Patent Wars - Real and Fake

To start with, let me say something anti-tech to you, guys. Namely, I’d love to send you my sincere congrats on Christmas and upcoming New Year holidays and wish you all to be healthy, happy, loving and loved, wealthy, and always optimistic!

Now to the point.

I’ve been perusing the patent wars topic for quite a long time, much because of Apple vs. Samsung War both in technological and design aspects of their products, and at one point I got completely stunned with how many infringement cases we can now find within the whole IT industry.

It’s true, that the possibility to produce something utterly unique is more, than hard. It’s also pretty hard to handle the fast tempo of market development and expansion to resist the growing competition with the rivals. What else can you do to let your business survive and, moreover, prosper? Of course, you can copy the technology, or the designs, or the marketing moves, or anything else. Obviously, the morality or professional ethics have nothing to do with this situation; it’s the money, which turns out decisive.

In this respect, the amazement at the patent wars is no longer this big, as you understand, that as much as everyone in the IT business wishes to earn, it’s highly essential not to let your competitor earn more, especially at your cost.

Nonetheless, the matter of patent wars has one more essential aspect, which is even trickier, than everything lying on the surface. That is the fake patent wars. They are not, in fact, fake, rather – as real as it’s only possible, but the essence of the claims is frequently groundless. “One small company” formulates the reason for suing “the large company”, and the story begins. The thing is that there’s always the notion of luck, which can be helfpul in court, and there’s always the company’s image put on stake, when the enterprise is sued. These 2 factors are what can make such a patent war, even if the case is totally fake, really profitable for “one small company” owners.

Fortunately, the positive side with the story about fake patent wars is that these are mostly unsuccessful for those, who start the fight. Otherwise, we’d probably witness hundreds of “real” patent wars being begun each and every day. For large companies, like Twitter, or Facebook or 4shared, having millions of users, this would be really bothersome.

In a whole, at least, it’s good that patent justice works properly for now, right?

Stay cool)
Andy

SOPA – Good Intentions vs. Abusage of Power

I’ll be perhaps one of the thousands, if not millions to speak about SOPA, which, in fact, has all chances to become the most dangerous Act in the recent years.

In case you somehow missed what SOPA is about, while preparing for Christmas and New Year holidays, I’ll try to explain it in brief. Stop Online Piracy Act, or as it’s mostly called SOPA (almost SOPE, lol)) is the US Congress Act, according to which the government authorities and private corporations (what a surprise!) receive a magical right to censor websites, and consequently cut the “unwanted ones” both from search on Google and a number of payment providers, like Visa, for example.

To say that SOPA is ridiculous, from my point of view, is to say nothing. First of all, it hides the danger for the fresh start-up social media sites, or, in a whole, the whole array of startups, and will, undoubtedly, slow their development down. Moreover, it also hides the incredibly vast area for abuse and corruption, and might be easily used as a tool to eliminate fresh rivals and gain monopoly in specific niches of the IT market.

My concerns are a just a small drop in the sea of worries and irritation, already expressed by almost 50 large and middle-sized reputable companies, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, not to mention TechCrunch and a great deal of others, and hopefully, their efforts won’t be vain, otherwise the consequences can be truly horrible.

I won’t be dwelling on the political underwater stones of SOPA, as I’ve never been involved in any party or something, but on the surface the good intentions to eliminate content infrigement have turned into a total scam, from my perspective.

They haven’t felt enough after removing large and (as I’d like to emphasize) trustworthy file-sharing sites, e.g. RapidShare or 4shared, from isnstant Google search with no auto prompts available. They want more, more power to manipulate the whole Internet community.

I won’t name who They are, let’s everyone have our own personal understanding, the only thing to add is that the proverb “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” has got one more proof of being right. We only need to add “so-called” before “good”, probably.

Stay cool & stay strong

Andy

Podio.com: Online Project Management and More

With all the haste about PayPal service losing its trust from the side of its corporate partners, and consequently, even regular clients, I don’t actually see the point in writing the whole post about the current problem with frozen accounts.

Yet, I wouldn’t dare keep silent and not express my opinion in short: the only obvious thing PayPal should do now is to expain themselves and change the politics, regarding freezing their partners’ accounts. Otherwise, the consequences for their business might be disastrous, I’m afraid.

Now, what I really found worthy of writing about is the separate, enterprise-oriented niche of the software market, which I haven’t even mentioned before – the enterpise services, aimed at managing and planning versatile projects within the company in a fast and convenient way.

In particular, one of the reliable players in the field is Podio.com, which is, by the way, among the winners in this year’s The Europas and is currently participating in The Crunchies 2011. I haven’t yet used this service myself (due to the obvious reason, that is my NOT having a company yet))), Still, according to what I have checked in terms of its features, and a short survey, that I’ve made among my few busy businessmen-friends, the service is seemingly providing high-quality assistance to every manager.

To start with, I’d like to say a few words about the official Podio.com site interface, which is absolutely perfect, as from my point of view. The design is minimalistic with pale backdround colours and the readable fonts. As for the structure of the site, every feature is explained in a very detailed way + there’s a short video-tutorial how it should be used at the same page, so the user won’t need to check the whitepapers to learn about Podio’s benefits.

As for the functionality, Podio.com is also impressive in number of options, available for clients, from Project and Event Management solutions to CRM and Lead Management tools, not to mention convenient Social Intranet, Product Development, etc.

What I’ve personally found especially useful is that Podio’s features (offered separately or in a package) appear to combine the functionality, which we accustomed to in JIRA, for instance, as far as task and project management is considered, in addition to CRM and budget calculation option. This is, obviously, a great Podio’s advantage over other services, as an array of different tasks can be resolved within the unified interface with specified dashboards.

Furthermore, you can also access the necessary data via user-friendly Podio mobile apps for iPone and Android (haha, seems like Windows Mobile and Blackberry users are unwelcome)), which makes it simpler to browse and manage the dashboards on the go.

The only question that is still bothering me is the possibility to maintain the work of the whole large corporation with a great number of employees all around the world (like Twitter, or 4shared staff, for example), or is it yet more suitable for middle-sized enterprises, like the ones, my friends have got?

This question remains open for now, but the overall impression of Podio is, nonetheless, absolutely positive!


Stay cool)
Andy)

Twitter Analytics vs. Follow Facebook Button - It’s a War, man!

For now, you can hardly find a person who doesn’t have an account in at least one of the popular social networks, even if you aren’t an active user. Here, it’s really obvious, why the war for users among the largest players, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is getting tougher with the paste of time. I haven’t mentioned specific networks, like LinkedIn, for instance, on purpose, as they aren’t taking part in the general struggle, they don’t need to, as in unique niche, they’ve taken there can’t currently be found many rivals.

If you happen to wonder why I have used the term “war” for the intense competition between the social network grandees, it’s so as the introduction of the new features has almost been synced nowadays. To expain it simpler, let’s check the latest example:

1.Twitter impressed many of us with the introduction of “View My Photos Right Here” option enabling to check the users’ photos & photo albums (uploaded to TwicPic or YFrog) right at their Twitter accounts.

Twitter went farther when offered Twitter analytics feature, so that the publishers can track the amount of traffic, they acquire having integrated their sites with the service.

2.Ta-dam, Google+ has presented the beta version of Google Music (which I’ve written about in my previous post, btw).

3.A day or two ago I encountered the news about Facebook – the network is now offering Follow Facebook button, which allows the users’ follow those ppl, they aren’t even friends with, as soon as the latter allow “Subscriptions” in their profile settings.

To say, it’s strange, why the service has introduced its follow on Facebook button only now, as it’s been included into Google+ and Twitter right from the very beginning. Moreover, even the file-sharing services, like 4shared(follow 4shared option), have already added this option for their users . I honestly have no idea about the answer.

Yet, Facebook Subscriptions possess their own peculiarity, concerning the exact type of updates you wish to subscribe for (you tick photos, games, apps, etc.) and the level of importance they carry (important, most or all). This is seemingly convenient on the one hand, but on the other hand, I’d get bored to define the importance of each photo I am uploding to Facebook, for instance. It’s just a photo, not the secret code))lol


Anyway, the struggle between social networks will continue, of course. But can we now predict the ultimate winner? Hm, no)


So, we’ll c)
Andy)