said, what matters is a driver's expectation of privacy. "We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark," Alito wrote, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Sotomayor, who fully joined Scalia's opinion, suggested in a concurring statement that she agreed with parts of Alito's analysis, which would cover privacy expectations not only when police affix a device but when no physical invasion occurred. That could cover when police access signals from a GPS-enabled smartphone.

"The bottom line is that any use of a GPS tracking device without a warrant would be highly risky for law enforcement," said Walter Dellinger, one of the lawyers who represented Jones.

Anthony Barkow, former director of the New York-based Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, which sided with the Justice Department, agreed. "Law enforcement will adjust and seek warrants" in all but emergency situations.

The Justice Department had argued that drivers do not expect their movements on public streets to be kept private, no matter the duration, so GPS tracking should not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections regarding searches and seizures. When the case was argued, Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben insisted that the government was not trying to obtain "24-hour surveillance of every citizen of the United States."

Beware of Publishing on iBooks Author

Think everything you write is yours?

Well, think again, my friend.....

not if you write your novels, etc. utilizing Apple's iBooks Author.  I just came across this article, reprinted from PCMag.com.  Study it and think again about publishing your original book on this platform, YOU WON"T own your own work!  Forewarned is forearmed.  Reprinted below:

"With iBooks Author, Apple just made a hideous play to kill authors' rights over their work. This doesn't just affect big publishers like Pearson or HarperCollins; it affects every single person who wants to use Apple's new tool to get their word out. Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you.

The news was so startling, I couldn't believe it when I first read it. The iBooks Author user agreement says that any file output in the iBook format must be sold through Apple's store, and not anywhere else. You can give it away for free, but if you want to sell your work, you can't sell it yourself. You can't find the best financial or distribution deal. You can't offer to email it to your friends for a dollar each so they can read it on their iPads. You must sell it through Apple, which gets a 30 percent cut.

Fortunately, it doesn't look like Apple owns the actual words of your book; it looks, to my non-lawyerly eye, that if you took the text out and reformatted it in a different app you could sell it elsewhere. But I'm not sure of that.

You Work For Apple Now
I'm feeling a personal terror here because I make my living as a writer. I'm writing this column now in Apple's TextEdit. If Apple took the same approach to TextEdit as it does to iBooks, I wouldn't be able to put my columns in PCMag's Digital Edition (sold through Zinio). Apple would control how PCMag does its business.

My wife is an artist; she creates some of her work on a Mac. Could Apple then forbid her from selling it on Etsy or through an art gallery with a little-noticed clause in a licensing agreement? That's what iBook Author heralds.

Up until now, Apple has kept creative tools divorced from the means of distribution. You can choose how to sell the things you made with iWork, iWeb, Xcode, TextEdit, or any app the company has ever written, free or not. Apple has always made a distinction between enabling the creative process and selling the product of that process.

Apple's iBooks Author erases that distinction. Apple owns the creative process of anyone who uses the tool. If you're looking to create an iBook, you've just given Apple total distribution control over your work. That's as good as partial ownership.

There are other creative tools with distribution restrictions. Take Blurb, the online self-publishing tool. If you build a book with Blurb's toolset, you have to pay Blurb to print it. But after that, it's yours. You can sell it at a school bake sale, on eBay, or to your friends. If you make an iBook, it's Apple's forever.

This is also very different than Apple's iOS app lock-in. Apple can safely argue that locking iPhones to the App Store helps keep malware off the platform. In the case of iOS, the restriction is around the playback device rather than the creative process itself. (As Dave Wineman, who discovered the iBooks Author EULA says, "In ensuring that the App Store remains the only legitimate market for iOS apps, Apple doesn't claim any legal rights to the content I create using its Xcode toolset.")

By saying you can distribute free but not paid iBooks yourself, this play becomes solely about dollars, not about curation, illicit content or malware. And by prohibiting iBooks from being resold, shared or sold as printed copies, Apple goes even farther than it did with its original iTunes DRM—which, you may remember, could be "ripped, mixed and burned" from its very start.

iBooks Author may be free, but it's a bad deal.

Yes, You Still Have Choice
I saw this coming years ago, although I may have underestimated Apple's ambition. When I said in 2010 that "the iPad will kill the Mac", I really meant that Apple was trying to shift away from open computing platforms to closed ones where Apple controls the sole means of content distribution.

The Mac App Store is Apple's attempt to bring the closed iOS model to the Mac, and it's flourishing, but it's fortunately flourishing in competition with other software stores. There was just too much inertia around openness on the Mac platform to totally close it down. Mac users have the best of both worlds: they can choose the App Store's ease, or have the freedom to download software from elsewhere. That's a win-win situation.

What's the solution here? Why, don't use iBooks Author, of course. 

Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the e-book creation market. This tool may look appealing, but it's a devil's bargain. I like using Apple products, but I don't want to work for the company."

Your friend, CB BookTech, concurs with this assessment 100%.

Stunning Video of Yosemite

Some Amazing Video's of Yosemite.


















A beautiful place in America to vacation.
Here's another video.