patents

Who is suing who in the mobile phone industry?

GigaOm links to an excellent visualization of smartphone patents’ legal battles. It’s interesting how different is the representation of Apple and Google on this graph. However, one needs to remember, that Google has acquired Motorola’s mobile division.

This seems to be a nice update to another graph that I’ve posted a couple of years ago. Some of the lawsuits from the old chart are still here. And there is a whole bunch of new ones. I like this new updated one better than the old one, because company logos make it more readable. And this one also has references to the actual lawsuits, in case someone wants to follow.

eBay’s newest patent

Steve Yegge lets us all know about the newest eBay patent:

San Jose, CA (Reuters) — Online auctions cartel eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and its collections and incarceration arm PayPal announced that on July 21, 2011, the two companies had jointly been awarded United States Patent No. 105960411 for their innovative 10-click “Buy it Now” purchasing pipeline.

The newly-patented buying system guides users through an intuitive, step-by-step process of clicking “Buy It Now”, entering your password, logging in because they signed your sorry ass out again, getting upsold shit you don’t want, continuing to your original destination, accepting the default quantity of 1 (otherwise known as “It”), committing to buy, clicking “Pay Now”, entering a different password than your first one, clicking “Log In” again god dammit, declining to borrow money from eBay’s usury department, reviewing the goddamn purchase details since by now you’ve completely forgotten what the hell you were buying, and finally confirming the god damned payment already.

The 10-click checkout system, known colloquially as 10CLICKFU — which many loyal users believe stands for “10 Clicks For You” — was recently awarded top honors by the National Alliance of Reconstructive Hand Surgeons. 10CLICKFU incorporates a variable number of clicks ranging from eight to upwards of fifteen, but eBay’s patent stipulates that any purchasing system that lies to you at least nine times about the “Now” part of “Buy It Now” is covered by their invention.

Read the full press release for more details.

Turning the world I-side out

Here is an example of things to come. The world is changing in so many interesting ways that it’s difficult to catch up with most…

The best market example I know is digital photography. Who is a digital photo “consumer” any more? Nobody consumes film, and relatively few consume print processing. Instead everybody is a producer in that marketplace. I have close to eleven thousand pictures up on Flickr now. From the start Flickr (a terrific Linux/LAMP hack) and I have both understood that those pictures are my data, and that the two of us are making the most of that fact. Same goes for Tabblo*, a new company that does stuff with photos that Flickr doesn’t. Because Flickr has open APIs, and welcomes customers who also work with other vendors, I am able to make montages for printing and sharing, on Tabblo’s site, with my Flickr photosets. As a result, Flickr, Tabblo and I all make money off each other, and enjoy productive symbiotic relationships that grow the new photography marketplace.

Meanwhile, where is Kodak, owner of one of the world’s largest patent portfolios and leader of the photography industry since the dawn of the category? You tell me. Where I contribute to the market, their name almost never comes up.