Pamela Samuelson on startups and software patents

Following up on my last post here is the view from Pamela Samuelson:

Why software startups decide to patent ... or not

Two-thirds of the approximately 700 software entrepreneurs who participated in the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey report that they neither have nor are seeking patents for innovations embodied in their products and services. These entrepreneurs rate patents as the least important mechanism among seven options for attaining competitive advantage in the marketplace. Even software startups that hold patents regard them as providing only a slight incentive to invest in innovation.

She also lists a variety of reasons why these software entrepreneurs decided to forgo patenting their last invention.  It's a very interesting write up. 

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Comments re "The Noisy Channel: A Practical Rant About Software Patents"

The Noisy Channel: A Practical Rant About Software Patents - [My comments cross-posted here]

Daniel, nice writeup.

I worked for a BigCo and filed many patents. It was a mixed bag. The time horizon is so long that even after I’ve been gone for 3.5 years many of them are still lost in the USPTO. Average time for me to see granted patents was 5+ years.

Here are my biased opinions:

1) Patents really matter for BigCos operating on a long time horizon. It’s a strategic investment.

2) Patents are nearly worthless for a Startup or SmallCo. The time horizon is way past your foreseeable future, and thus the whole effort is akin to planning for an alternate reality different than the current business context. Throwing coins in a fountain for good luck is about as relevant. You simply are better off getting a filing date on a provisional design writeup and hiring an engineer with the money you’d spend on Patent lawyers.

3) As an Acquiring company looking at a company to acquire, Provisional or Pending Patents are a liability not an asset. They take time and resources to push to completion for a strategy of deterrence.

4) Patents are mostly ignored in the professional literature. Take Sentiment Analysis as one example. Sentiment Analysis exploded in 2001 w.r.t. Academic publishing, yet there are more than a few older patents discussing good technical work on Sentiment Analysis. I’ve NEVER seen an algorithm in a patent cited in a paper as previous work. And I have seen academic papers with algorithms already 90% covered by an older patent… and the papers are cited as ‘novel work’.

5) Finding relevant patents is ludicrously hard. It might be the most challenging problem in IR w.r.t. a corpus IMO. Different words mean the same thing and vise versa due to the pseudo-ability in a Patent to redefine a word away from the obvious meaning. With two different lawyers rendering the same technical design into a writeup and claims results in wildly different work product.

6) I’ve seen some doosey granted Patents. Things that appear to either be implementations of very old CS ideas into new domains.. or worse stuff that would be a class project as an undergrad.

It’s just plain ugly in this realm.

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On Strategic Plans

This needs absolutely no comment.

“We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.” ~ Herb Kelleher

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Hilarious system calls in the BeOS

These system calls in the BeOS still make me smile.

int32 is_computer_on(void)

Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

double is_computer_on_fire(void)

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

#include <stdio.h> 
#include <be/kernel/OS.h> 
int main() 
{ 
printf("[%d] = is_computer_on()\n", is_computer_on()); 
printf("[%f] = is_computer_on_fire()\n", is_computer_on_fire()); 
} 

These functions serve a similar purpose to getpid() in Unix, essentially no-op calls that can be used to test the kernel's intrinsic response time under load.

Write up of BeOS history is here, Haiku is an open source clone of the BeOS that is curiously under active development.

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Contractor Needed: HTML/CSS/Javascript Ninja

The Rubicon Project is looking for an in-browser HTML/CSS/Javascript Ninja to restructure the workflow of an application GUI.  The server side code is perl/mod_perl.  Please contact me if you are interested and available.  The contract is 4-6 weeks.

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Job Post: Software Engineer/Scientist: Ad Serving, Optimization and Core Team

LOCATION: the Rubicon Project HQ in West Los Angeles or Salt Lake City

the Rubicon Project is on a mission to automate buying and selling for the $65 billion global online advertising industry. Backed by $42 million in funding, we are currently looking for the best engineers in the world to work with us.

Team Description

The mission of the Core Team is to build robust, scalable, maintainable and well documented systems for ad serving, audience analytics, and market analysis. Every day we serve billions of ads, process terabytes of data and provide valuable data and insights to our publishers. If building software that touches 500+ million people every month is interesting to you, you'll fit in well here.

Some of the custom software we've built to solve these problems include:

A patented custom ad engine delivering thousands of ad impressions per second with billions of real time auctions daily
A real time bid engine designed to scale out to billions of bid requests daily
Optimization Algorithms capable of scheduling and planning adserving opportunities to maximize revenue
Client side Javascript that performs real-time textual analysis of web pages to extract semantically meaningful data and structures
A web-scale key value store based on ideas from the Amazon Dynamo paper used to store 100s of millions of data points
Unique audience classification system using various technologies such as Solr and Javascript for rich, real-time targeting of web site visitors
Data Mining buying and selling strategies from a torrent of transactional data
Analytics systems capable of turning a trillion data points into real business insight

Job Description

Your job, should you accept it, is to build new systems, new features and extend the functionality of our existing systems. You will be expected to architect new systems from scratch, add incremental features on existing systems, fix bugs in other people's code and help manage production operations of the services you build. Sometimes you'll have to (or want to) do this work when you are not in the office, so working remote can't scare you off.

Most of our systems are written in Perl, Java, and C, but we have pieces of Python, Clojure and server-side Javascript as well. Hopefully you have deep expertise in at least one of these; you'll definitely need to have a desire to quickly learn and work on systems written in all of the above.

You should also have worked with and/or designed service oriented architectures, advanced db schemas, big data processing, highly scalable and available web services and are well aware of the issues surrounding the software development lifecycle. We expect that your resume will itemize your 3+ years experience, mention your BS or MS in Computer Science and be Big Data Buzzword Compliant.

Bonus points for experience with some of the technologies we work with:

• Hadoop
• NodeJS
• MySql
• Solr/Lucene
• RabbitMQ
• MongoDB
• Thrift
• Amazon EC2
• Memcached
• MemcacheQ
• Machine Learning
• Optimization Algorithms
• Economic Modeling

Apply Now! Click the Apply button!

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