Inside View from Ireland

Intellectual Property Laws Damage Innovation

HAM-FISTED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation, according to Heidi Williams at the Department of Economics at Harvard. She based her conclusion on newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera.

Her research paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product development. The paper explains how genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort. Across a range of empirical specifications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.

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Heidi Williams -- "Intellectual property rights and innovation: Evidence from the human genome" in the Yale Law Review, December 30, 2011.  Download IP and Innovation

IStockphoto by David Marchal.

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Damn Lumia Elevates Facebook Drivel

AFTER A MONTH of normal daily service with the Nokia Lumia 800, the one negative aspect I have noticed is the prominence it gives to Facebook newsfeeds. This might not be an issue for everyone.

But for me, I wanted the phone to help improve my productivity. Seeing parallel worlds bubble up into the top right hand corner of my phone's home screen can be distracting. That's information about a tattoo voucher at right. But as the guys at All About Windows Phone would point out, I can fix my concerns in several ways. I'm opting to reduce the amount of connections I have on Facebook instead of subordinating the People tile. That way, I can see small avatars of my cater cousins as they update their status or share information. I've move specific people to the Lumia's home screen a day or two before I'm set to meet up with them. That way, the Lumia pushes relevant content from those people directly to the front of the phone. I've discovered I can emjoy a more meaningful collegial setting if I know what somebody had for breakfast. A lot of my friends share those details via Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter comments and they seem to respect me more when I notice those kind of things.

You may run with a different circle of friends, so the Lumia's handy method of keeping people right in front of your phone's home screen might not be compelling. But in my hands, it's nice to be able to watch the flow of information related to people whose status I can elevate by pinning it front and centre on my primary mobile communications device.

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Previously: "How the Lumia has changed my habit patterns" on InsideView.ie, December 15, 2011.

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Consumer Tech Just Gets Less Expensive

I AM LISTENING TO a crescendo of voices talking about the Consumer Electronics Show (the event that does not admit consumers) and know one thing is certain--technology targeted at consumers normally costs less in two years than it does on the CES floor when it is first announced.

I have a blog to help me remember things like "surprise consumer hits" from years past. So many of the things considered to be the next great thing have become commonplace within five to seven years. The photo shows a digital pen and a Sony Clie, both in my briefcase in 2003. Looking back into 2004, I wondered about phones as effective office computers. I thought you'd need an external monitor and a keyboard. Actually, you don't. Some make do with an iPad, others with a QWERTY keyboard an on-board Office software.

Handheld Context-Aware Communications

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME that I carry communications technology that connects me to people, places and events without my prompting and often without my knowledge. Based on what I see on several different apps, I know dozens of friends who are equally clueless.

There are experts who are trying to alert us to the fast evolution of context-aware personal systems. These systems have become mainstream and part of our culture but a lot of us don't know what it means.

• Aggregators have morphed from serving newsfeeds to providing increasingly personal updates, often derived from ambient intimate moments like the amalgamation of check-ins shown by the screenshot from Foursquare at right. This clever information harvesting is so commonplace that it blurs lines of privacy that once shrouded our mundane lives.

  To manage this torrent of personal information, people are putting other people into lists, circles or groups where information about those cohorts bubbles up onto the front screen of phones. These used to be little updates that expanded into view at the bottom of a laptop screen. Now the updates come to the very front of mobile phone screens where they are as prominent as an unanswered text message.

 

• Facial recognition software on social network servers everywhere has changed raucous pub moments into potentially career-threatening events. I know couples whose relationships were rocked by the appearance of affectionate old flames in the a mobile phone photo frame. The faces appear as news items and they resurrect buried memories. Such is the impact of very intelligent cameraphones in purses everywhere. The phones upload photos without a single prompt. And sometimes they share the results with the world.

   

• I haven't seen a phone tell a car's dashboard what to do but I've seen clever telematics in action and know that before the end of the decade I will own a car that is as smart as my phone is today. The car should be smart enough to prevent me from driving while intoxicated and the phone I have in 2020 should be smart enough to execute verbal commands to all communications services.

   

• I think it's amazing to watch my Android phone send all its images and video clips directly up to the cloud. It's very empowering seeing the phone display summaires of 100 GB of my current scratch work via Crashplan on the phone.

   

• I enjoy being able to play DVDs from my phone to television sets through either DLNA or HDMI connections. My mobile phone has become an intelligent DVD player.

   

• Professional identity specialists. Because phones leak personal data, you can now buy an assumed identity from dodgy characters who used to specialise in spamming your e-mail or infecting your computer with a virus. These aren't teenagers out for a law. They are professional identity specialists (ok, thieves) and part of their chosen career path evolved as a result of procuring megabytes of data from stolen handsets.

   

• Skype, Hangouts, VoIP calling and Facetimes--all of these technologies are simple enough for your granny and they are extremely effective in reducing the time it takes to reach a business decision.

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Previously on my blog: "Emerging Trends", December 30, 2003.

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How to See the Future

IT TURNS OUT that some of my students think I'm meant to show them how to see into the future.

They suggest that's what it says in the academic syllabus in the Emerging Technology module I teach at LIT-Clonmel. I thought out loud for a minute, trying to list ways I thought people could set themselves up to monitor emerging trends and to perhaps predict what's ahead on the technology roadmap. In my mind, it's a matter of clever listening, especially when around smart people (like those in the photo from Limerick OpenCoffee). I have watchlists, reading lists, and trust agents worth following. The watchlists often generate photos and descriptions of brand new technology. The reading lists emerge from suggestions I find on blog posts, trustworthy tweets, and conference proceedings. The trust agents are people with backgrounds worthy of respect. Getting the watchlists, readings and trust agents into one nice compilation is an on-going process. What's fresh and compelling today could easily be stale and dull a year from now. Nonetheless, I'm going to create a presentation that lays down my schema for seeing into the future and then I'll blog my thoughts and see if anyone affirms my viewpoint.

Reinvention

NOKIA TOOK BIG LEAPS towards reinventing itself as a company, starting with a burning platform metaphor in February and culminating with the successful launch of its first Windows Phone nine months later. It's a success story in the making.

The new Nokia handsets are stylish and functional. They appeal to me and I will merit the attention of anyone with a two-year old Apple or Android handset.

Totally Enormous Not Extinct

ONE OF THE THINGS that resonated with me during the launch of the Nokia Lumia is that the phone comes from a totally enormous brand. Two brands, if you consider Microsoft. And while Microsoft is often derided as a dinosaur in tech space, I think it has hit a success with its partnership in Helsinki. The Lumia 800 handset is a first generation Windows Nokia phone. As such, it is levels above the capability of the first generation iPhone that I carried around without copy and paste. And for someone working with Sharepoint or Exchange services, the Lumia will deliver collaboration in elegant and mobile ways.

Location Corner Chat

NOKIA WORLD BRINGS together handsets, location-aware search results, and service providers. I listened to five clever speakers talking about what lies ahead in the world of location-based services.

Ford wants to use its vehicles as platforms and through that platform allow drivers to operate safer and with elegant background syncing. I hear Leo Laporte talking about Ford Sync and I like the idea of thinking of my car as a wheeled device connected to the cloud.

Writing for Social Layers

THANKS TO SEAN O'GRADY, I stumbled into Google Plus during its early days of public beta. After nearly eight weeks of watching how Google Plus works, I've learned it is more than a chat zone. I now believe I should set up plans to teach new third level students how to write for social layers that sit inside Google Plus.

Like many people I follow on Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, I think G+ has the potential to change the way people, brands and groups interact. I'm interested in discovering whether my new students, men and women who are just starting their third level education, can detect any of the facets that I believe deserve a close look.

First QR Code through Letterbox

INTEL'S CORPORATE AFFAIRS wins a coveted gold star for putting the first QR code through my letter box.

It came inside and on the back cover of an Intel Corporate Citizenship brochure this evening. I'm interested in the documentation of the Irish launch of the European Year of Volunteering and the focus Intel has on Education Transformation. Intel has voiced strong commitments to drive skills-based learning in education, something we articulate during the annual ICT in Education Conference on the Thurles campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.

I am also interested in the Intel eSchools programme, its use of wireless technology and laptops. I'd replace the laptops with either Kindles or Nook Color eBook readers during a third level collaboration designed to show the effectiveness of distributing electronic reading materials to school students.

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Sent mail2blog using O2-Ireland 3G Typepad service from my Nokia E7 in Celbridge, Co Kildare, Ireland.

technology