Mon, 20 Oct 08
New Tech writeups
Via the mailing list, I found this fairly thorough archive of the companies and presentations at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. As far as I can tell, Michael has been doing his writeups since April 2008.
Enjoy.
Mon, 03 Mar 08
IP Crash Course Slides Available
A few weeks ago, Jason Haislmaier posted the slides that I referenced. (The audio is still unavailable.)
Two of my favorite slides are below (click to see them in all their Powerpointy glory).
But there are plenty of other good ones, so take a look if the topic interests you.
Technorati Tags: intellectual property, presentations
Fri, 25 Jan 08
IP Crash Course For Entrepreneurs
This past Wednesday, I went to an interesting talk sponsored by Silicon Flatirons (an organization worth knowing about). Jason Haislmaier gave the talk, and the subject was intellectual property (IP); it was titled ‘Intellectual Property “Crash Course†for Entrepreneurs’ and was packed! I got there 10 minutes late (parking on the CU campus is no fun at all) and sat in the back on a heater. Good thing the fire department didn’t come by, as I’m sure we were over capacity. (Incidentally, I heard about this via the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup mailing list but it was also on the Colorado Startups Events calendar.)
Jason said the presentation and possibly a recording of it would be available, but I was unable to find it by looking around his blog or the Silicon Flatirons site. I took some notes, but his presentation, if and when it becomes available, will be a great introduction to what entrepreneurs need to know about IP. (Note that all mistakes herein are mine, and I am most definitely not a lawyer. Consult your friendly attorney for serious advice. I marked things I thought I remembered with a ‘?’.)
There are 4 kinds of IP: patents, which are ideas or inventions, trademarks, which are about branding, copyright, which deals with creative expression, and trade secrets, which is know how. The overall emphasis on his talk was that you may not need protection from one or any of these forms of property, but that you, as an entrepreneur should be aware of all of them and make a conscious choice to pursue or not to pursue them. Which makes a lot of sense to me! (Incidentally, he repeatedly mentioned that the US was different in IP than the rest of the world, in a lot of ways, so if you plan to do business internationally, you should definitely think about that sooner rather than later.)
Trade secrets are pretty much anything–data, methods, software, etc. The protection is dependent on keeping them secret. Jason was working with a $10-20 million company that had only one patent; its valuation was almost entirely based on trade secrets. NDAs and employment contracts are the front line of trade secrets. He emphasized that you need to read NDAs and think about how they affect you and your relationship with the NDA signer. In particular, you can’t expect a signer to forget everything they’ve learned after a relationship ends, but you can expect them to return all the tangible forms of information. NDAs should have remedies (injunctions). If the other side won’t sign an NDA, that’s fine, just don’t tell them anything that you wouldn’t want to see posted on the Internet.
Copyright is protection for an original work or authorship in a tangible form from which the work can be perceived, not an idea. Apparently, there was a famous case (Feist) which basically outlined the limits of copyright–anything more creative than the White Pages qualifies for copyright protection. There are five rights, which I didn’t note because I thought the presentation would be up. Copyright can be unregistered (just about anything–these notes and this blog post are unregistered copyright) or registered. Registering costs something, but means you can sue folks. Under the DMCA, the copyright owner no longer has to show infringement–the possibility of infringement is enough (?). There are safe harbors though, one of which is the service provider harbor(?). You have to register with the Library of Congress and take things down if notified, but if you are providing any service with user generated content, you should pursue this safe harbor.
Trademarks (or service marks) are about branding. They’re easier to file for than patents. Use in commerce generates rights. He had a great slide showing the protection levels of trademarks from the fantastic (Kodak, Exxon) to the arbitrary (Apple) to the suggestive to the descriptive (World Poker Tour) to the generic (aspirin, escalator). The more the trademark describes what it represents, the less protectable it is, and trademarks can be lost (as escalator was).
Patents–the big one! Patents are the right to excludes others from making, using and selling a new, useful and non-obvious invention. There are a number of reasons to patent–defensive, offensive, ego, source of revenue (a secondary market is developing for patents. Offensive patents are getting riskier recently (courts are narrowing down patent infringement). But, investors are starting to ask why patents weren’t filed, and “we didn’t think to do so” is a poor answer. The answer to the question “Is it patentable?” for almost any value of “it” is yes, but you need to think about why–the better question is “How relevant and valuable will a patent be for the business?”. Lack of knowledge or independent development is not a defense against patent infringement.
All in all, it was a lot of ground to cover. Jason did a good job making things very applicable to the audience he was talking to. It kinda sucks that you have to think about such things, when all you want to do is develop killer software. (Brian made an offhand comment about patents and long running servlets almost 4 years ago, incidentally.) As Jason said in closing, if you don’t have an intellectual property strategy, your competitors will give you one (and, I inferred, you probably won’t like that one very much).
Tue, 08 Jan 08
GWT Talk at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup tonight
I presented on the Google Web Toolkit at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup tonight (presentation and useful links). It was a rush, as presentations always are. However, the adrenaline was compounded by two factors: the length of the presentation and the composition of the audience.
To present something as large in scope as GWT in 5 minutes was difficult. Though I’d been to 3 previous meetups, I didn’t have a good feel for the technical knowledge of the audience, so I aimed to keep the presentation high level. (The audience, on this particular night, was about 50/50 split between coders and non coders, as determined by a show of hands. However, almost everyone knew the acronym AJAX and what it meant.) This lack of knowledge compounded the difficulty, but I still feel I got across some of the benefits of GWT.
I’ll be writing more about what I learned about GWT in preparing for this, but I wanted to answer 3 questions posed to me that I didn’t have off the cuff answers for tonight.
1. Who is using GWT?
I looked and couldn’t find a good list. This list is the best I could do, along with this GWT Groups post. I find it rather astonishing that there’s not a better list out there, as the above list was missing some big ones (Timepedia’s Chronoscope, the Lombardi Blueprint system) as well as my own client: Colorado HomeFinder.
2. How much time does the compilation process add?
I guessed on this tonight but guessed too high. I said it was on the order of 30 seconds to a minute. On my laptop (2 cpu/2 ghz/2 gb of ram box) GWT compilation takes ~7 seconds to build incrementally (from ant, which appears to add ~2 seconds to all of these numbers) and ~21 seconds to build after all classes and artifacts have been deleted. This is for 7400 lines of code.
3. How does GWT compare to other frameworks like Dojo and YUI?
I punted on this one when perhaps I should not have. From what I can tell, GWT attacks adding dynamic behavior to web pages in a fundamentally different way. Dojo and YUI (from what I know of them) are about adding behavior to existing widgets on a page. GWT is about adding objects to a page, which may or may not be attached to existing widgets. I’ll not say more, as I don’t have the experience with other toolkits to speak authoritatively.
Also, here’s an AJAX toolkit comparison that I found.
Technorati Tags: gwt presentations, unanswered questions
Wed, 11 Jul 07
July Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Notes
I went to the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup last night, and it was a blast, as always. Due to the format, 5 minutes of demo, 5 minutes of questions, it’s hard to get much technical depth in any one presentation, but it is always interesting to see the wealth of different businesses that are utilizing the Web. The New Tech Meetups are now being videotaped, but I’m not sure where the video is being posted. Additionally, the CU Entrepreneurial Law Clinic is looking for 6-12 clients–they provide free legal advice to startups.
I’m going to do a separate post about each speaker, and link to them here.
Don Dodge from Microsoft Andrew Hyde for Startup Weekend Dean Rizzuto from Feed Share Your Look LocalGuides Villij Printfection
At the end of the night, several folks announced they were looking for people to fill positions: 1 flash, 1 java, 1 flex, 1 ruby on rails. I thought that breakdown was interesting. In addition, someone from the Altera group stood up and announced they were looking to do deals of $3-5M, investing in energy sector startups (and no, just using electricity doesn’t make you an energy sector startup–someone asked).
July New Tech Meetup Notes: Printfection
Printfection was the last company to present–they do on demand printing of t shirts, etc. They started up in a DU dorm room. They are essentially a cafepress clone that focuses on inkjet printing to cloth, rather than screen printing. They compete on quality and automation. Printfection is also are more of a white label printer, where you can set up a very customizable storefront. Eventually, they’re going to have an API (after the Christmas rush) that other sites will be able to use. Their average order size is 1.8 shirts, which I thought was quite interesting–most of their business is micro orders. Just another example of how the internet is shaking up typical business models by making mass customization cheap.
I like to support local companies, so I’ll give them a try next time when I do a custom shirt. I have a couple of cafepress shirts, so I’ll be interested top see how they compare.
Technorati Tags: cafepress, micro orders
July New Tech Meetup Notes: Villij
Villij was the next presenter. They are a techstars startup; their mission is to introduce folks based on common interest. How are these common interests determined? By what you write on the internet. So far, they have the basics of a platform built, but are not trawling the internet just yet, so introductions are based on data you’ve entered into their system (like match.com, but without the romance). They are looking for interested folks to get on their waiting list to get a beta login.
The issue I have with this, and almost every other social network, is something I have often thought about–the binary nature of connection. I am either all your friend or I have no connection to you–no shades of gray. There’s no concept of grouping of visibility. I presume because this is a hard problem for folks to solve in the real world (”let’s see, who should I invite to the party”), let alone represent in a digital format. I have at least two online personas, work and personal, and there may be folks that I’m interested in meeting because of one that I wouldn’t care to meet based on the other. But maybe they’ll solve that problem….
Technorati Tags: yet another social network, techstars
July New Tech Meetup Notes: LocalGuides
LocalGuides presented next. This is such a fantastic idea, I’m envious. You know the little slips of paper that someone puts in every wedding invitation, with information about local hotels, hotspots and wedding location information? Well, LocalGuides lets you do this on the web and share it. You can be as detailed as you’d like (adding images, etc), and you can share it with other folks or not. They monetize it by providing links to businesses in your area.
I created my own localguide to Boulder easy classic rock climbs. The interface is very web 2.0–there’s no save buttons–when you move off input fields, they are saved. The signup was a bit unclear–you have to activate your account via a link sent in an email. That’s standard practice, but I saw no notice of that.
If I were a listing real estate agent, I think that a localguide would be a tremendous complement to a virtual tour.
July New Tech Meetup Notes: Shareyourlook
Someone from Share Your Look spoke next. Basically, a YouTube for the fashion industry. You can upload photos of your style and folks can comment. They also aggregate fashion blogs. Development is done in Romania, and images are checked for obscene content in Thailand, so it’s a real distributed company.
When asked about the business model, the speaker replied (I paraphrase): we have a long and complicated business model, and I’d be glad to talk to you afterwards about this. That smelled a bit of The Underpants Gnomes but they already have designers using the site as a lead generation tool, so I am guessing there are a number of possible ways to monetize the site.
July New Tech Meetup Notes: Feed
Dean Rizzuto spoke about Feed, which is a mobile payment technology. Officially 3 months old, they already have 200 merchants signed up. Any phone that can send text messages can use the technology, so the potential market is huge. Basically, you sign up on the Feed website, and give them some money. Then, when you are at a merchant that accepts feed, you SMS your pin to the Feed number. You recieve an authorization code good for 15 minutes. The merchant can then enter that code into either their POS system or a standalone, Feed provided and maintained terminal. The Feed system then makes sure you have enough money in your account, and tells the merchange yes or no, and, if yes, withdraws the sum and gives it to the merchant.
What does the merchant gain? Feed charges a flat fee of $0.19 a transaction, which is much cheaper than typical credit card transaction fees. Feed doesn’t provide the consumer the same protections as credit card companies, as the transaction is treated as if you had paid cash. Additionally, once someone has bought something with Feed, the merchant can send them special offers (in the future, possibly focused to the SKU level). I wasn’t clear about how a user could opt out from those offers.
What does the consumer gain? Dean was honest that they are targeting the youth market (the millenials) who use their cell phones all the time, and are interested in quick transactions. For someone with a credit card already, it might not be such a win.
I wonder how secure SMSes are, especially if you’re sending a pin that can be used to retrieve money. A quick search of the internet seemed to imply that SMSes are relatively secure, but that is a definite issue to me.
But, if you want to try Feed, text ‘pickle’ or ‘noodles’ to 39598 and you’ll get a one time credit to buy lunch, at the Spicy Pickle or Noodles, respectively. I think this might just be in Boulder, but I’m planning to give it a try. (I have worked with Dean in the past.)
Technorati Tags: feed, mobile payments, millenials
