liquidmatrix

On August 19, 2008, Microsoft was granted a US-Patent:


Dave Lewis claims this means that Page-up and Page-down is hereby patents owned by Microsoft. I think Microsoft now also have patented using arrows to navigate - if you use your arrow-up or arrow-down in MS Word, you are taken one line up or down - or you are "scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document...".

The same happens using the elevator shafts - moving left/right, or up/down. It may also apply to the shortcuts to jump forward/backward to pages, columns, tables and images.

I agree with Dave that the US Patent system is long overdue for a revision. If it continues like this, anyone with a bit of cash and a way with text can claim patents for anything and everything.

What does this mean to your business? You may risk that someone shows up one day and ask you to pay a license fee for using things you take for granted - like your keyboard. But the most likely scenario is for someone to take your technology - the technology you have spent time, money and effort on developing - and register a patent on it. Using that patent, they own the rights to the technology you developed, and they will cash in on it.

How can you avoid this scenario?

Be sure to register your patents as you go. Spend the money - as it is the only way to ensure that no-one else does it. To SME's the cost of patents may seem high, but consider it an investment - if you fail to register, the whole value of your development is gone (since if your technology have any chances for making money, someone will register it as a patent, and you will pay them to use your own technology...).

What are your experiences with patents?

Sources:
ZDNET
Liquidmatrix (Dave Lewis)

entrepreneurs, small business, patent, microsoft, liquidmatrix

Facebook (and a number of other platforms in the Social Networking revolution) enables great minds to do great things. Many of us uses these services on a regular basis (daily, hourly, or even every moment of the waking hours). 

I for one is a huge fan of networking, and using networking sites enables me to communicate and stay in touch with old and new contacts easily. On the other hand, I recognize the security challenges - namely the ID-theft and the social engineering (SE) possibilities that is enabled through such services. 

One of the messages I try to convey in speeches and trainings is the threat that Facebook Apps may be. Granting an application access to your profile, automatically enables that application to harvest a huge amount of data about you and your friends. Now, most applications are "for real" - thus doing only the thing it claims to do. Still, imagine a business manager sitting on 10s of thousands of users and their data, in need for money. It would be extremely easy to use the data already harvested,  as well as rewrite the application to be more aggressive in it's harvesting. 

The other scenario is malicious apps appearing cool and fun and a "must have". These apps would offer you a service (chocolate) as a killer app - something you just have to have. And you would invite all your friends to use it too. By offering the coolest, it will become popular, and thus the road is open to harvest and use information. Information that you normally only would share with friends only.   

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In enters the Social Engineer. Uses the information about you, collates it with other info shared on other sites, creating a complete profile of you, your interests, your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and so forth. 

Perhaps one day he bumps in to you at the local mall. Or calls you because "someone said that you could be interested in ..." 

Having a complete profile of you, he (she) would know all the answers, and thrill you into doing anything. Given enough time, and a valuable target, there are no limits to what can be achieved. 

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Given this outlook - perhaps it is best to continue as before - in ignorance. Hoping that "it will never happen to me".  

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I gotta run.

Just got this incredible, almost unbelievable, opportunity! This complete stranger called me out of nowhere!

See you in a bit!  

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Ka-zing. 

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(Thanks to Liquidmatrix / Dave Lewis. And man, do I love that cartoon!)