“Gold rush or not, nobody wants to get sued.”
Month: June 2011
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Sarah Lacy on Twitter Ads
Sarah Lacy asks the question, that Walt Mossberg should be embarrassed for not asking:
>So if it’s so great, why only 600 advertisers?
For the record, Mossberg decided to respond to the 600 advertiser number from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo with the following:
>Echoed Walt Mossberg, it’s “the perfect wet dream of every marketer.”
*Walt Mossberg: asking the tough questions… wait.*
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Twitter CEO Says 80 percent of Advertisers Renew
Sarah McBride and Alexei Oreskovic:
>Costolo said the company counts roughly 600 advertisers, up from 150 advertisers at the end of 2010.
and:
>The company is expected to bring in about $150 million in ad revenue this year […]
Do take note that in December they *raised* 200 million dollars in VC money, yet they are set to make *only* 150 million of that back this year. Add to that the fact that they had 450 less advertisers last year and it makes this last statement even more comical:
>Costolo declined to answer a question about whether Twitter was profitable.
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Five Things Eric Schmidt Said and What He Really Means
God that guy creeps me out.
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Twitter Photos
Jack Dorsey on the Twitter Blog:
>Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes.Good move, I like that they don’t have to bear the cost and scaling of photo hosting. ((No doubt there are some back room deals that benefit both parties, so when I say “cost” I really mean all of the cost.)) I also like that Twitter is grabbing hold of this segment of the service — this needs to be controlled by Twitter, for the sake of Twitter.
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iAWriterService
Moritz Zimmer:
>This adds a simple system wide action and/or shortcut to your Mac OS X installation to copy the current selected text of any application to iA Writer.With the notable shortcoming of not being able to move the text back into the original app. Sounds like support for tools like QuickCursor is coming to Writer. Nice workaround though.
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On Software Patents
[Fred Wilson says](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/enough-is-enough.html) what we are all thinking about software patents right now. Though I agree largely with what he is saying, I don’t think abolishing software patents is the solution. Wilson’s first point is:
>First of all, the idea of a transaction in an application isn’t novel.
I fully agree that it *currently* is not novel, but when this patent was granted that *was* not the case. As a result a patent was granted, that’s not a broken system — it is a short sighted one.
The solution to such a problem is not abolishing the system, rather refining it — perhaps just by shortening the period of time that software patents are upheld.
>Second, Lodsys didn’t even “invent” the idea. They purchased the patent and are now using it like a cluster bomb on the entire mobile app developer community.
This is what irks most people, but it will hurt just as bad if the original inventor comes after developers. Don’t confuse the fact that quite often the “real” inventors are the ones that go after people, it just so happens that this is not the case with Lodsys.
The fact isn’t that patent trolls shouldn’t exist — it’s that the patent system is so egregious that in order to protect patents inventors must rely on patent trolls. It’s that, as a society, we are not rewarding inventors for these inventions and instead are forcing them to do what ever they can to make money (selling patents to patent trolls).
This is the whole “pay teachers more money” argument, but in this case replace teachers with inventors. If we embrace this and seek to reward these individual instead of cribbing their work — that’s when things change.
>Third Apple and Google, the developers of the iOS and Android app ecosystems (and in app transaction systems), did license the Lodsys patents but that is not good enough for Lodsys.
Plain and simple: I don’t think that is a fair or accurate statement to make. We don’t know the terms the license that Apple or others paid to Lodsys and the understanding that went with that. Is it shady? Yes, absolutely. Is it wrong? That’s for a judge to decide.
The patent system is very much broken, but abolishing it is not the solution. You don’t abolish traffic by ridding the world of roads and highways. This is no different, it’s time to make a change — but that change is not abolishing software patents, that change is modifying the rules surrounding them.