Christopher Herot's Weblog

Philippe Dauman at D

When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube were on the stage at D, they responded to a question on copyrights and their relationship with the content owners by repeating the oft-told story about how they will often get a video uploaded by a publicity department and then some time later a cease-and-desist letter from the same company's legal department.  Sure enough, we saw that process in action when Viacom President and CEO, Philippe Dauman took the stage.  His talk was preceded by a hilarious video from Viacom talent Stephen Colbert.  According to D organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Dauman gave them permission to post the video on their web site.  However, by the time we came back from the break, Walt and Kara announced that the Viacom lawyers had already called and asked them to take it down.

UPDATE:  Kara and Walt said it was all a misunderstanding.  The video is back.

Palm Foleo

At the D conference today, Palm founder Jeff Hawkins showed off the new Palm Foleo.  Billed as a "mobile companion" this thin little device sports a 10.2 inch screen, a full zies (18mm pitch) keyboard, WiFi, and Bluetooth.    It automatically syncs email and contacts from your Palm OS or Windows Mobile Phone, with more platforms to follow.  It doesn't have windows but does do fast task switching via the "Apps" key.  Like the Palm, it's instant on, with all apps retaining their state.  It's not fast enough to run video, but otherwise  sallows full web browsing, including Flash navigation, via the included Opera browser.  It also includes the ability to create and display Excel and Word files, display and (lightweight) edit Powerpoint, and display PDF.

And it runs Linux inside.

Available this Summer direct for Palm for $499 after a $100 rebate.

John McCain at D

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher kicked of this year's D conference with a conversation with John McCain.  They covered a wide range of topics, from why the US lags behind Luxembourg in broadband to the war in Iraq.  McCain came off as principled and informed, although more conservative than much of the audience at this event.  He was concerned about broadband penetration and net neutrality, although we warned against the "unintended consequences" that often follow government intervention.  Walt continued to press, at once point saying that Korea had been ahead of us in broadband for 4 years.  McCain's response was that he would still take the US technology over that of Korea.  I hope he was speaking of technology in general and not broadband in particular.

McCain scored some points with his statement that if he was to run for President, and if he was elected, he would pick the best and brightest people to work in his administration, regardless of party affiliation.  He mentioned John Chambers and Steve Ballmer, both of whom were in the audience.  Walk suggested (jokingly?) that Ballmer be named ambassador to China.

The most tense part of the discussion was about Iraq.  Despite some pointed questioning from the hosts, McCain did not back down from his position that we needed to let the surge do its work.  He did say that we needed to get the Israeli-Palestinian situation under control.  One idea that he had was to form a league of the world's democracies, which might work in parallel with the UN.

A memorable quote:

Every time I've done the right thing everything turned out OK.

Time to Move Beyond DNS?

My friend, neighbor, and colleague Bob Frankston has been railing about the limitations of the Internet's Domain Names System (DNS)  for some years, and I am starting to see things from his point of view.  Bob's  argument is that while DNS provides the valuable service of mapping domain names (and hence URLs) to the lower-level IP addresses, that domain names themselves are too limiting.  They might have worked well when there were a small number of easily remembered and spelled domains, such as microsoft.com and apple.com, but it is increasingly difficult to find a short, mneumonic name that isn't already taken.  I thought Bob had a point, but I also appreciated the convenience of seeing a URL on TV or on a billboard and being able to recall it hours later when I was in front of a Web browser.  Bob's proposal that web browsers incoporate a directory service on top of DNS appeared to add an extra level of complexity.  Besides, with a name like Herot, getting the domain Herot.com wasn't all that difficult

More recently, I'm starting to see Bob's point.  My epiphany came while choosing a name for a new business we are starting at Convoq.  Picking the name was easy compared to registering the domain.  It seems that every word in the dictionary is registered as a .com, along with a surprising number of two-word combinations.  Invariably, the owners wanted somewhere in the deep six figures to part with it.  For the most part, the actual sites were just a collection of links that bore some vague resemblance to the name of the domain - the kind you may have stumbled upon when you mistyped a domain you were looking for.

Some recent news stories have shed some light on this phenomenon.  In Millions of Addresses and Thousands of Sites, All Leading to One the New York Times describes how NameMedia has raised $120M in funding and owns 725,000 web sites, all populated with generic content.  It seems that 5 to 10 percent of people searching for something in the web will type a word into the address bar instead of using a search engine.  Even though a lot of these words only generate four or so hits a month, it adds up in volume.  Some of those sites, like photography.com have custom-generated content.  Others just show the same links that one would get if one typed the same word into a search engine, and generate revenue for that referal if someone clicks through.

According to a recent article in Business 2.0 trading in domain names has become a brisk business, with names such as greetings.com going for $350,000 at a packed auction in Las Vegas.  The article describes how Kevin Ham set up a deal with the government of Cameroon to share the ad revenue when people type .cm instead of .com and end up on one of Ham's sites via a wildcard match he set up.

The ultimate irony is that when every word in the dictionary leads to a domain, the address bar becomes a search engine itself, and with most of the words owned by search engine companies, users will need a search engine to find the actual content they are looking for.  Bob's vision for directory services replacing domain names will come about, although not quite the way he imagined it.

Pat Phelan is Back

Pat Phelan has never been shy about businesses that upset the status quo.  His AllFreeCalls.com, which took advantage of high termination fees paid by IXCs to some LECs in order to provide free international long distance to consumers was shut down in the wake of a lawsuit by AT&T.  It seems AT&T felt that the calls weren't really terminating in Iowa since the party on the receiving end was outside the USA.  Now Pat is back with a service he thinks can pass legal muster at Yak4Ever.com.

This time, a subscriber signs up by filling out a form with a US phone number where the calls will originate, an email address, and a list of up to ten phone numbers in any of 29 countries.  The service responds with an email containing a US number which the subscriber can call and assigns an "extension number" to each of the 10 supplied destination numbers.  The number answers in several languages, including a few I did not recognize, and asks the user to enter one of the 10 numbers, upon which the call is put through to the ultimate destination.  When I tried it this morning, it wouldn't connect me to a UK cell phone but did connect to the several land-lines that I tried.  Given that the service is free and calls are unlimited, it's not surprising that they would want to avoid paying the hefty surcharge for mobile phones.  The landline calls were about the same quality as Skype, which is not bad considering the cost.

Presumably the process of calling an "extension" means that Yak4Ever can argue they should be treated the same as a PBX - where the call terminates there before being extended to an internal or off-premises extension.  I suspect that this can't go on forever, but given the pace at which telecom law evolves it could take years before this approach becomes obsolete.  In the meantime I expect the creative mind of Pat Phelan will come up with new innovations that build upon this service.

Jangl Update

Jangl, which is one of the most creative and forward-looking of the web-based calling services, today released a significant update.  The old service was based on the concept of a proprietary "Jangl ID" which a subscriber could hand out to potential callers.  The caller would go to the Jangl web site and exchange the ID for a dedicated phone number that could be used to make the call, subject to Jangl's call screening application.  In an advance over the typical anonymous calling service, Jangl provided a return path such that either party could call the other without revealing his or her own phone number.  The process was a bit cumbersome but the subscriber could simplify things by creating a widget that could be posted on a blog or social networking site.

In the new release, Jangl has ditched the proprietary ID in favor of using the recipient's email address, in essence providing a way to make a phone call to anyone via that email address.  While the concept of making phone calls to user@domain instead of a phone number was part of SIP, Jangl has created a complete service for doing the mapping, including the human part of getting people to offer up their phone numbers to be mapped, and protecting their privacy in the process.

To make a call, the caller must join the Jangl service (free for now) which requires providing an email address and a phone number.  The new subscriber provides the email address of the intended recipient and is given a phone number to call.  That number, which only works from the subscriber's phone, will reach voice mail the first time it is used.  The recipient then gets an email with a link back to the Jangl site where the voice mail can be played.  If the recipient wants to return the call, he or she must also join the Jangl service and get a number that he or she can use to call back the original caller. 

Once everyone is signed up, the process gets easier.  The web site provides the subscriber with a Contact list where he can specify on a per-caller basis whether calls are sent directly to voice mail (the default) or whether they are forwarded on to the subscriber's real phone.

There is also an slick integrated voice mail system, similar to Grand Central,  where all the voice mails can be viewed and played.

Jangl will provision local numbers in 32 countries, allowing it to compete with companies such as Jajah to provide cheap or free international long distance, but without requiring the use of the web site except for the initial call.

There are still some rough edges.  On the first day of service the site occasionally stopped responding, GIFs were misplaced, and numbers didn't work.  By the end of the day it all appeared to be working smoothly, although some features were still missing, such as the ability for the subscriber to update his own phone number.  In all it appears to be a creative approach to the problem of getting people connected while protecting their privacy and maybe even saving some money.   I look forward to using it some more to see how well it works out in practice.

Height Matters

You may have suspected that the physical environment can affect your thinking, but a recent study demonstrates how this happens in very concrete ways - in this case showing that changing the height of the ceiling in a room can effect a person's ability to see connections among objects or concentrate on the details.

Joan Meyers-Levy, Professor of Marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and Rui (Juliet) Zhu, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use performed a series of experiments in which half the subjects sat in a room with a 10 foot ceiling and the other half sat in an identical room where the ceiling was lowered to 8 feet.  The subjects in the room with the higher ceiling performed better on tasks that required seeing the common elements among items, such as naming the number of ways to objects were similar.  They also tended to evaluate the design of products, e.g. a coffee table, as being more sleek, since they tended to see a higher degree of similarity among the design elements and overlook the parts that were different, e.g. knots in the wood.  The subjects in the low-ceiling room tended to do better on tasks that required item-specific processing, such as recalling the number of items per category.

The experimenters theorized that the high-ceiling room primed the subjects to more thoughts of freedom while the low-ceiling room primed them to more thoughts of confinement, something they confirmed with a questionnaire.  The more significant finding was that this initial priming went on the affect the thought processes of the subjects, with the ones experiencing more freedom being more able to discard preconceived notions and find new connections.  They go on to recommend that people who need to engage in creativity would therefor be more successful in rooms with higher ceilings.  Since they are, after all, marketing professors, they go on to recommend further studies on how consumers may have different reactions to merchandise in a store based on ceiling height.  One intriguiing conjecture is that consumers in a higher-ceiling room may find that distally related cues, such as seeing bottled water, may trigger their memory for a related product, such as running shoes.

For my own part, I will attempt to work as much as possible in a room with a high ceiling, except maybe when I am paying bills or doing my taxes.

Walt Mossberg in the New Yorker

The May 14 issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Ken Auletta on Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg.  Anyone who is in the computer business or reads the Journal is familiar with Walt's column and his militantly pro-user attitude, but the New Yorker profile is the most comprehensive coverage yet of where he came from and how he works.  There is a great description of an entourage from Samsung and Sprint in preparation for the launch of the Upstage phone/music player.  Walt immediately zeroed in on the 64 MB memory card ("trivially small") and the 2.5 hours of talk time ("low") but said he appreciated the innovative two-sided design.  In this age of paid-for journalism Mossberg's integrity shines but newer rivals such as Engadget are nipping at his heels.  Still, Mossberg is one of the few columnists who spends a significant time actually using the products, advocates for the perspective of the naive user, and writes detailed reviews.  And he's organizing the D Conference where I will be next week.

Dopplr

Dopplr is a social networking application for travelers that I always thought someone should build.  You tell it about your travel plans and it tells you which of your friends are going to be in the same place.  It's low tech - no automatic GPS updates, just good old-fashioned manual posting, but it's simple and effective.  They are adding users slowly by occasionally giving existing users a few invitations to hand out.  The process by which those invitations materialize is rather mysterious, as is everything about the site.  The "about" page does not mention any names but refers to "an international team" in Helsinki.  They do solicit feedback but don't answer their email.

Two names do occasionally pop up on the Internet, Matt Biddulph who says on his blog that Dopplr started as a part-time project but is now his full time job as CTO, and Marko Ahtisaari, an investor.  Until recently, the domain was registered to Daniel Gillmor but has recently been changed to an anonymous proxy registration company.

Supreme Court Overturns Obviousness Rule

Last week the US Supreme Court rendered a decision in a patent case that is just starting to get the attention it deserves.  In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Kennedy, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. et. al, the court reversed a decision by the appeals court that had clearly, if narrowly defined the bar for obviousness in a patent.

Section 103 of the Patent Act of 1952 states a patent may not be obtained

if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.

KSR v. Teleflex addressed the issue of when the combination of two prior inventions would be obvious.  The patent at issue concerned the addition of an electronic sensor to an adjustable cars gas pedal.  There had been previous patents for adding electronic sensors to gas pedals, and previous patents for making gas pedals adjustable (to allow for varying heights of drivers),  but Teleflex held a patent for adding an electronic sensor to an adjustable gas pedal.  While this may seem obvious in hindsight, the Appeals Court held that to be considered obvious at the time the patent was granted there would have to be some teaching, suggestion, or motivation (TSM) in the prior art, the problems nature, or in the knowledge of a person having ordinary skill in the art.  While the TSM had been applied by the District Court, the appeals court held that the application was not strict enough in that the District Court did not make "findings as to the specific understanding or principle within the knowledge of a skilled artisan that would have motivated one with no knowledge of [the] invention" to combine the prior art in the way the patent described.  In overturning that opinion, the Supreme Court recognized that it is common engineering practice to try existing things in new combinations and therefor held that "The combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."

The Supreme Court cited some examples of this doctrine:

In United States v. Adams the court considered the obviousness of a battery that contained water instead of acid and used electrodes of magnesium and cuprous chloride instead of zinc and silver chloride.  While ordinarily substituting one material for another would have been considered obvious, in this case the prior art warned of the risks involved in the new combination.  The fact that it worked was unexpected and thus held not to be obvious.

In Anderson's-Black Rock, Inc. v. Pavement Salvage Co. the Court invalidated a patent involving the addition of a radiant-heat burner to a paving machine, ruling that while the combination was useful it did nothing unexpected.

In Sakraida v. AG Pro, Inc. the Court ruled that when a patent "arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform" and yields no more than one would expect, the combination is obvious.

The Supreme Court did go on to say that the analysis of obviousness can be complex and that a court that performs it should made its reasoning explicit, but that it "need not seek out precise teachings directed the the specific subject matter of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ."  The opnion adds that "A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton."

It remains to be seen how this will effect software patents, although some major cases such as Verizon v. Vonage will provide an indication.  In general, if this should make it harder to get the kind of patents where the application takes a verb from the dictionary and appends "on the Internet," which would be a good thing.