Don’t you just hate it when someone is awarded a blanket patent on commonplace technology that they can’t even truthfully claim they invented? Case in point: NetMite (Yongyong Xu) and patent 6,418,462. “Global sideband service distributed computing method”. I’m not a lawyer, but on the surface this patent protects the idea of distributed computing via Ajax.. but if you read the actual language of the patent, it actually appears to describe Ajax itself:

A new method of distributed computing, sideband computing, that is global, scalable and can utilize many idle CPU resources worldwide. Sideband is defined as when a user connects to some (normal) network services, a separate communication channel is opened, through which a server distributes its tasks to all the clients and collects the results later. 

OK read between the lines.. Ajax, right? The point of this patent? Frivolous lawsuits, obviously. In a recent article on MarketWatch.com, the writer remarked:

Xu said that while he’s been pleased to see his research put to use, he believes that “these big companies are taking advantage” of technology that they should rightly pay for. He said he hasn’t had any luck getting the attention of companies that might be interested in licensing what he refers to as his “AJAX patent,” and thinks an attorney might fare better. 

Well a quick visit to the illustrious inventor’s website will reveal a colorful display of MS Paint images and animated gifs – indicating to even the untrained eye the seriousness and gravity of this impressive individual’s important research and brilliant mind.

So he took his insane patent to a company called Ocean Tomo who auction intellectual property. At the asking price of $2 mil there were no bids, and there were no bids at $1 mil. There were no bids at all, as a matter of fact, but later after discussing the lot with some investors in the hallway, one of them remarked that there might really be an opportunity for development as a “licensing and litigation” property.. heaven forbid we actually try to develop this amazing technology.

A couple things have occurred to me about this particular case.

#1 – Why on earth was he awarded this patent to begin with – given that Microsoft invented “Microsoft Remote Scripting (MSRS)” in 1998 which was intended for exactly this purpose.

#2 – Anyone foolish enough to buy this from him with the intent of blackmailing large companies out of their money has an uphill battle ahead of them. Prior art, and the sheer ludricity of the claim will provoke executives to dig in their heels and fight it until the complainant is broke. Any acknowledgement that they are illegitimately infringing on a valid patent will create a precedent and open the floodgates to all kinds of crazyness.

Despite all that – I can see a useful purpose for this patent. I think a company who is infringing on other patents who wants something in their pocket as a defensive tool might be interested in having something like this since it might at least be effective as a deterrent to lawsuits against them – since probably everyone in the universe is infringing on this.

I know this is old.. but I just found it, and it’s hilarious. Whoever does these things is a genius

The news broke earlier today – Microsoft is making a pass at Yahoo!. What would this mean for consumers? Here is my guess:

1. Zimbra becomes the platform an online offlice product resembing Google docs but fitting into Office Live.
2. Microsoft becomes a leading content producer, cross-polinating their MSNBC stake with online material including video, with everything from news journalism, to entertainment.
3. With the talent imported from Yahoo!, Microsoft slowly takes on a more credible R&D role and actually begins listening to developers.
4. Microsoft gets into a host of other service businesses including Travel, Financial Services, and eCommerce enablement.

I wonder what the E.U. and antitrust groups will have to say about this. In any case, it will probably take upwards of a year to sort all this out. Does anybody have any other opinions on this?

There is a huge Internet outage going on right now in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Its amazing to think how this could affect business.. in particular the financial sector and large businesses who rely on the Internet to communicate. Supply chains would be crippled, communication would be limited, and of course (maybe most shockingly), access to YouTube clips cut down to zero.
I’m curious how exactly an undersea cable gets ‘cut’.. earthquake? seamonster? Underwater Al Queda? Food for thought.

Scott Sehlhorst, as always, has some interesting insights into the software development process. He argues this week that Agile is sometimes used by developers to hide or absolve themselves of responsibility, but that the opposite is true. Agile actually increases accountability by preventing a ‘throw it over the wall to QA’ culture and by promoting developer ‘ownership’ over features and quality.

Read the full post here.

I’ll admit that I’m not an Agile expert and I don’t understand a lot of it yet, but in a recent project I saw this responsibility-dodging behavior on an Agile team, and I think the culture of supremacy of developers over project coordinators preventing anyone from calling them out. The scrum-model is a short rapid-fire way of tracking team progress, but the flip-side is you get the perception of transparency but in fact only get a surface-level view of what the developer is actually doing. When things are not going right in a project, developers are able to cut features and push timelines, unfairly shifting the burden onto project coordinators who then have to deal with the client. The failure of the project coordinator in this case was that they didn’t notice or seem to mind that the developers had the same goals day after day and didn’t make progress. What’s funny is these people would rephrase their goals each day but say exactly the same thing. That’s a fault of the coordinator, not the model, but even if they did notice, what could they really do about it. In a room full of many people who is going to step forward and say ‘hey! you’re full of crap!’

I read an interesting tidbit today about the whole “click to activate” issue that has plagued the Adobe Flash community for the last year or so.

First some background.. a while back, a very litigious and selfish patent holder EOLAS sued Microsoft because embedding a flash movie or other component in a webpage appeared to be a violation of their undeveloped patent. The result was the Microsoft had to add a mouse-click requirement in order to activate Flash movies (and other media objects) on a page.. at least ones that weren’t generated by script.
Now that we’re up to speed, the news is that Microsoft has licensed said technique from the patent holder, EOLAS and will soon be releasing a patch to fix IE. Yay! This greatly simplifies the use of Flash in webpages again.

There is a company in Toronto that makes some pretty sweet microscopes and they have a sizable software development and manufacturing team. A few months ago I was visiting the company (I used to work there) and I noticed their new Team Rules poster next to the developers’ cubicles. I guess this is an attempt to foster a particular sort of team culture. What culture would this represent to you?

VisualSonics Team Rules

1. We have open honest communication; no held punches.
2. Discussions are about issues and ideas, not about personalities.
3. We challenge each others ideas, we never take it personally.
4. If a challenge becomes personal, we apologize, we accept the apology, and we move on.
5. We challenge ideas openly, debate passionately, then we get the best decisions.
6. We value the exposure of problems, it allows us to find solutions.
7. We always support the group decision unanimously; one decision out of the room.
8. 100% buy in = no unresolved issues = no politics.
9. This is not a democracy.
10. Issues, their action plans, time lines, and persons accountable must be documented.

I thought it was interesting that a lot of these rules are about consensus-building and decision making, but hidden away near the bottom (item 9) is a clear indicator that in fact they are not really that interested in consensus at all. Are these the seeds of a poisonous work environment, or the building blocks for a cohesive team? You decide. Are there team rules at your company? If so, what are they?

“This is an empty box”. I love it.

This really shows the contrast between a young and aging tech brand.

BTW, if you’re curious about iPhone packaging.. See my earlier post.

So I was working on a project today and I had to plug into the Google News API.. I tested it with our Company name and out came this article:

An Account Registering Frenzy – Sign up for Nothing (Jeremy Wagstaff)

The article essentially says that a big part of Web2.0 are the insane number of new services requiring registration.. we register, provide tonnes of personal data.. then forget about the service.. Now our idle account is sitting out there in a veritable boneyard of abandoned services.. So why was our name mentioned? Because the author was coming up with a list of silly-sounding Web2.0 names (of actual companies) and must have stumbled across ours at some point (I’m guessing from RobotReplay).

Is “Nitobi” really that wierd-sounding? I didn’t think so before now. Yeah ok it’s not an English word or compound-word like “Elastic Path”, or “Adobe”.. It’s not someone’s last name “Dell”, “Eaton’s”, etc. I don’t think anyone needs to defend it by pointing out the plenty of other silly names that have done just fine (hint: “Google”, “Yahoo”, “Flickr”, etc).

But why did we choose Nitobi?

First and foremost, we wanted a name that was:

1. Short.
2. Domain available.
3. People can spell it / say it.

Meeting those criteria was hard enough. Next we wanted something that spoke to our team. We happen to be located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, home of my alma mater the University of British Columbia, where you will find the incredible Nitobe gardens- a Japanese botanical garden. We felt it was a symbol that represented a lot about who we are: a pacific rim city, and an outdoors-oriented bunch of people. We changed the ‘e’ to an ‘i’ to avoid bugging the real Nitobe gardens, and we had a name!

If anyone has any thoughts on our name or branding.. or on web2.0 names in general… would be cool to hear what they are!

BTW.. if you want a Web2.0 name generator: http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html

So our very own Andre Charland is on tour right now with the Adobe folks on the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) bus tour http://onair.adobe.com/. Besides the fact that it looks like a lot of fun, its a great opportunity for us to be demoing not only our components, but also helping spread the word about Adobe’s new development tool.

For those who don’t know, AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop.

AIR is exciting to web developers for few reasons:

1. Cross platform desktop applications. This is killer. Imagine, write an application for the desktop once, and have it run on any platform  – MacOS, Linux, Windows, etc.
2. Write desktop apps in JavaScript/HTML. Yes. Write pretty darn powerful web applications and have them run like native desktop apps. You can also use Flex to build these applications for a richer experience.
3. Apps that act like desktop apps. Don’t worry.. this isn’t just a chrome-less browser running on your desktop. This is a pretty full featured application framework that gives you access to the file system, system tray, and the web at the same time.
4. Better integration for web applications. If you have a web application and would like your users to have a desktop component to that, this is the way to do it. Pownce is showing us how.

Nitobi’s Fisheye Running in AIR on my desktop

So what does this mean for the web development community?

1. Well for one thing, it means that we’ll be seeing a lot more desktop integration for online applications in general, which means a better experience for users.
2. We’re going to see a further proliferation of web API’s. Having seamless access to the web through AIR makes consuming and using web API’s much easier and makes a lot of sense, frankly.
3. At the risk of sounding like a tout, I think we’ll see a growing interest in things like Flex, which are similar in the way they leverage existing skillsets to build applications. Also, AIR apps can be build with Flex in addition to JS/HTML.

What are the challenges / risks?

In general I think it will be crucial for Adobe to find effect means of distributing the AIR runtime component.. much the way they did with Flash. Blogs and advertising will get them the techy community, but to get real desktop penetration, they’ll need to ship it with a browser or piece of software that everybody owns. I had some ideas of my own… not all of them practical.

1. Let developers bundle the runtime with .AIR applications! To my knowledge you cannot bundle the AIR runtime with your app. This would be a technical challenge, sure.. but not impossible to do. The goal would be to give a single executable away that users can run that will execute the AIR runtime if they don’t have it installed and then let the application run.
2. Give some version of Photoshop away for free (one that does a LOT). Put AIR in the installer. Market the heck out of it. Get it bundled with everything as a killer value-add.
3. Send it to customers with Adobe Updater. You’ll get millions of households that way.
4. I dont think they’d get it bundled with a browser, but they might be able to get it pre-installed on Dell machines or convince Apple to put it in MacOS.. Why would they? Well, it really helps their customers after all, and Adobe might be able to sweeten the deal by shipping a free scaled-down version of Photoshop (maybe not called photoshop) – possibly under Apple branding. Small market, but an influential one.

A final thought here is the risk of someone uncovering a security hole or flaw in AIR that results in a PR firestorm for Adobe. If that happened, it would really hurt it’s chances of being adopted. This happened to ActiveX in IE. This is going to be a tricky tightrope for Adobe – offering enough power within the runtime, but pre-emptively avoiding any potential holes before they become vulnerabilities. When we visited Adobe earlier this year it really sounded like that was a major focus of theirs. We’ve noticed they’ve been very cautious in turning on functionality in Webkit, and I would guess that they’ve scaled back the capabilities of AIR for the initial release just to reduce their exposure should they have forgotten anything.

At any rate, I have doubt that this will become a major feature of the web. After playing with AIR myself, I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to build pretty powerful functionality. If you haven’t downloaded it, get on over to the Adobe website (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/) and grab it. There are some great free resources here: http://www.ajaxian.com/downloads/books/AdobeAIR_for_javascript_developers.pdf  if you’re looking for tutorials and the like.

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