Twitter needs to innovate, elaborate, associate and inflate before it’s too late.

Allen Stern recently asked, "is Twitter F’ed?"

The question of business model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some startup. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a startup come out of the gate with a business model — perhaps it’s the accountant in me.

 

 

Everyone is questioning business model timing and I say focus on  the core feature set and your think of your customers as "fans" and forget about the business model–for now. User’s are just now starting to hear the word twitter. Twitter is not going away! We are way back in the early stages still, many rooks still on the table.

1. Make sure the Pownce isn’t the verb people use. Make sure it’s a tweet. (I just feel like Pownce’ing someone is a bad thing to do, pro account or no pro)
2. Innovate your freaking butt off until everyone is begging for sleep; everyone in the company must come up with one additional idea or way to use the service each and every day.
3. Elaborate by explaining all of these other ways to get users is to explain exactly what it is and why it is your users want to use your service.  Currently you have:
   

   Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

   What the heck does that mean??? Remember the critical mass needs to see that in action. They need to know how to get started I don’t mean to say what that says is bad, but I know it could be more informative, some users only hit the page once and then bounce off.

4. Partner your butt off. Associate, talk to other people, this is the way Microsoft did so well. Dave Winer mentions some ideas here.
5. Show it in action show the people why their lives are better because of twitter, show how it’s changing the world show them this and everyone wants to be a part of a success story, not an advertisement.
   Forget about the bubble and think about ways to expand the problems in which your service could solve.
6. Inflate: get more servers and admin in order to stabilize the service.
7. Get someone else thinking about how to get the money coming in, but don’t implement yet because you don’t want to screw up your awesome service.

Jason Calacanis knows how to make money with a service, and he has his take here. He basically says you need:

1. In feed Advertising

2. SMS Adverting

3. Subscriptions

Before you implement these service, try to think of a unique way to deliver advertisements that is kind on the vast majority of your users. I would hold off longer if I were you but I don’t see the inside picture. Make some arrangement with Google to use some of their infrastructure, partner with them, get your tweets working before your advertisements or you will loose users to the competition. Follow everyone’s take at Techmeme.  It’s also a great place to see an advertising system that is set up which does not interfere with the core offering, which is to correctly follow the best stories, but shows related advertising in a non-obtrusive, Google way.

Technorati tags: iphone, twiter, iphone and twitter, twitterific, dave winer, Jason Calacanis, Allen Stern, Business Models

del.icio.us tags: iphone, twiter, iphone and twitter, twitterific, dave winer, Jason Calacanis, Allen Stern, Business Models

FlickrFan is worth a 1000 feeds

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s very true, a picture is not only worth a thousand words, but a picture doesn’t have any bias. A picture doesn’t put spin on something and a picture is one of many formats that our more visually enabled world is getting used to have displayed in just about any format.

There is one on the front page of every news paper which I would assume makes much of the difference on whether someone purchases it or not. Considering the newspaper is a thing of yesteryear, and we are entering the semantic age (not there yet but soon) Enter the person responsible for the vast majority of data distribution in the next five years–Dave Winer.

Dave Winer recently released FlickrFan in the form a logical add on to his not so advertised OPML editor tool. I’ve given thought to this exact type of tool in the past and what makes Dave special is he takes most of his ideas and runs with them.

The idea is simple, subscribe to the RSS feeds you want, for instance one can subscribe to an RSS feed of my pictures on flikr, ( I have a few cool pictures up) or if you want to see live pictures which are GEO tagged instantly appear in your home, subscribe to a flikr feed of–let’s say–Hawaii to see every picture in the world that is uploaded to flikr geotagged Hawaii instantly appear in any screen in your home. Living in North East Ohio, I’d say that’s a beautiful thing.

The theme I was talking about before was that we live in a more and more semantic and a more visually enabled world. People expect to be able to visualize anything, and any digital idea of creation is only some programming hours away from a reality.

Once you have Flikr fan up and running you can "screen cast" to any other mac. I’ve been searching for a pragmatic way to get these pictures to my TV and all I have to do is share and include the flikr friend folder my Xbox 360’s and the pictures are presented in all of the glory of the Xbox 360’s video power.

Perhaps all you have is Macs and you would like to install the program just once, you could either just install on the machine you plan using the most or just install good old ScreenRecycler which uses VNC to do all of the heavy lifting for you by simply sending the screen session over your wireless or LAN connection (just make sure you choose 24 bit color quality.)

The Future: A semantic Internet is simply an Internet which is readable by machines. We are starting to see programs that take advantage of this via the RSS feeds and the API’s in which Flikr makes available. For instance you can now have any picture of any location earth appear on any screen in my house, I can. But I want the concept taken a bit further, I want pictures of the location "x" with theme "y" and I want an algorithm which matches the feed’s location and metadata to search my music library and play the correct photos so that it can then group the right photos and music into "bunches" and play them all in a semantic chewy golden way.

The greatest part about dreaming about such a thing is I know that it won’t be long until such a thing exists. I love technology.

Technorati tags: FlickrFan, Flickr Fan, Dave Winer, A Picture is worth a thousand words, Screen Cast, Semantic Web, Semantic Internet, Yahoo!, Flickr, Mac, Macbook, Flickr API, Flickr RSS

 

del.icio.us tags: FlickrFriend, Flickr Friend, Dave Winer, A Picture is worth a thousand words, Screen Cast, Semantic Web, Semantic Internet, Yahoo!, Flickr, Mac, Macbook, Flickr API, Flickr RSS

RIAA or (Rip-off Innocent Americans Association) is at it again

The Washington Post has a great write-up about the RIAA (Rip-off Innocent Americans Association), this time they are saying that if you go to the store to buy a record, and then you transfer that record to your computer, or perhaps your music server, or transfer that music in any way, you are breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages.

I think it’s pretty clear what needs done. We need to start a fund to help protect these innocent Americans instead of paying the RIAA. I think it’s pretty obvious if every single record company goes broke, the world will be a better place. Artists will not fail to survive and sure, there might be a few artisits whom are deeply hurt by this. When you tell me I can not take a CD I just purchased from you, and use it how I want, then I am no longer your customer, and you are in fact my enemy because you not only have a bad track record of not respecting other’s copyrights, but you go after innocent American’s and you use dirty scare tactics. Our nations college students need left alone so that they can graduate and get a job and support your companies. Many college kids eat "Ramon Noodles" and try to get by on as little as 20 dollars a week. Sure, some of them are pursuing illegal activities, but that’s not to say that those same people are not the ones who purchase music more than the rest.

Update:

Duncan Riley at Techcrunch agrees that the RIAA is greedy and he points out that our congress is trying pass "The PRO IP act" and don’t seem at all interested in serving the American public when it comes to copyright and personal use. This isn’t about stealing music anymore, the RIAA wants to sell you a song for each device you have instead of you owning the entire song for life. I think the RIAA needs taken out of commission, I’m going to cancel my music subscription account which is going to be tough, and then I’m going to not ever buy another CD in my life unless the money goes entirely 100 percent to the artist.

Update 2: Alan Patrick at broadstuff.com says something pretty interesting about the RIAA’s new tactic (making most of the United States a criminal) He says:

The worrying thing is if it does actually get a positive ruling, because this, along with the various attempts at extending copyright and IP law into areas it was never intended to go shows a level of intellectual protectionism that is certainly bad news for new innovators, and probably bad news for the US economy overall – any information economy relies on creation, not ossification.

I’d absolutely agree, the United States needs to get out of the way of this entire argument and let digital media innovation happen. The new music stage is the digital stage, and crowding it with rules is only red tape which will slow the progress of artists being found and subsequently paid.

Technorati tags: boycott RIAA, RIAA, Coolition for the protection of our nations college students from rich greedy executives

del.icio.us tags: boycott RIAA, RIAA, Coolition for the protection of our nations college students from rich greedy executives

What is the ROI with Online Website Registration?

Publishing 2.0 has a Great Article which asks, "What Is The ROI Of Requiring User Registration To Access Online Content." Where is the point in which a Web Service returns great value? Is it only at the top where the property owner owns a very large database of dedicated of users who frequent the site and share a large amount of intervention with them?

My best guess would be that it depends on:

How much paid human intervention is Required

Divided by

The amount of Interaction by the customer

I would imagine it’s the amount of interaction with a site that matters the most. Anything that requires input or collaboration or manipulation of any sort. Digg is the great example, they are the company which besides Google have their company name used as a verb the most. Digg, which was really just a creative redo of Slashdot which also seems to do fine.

But how can companies create value in the future with the competition in such a race to provide a better service?

The entire industry is interested I would imagine, how much money does the NYT’s make selling all of that info that gets put into the forms on the NYT’s homepage as well as how do I get more from my users in the form of retention. The most basic form of interaction and the oldest form is the simple hyperlink which doubles each visitors value if it’s a link to additional relevant content which is also owned by your company.

Industries moving forward are going to have to be very clever if they want success which comes only when you have a lot of users whom you know a lot about, and they actually "need" you for some type of reason. 

What good does it ask me to answer a form that I know benefits me and not the advertiser. If you ask me how much money I make a year, my phone number and my street address, please remember to at least ask me about what I like to do in my spare time, what books I’ve read, what shows I watch, or something that makes sense for me. Why? There must be a purpose other than just acknowledging your identity unless there is a monetary interaction involved. 

Garbage in Garbage out, I have no proof, just a theory that over 90 percent of those standard forms are filled out with lies. I could be "WAY" off though, who knows, it’s hard to base a theory on something you know so little about (the other 2billion of you) Try to start a conversation with us users, or try to find a purpose for not thinking about something else. I should study like a group of 50 different registration forms and then return with what I would think could improve on all of them or at least some of them.

Technorati tags: Media Registration ROI, Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp, User Registration, Registration Style, User Registeration forms

del.icio.us tags: Media Registration ROI, Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp, User Registration, Registration Style, User Registeration forms

Apple is Gunning for Vista and Visa?

Brian Caulfield at Forbes.com has a story about a few of Apple’s latest patents. (He calls them innovations) These Scenarios have been tossed around by Microsoft for years, but Microsoft has of late turned into Sun Microsystems, the company with the vision, and no execution. Apple has the execution it seems lately, and with each customer they get, the influencers are turning into haters. Anyhow, I think Apple could actually replace visa and Vista in one fell swoop if what Steve Jobs is planning what I think he is planning.

A credit/debit card is a fantastic piece of plastic, but it hasn’t evolved much since its inception. Originally, a credit card was the evolution of the "Fuel Card." way back in 1938. If you listen to what Steve Job’s said at the "All things D" conference this year, he said that the one thing he always admired about Bill Gates was "Microsoft’s ability to partner with all types of companies and make them advantageous relationships." Since then, we have found out that while you sip your mocha Frappity yapper crap (Fair trade I hope!!!) you would be able to download the song which is playing at your local Starbucks.

Brian goes on to talk about Apple’s latest Patents. He says that the patents describe a device and means in which to order a coffee via your iPhone (presumably) and a means for you to cut in line, a means in which to have your preferences saved on the device and/or the store’s computers. This is the meaningful evolution of the credit card in my opinion and I think Apple will start expanding in a way in which scares even the likes of Visa and maybe even Vista!

My wife and I both now own the iPhone, and I must say I love the device more than any 1200.00 device HTC could ever throw at me. Apple is turning into a consumer company for sure, I even own a mac these days. (There isn’t a major OS in my home LAN that I’m not running though.) How did that old record you could get at McDonald’s go? Big Mac, Mc BLT, Quarter Pounder with an iPhone please! (not)

Technorati tags: iPhone = Credit Card Evolution, ITMU = Credit Card, ITMU VS PayPal VS Google Checkout, Mobile Payment Methods, Mobile Advertising, ITMU Expanding

del.icio.us tags: iPhone = Credit Card Evolution, ITMU = Credit Card, ITMU VS PayPal VS Google Checkout, Mobile Payment Methods, Mobile Advertising, ITMU Expanding

Brian Westbrook’s “no touchdown” ends my Fantasy Year

Brian Westbrook, a great multi purpose running back for the Eagles in the NFL had a clear line for a touchdown and decided it was best to secure the teams win by a very small fraction by sacrificing his own stats as an NFL player. This isn’t something you see very often, but I think there is a bit of anti "Tom Bradism" going on in the NFL.

I suppose this isn’t geek related, but I do play fantasy football. In a game dominated these days with Ego gods that who feel they are the only reason why everyone has come to see the game…. I totally understand and admire what Westbrook did, he laid down on the two yard line. I lost by two points in a league with a pot at almost 1.5k and the money going mostly to the number one position. I am a little bit tired of rooting for the athletes and I want to get back to rooting for the teams. Westbrook is a class act, a polar opposite to Tom Brady who goes for it on 4th down when up by over 30 points just to artificially inflate his stats.

Technorati tags: Fantasy football, Westbrook, Time to get back to rooting for teams, End of fantasy football for me

 

del.icio.us tags: Fantasy football, Westbrook, Time to get back to rooting for teams, End of fantasy football for me

Don’t Throw Rocks When You Are in a Glass House

I was just reading this article over on Tom’s Guide. It appears Leopard is giving Blue Screens of Death. I’ve had some problems with my Macbook Pro freezing up (software freeze I think/hope) but haven’t received any of these problems yet. To make matters worse, Apple is censoring topics on its forums in an attempt to apparently keep the false illusion that there are no problems what-so-ever with anything that ever came out of Cupertino.

Tom points out some disturbing facts.

1. Retrodata is reporting "disturbing hard drive failure rates in some Apple Macbooks"

2. Finder sometimes causes you to loose data when you cut-paste across hard drive because it doesn’t write before deleting first. (only happens during hardware/power failure but still very important)

3. BSODs (blue screens of death) on Leopard machines, yes, Apple’s Leopard (Yikes, better change the Icon for Windows Computers Steve! See Above!)

4. Major problems with Freezes and hangs (I can verify this happens all the time on my Macbook pro)

If there is someone who first of all, knows what the heck he is talking about, and second, isn’t afraid to say it, it’s Tony Celeste. Bravo to you for having the guts to say what needed to be said, Apple is no better than Windows when it comes to being "made by humans." It does have flaws! It did ship too early! Not as early as Vista shipped but still.

I have two copies of Vista Ultimate, a Copy or two of Vista Premium, a Family pack of Leopard, a Macbook pro and more Linux servers and desktops than you would care to here about. I love all OSes and even Sun Distros are growing on me despite their usability issues.

A user named FusionGuy over at one of my favorite forums for learning, Channel9, posted the following. 

I find it amusing that Apple refuses to call a "blue screen" kernel panic the Blue Screen of Death but rather a Blue Screen; I suppose that’s the artistic approach Steve?  It’s also amusing that OS X is designed to work on a very narrow hardware set and they still have issues like this, whereas Windows is designed to run on thousands of unique hardware configurations and nobody critisizes (sic) Apple’s "brilliance" for failing to deliver a product that clearly wasn’t ready.  *sigh*
Now I’ll just sit back, relax and wait for the flame war to begin…

Good for you FusionGuy, and I agree, call it a BSOD if you have one, especially when you rub it in Microsoft’s face by making the Windows icon a BSOD. (not that I don’t find it funny, but now it’s twice as funny, don’t throw rocks when you are in a glass house)

I was going to post my thoughts that I thought Leopard was released too early as well, they are now guilty of some of the things Microsoft is guilty of, and yes, they are no better than Microsoft. Let’s take this time to admit that all operating systems have their strengths and weaknesses, some hate Vista, but I love it. As we push the envelope on what an OS can do, we will run into glitches, and I have no reason to believe that Apple will fix the problems. Hopefully Microsoft keeps improving Vista.

Update: While we are on the subject of problems with Apple products, an occurrence which wasn’t perceived to have happened very much until recently I just read this article by Alexander Wolfe. It appears that iPhones are having a lot of problems as well. I never complain about poor reception on my iPhone, it’s generally acceptable and I realize that not picking up a signal very well usually goes hand-in-hand with producing less brain cancer causing radiation. The complains noted are:

• o2 carrier reception
• iBricking because of 3rd party apps.
• Camera lens wearing off
• and more…

The only complaint I have with my iPhone is that the keyboard sometimes changes my words for me (it works well half the time) and the iPhone’s keyboard is sub-par in general especially when you are using an app that doesn’t use landscape mode. In landscape mode, I have minimal problems, but I could type on my XDA exec twice as fast if not faster. Other than that, I hadn’t planned on getting an iPhone, but after playing with my friends unlocked iPhone, i couldn’t resist but to get one. It’s the best mobile phone ever made, Apple has successfully taken all of the innovations of others, added a bunch of their own, and pretty much hit a grand slam. Now if they would just open the freaking thing up….

Technorati tags: Apple, Tom’s Guide, Apple BSOD, Apple Blue Screen of death, macbook, macbook pro, leopard, leopard problems, leopard freezes, leopard bsod, lopard hangs, battle of the os

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Vista: The Most Ironic Name For Microsoft’s New OS

If you do a search for the definition of Vista, Princeton defines the word as such:

view: the visual percept of a region; "the most desirable feature of the park are the beautiful views" wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Basically, you could ironically describe Microsoft Vista as the perceived most desirable Operating system. I love the tool just fine, I think it’s great, warts and all, but Computer World UK survey has done a survey pointing out that most people are very worried about the operating system.

"The majority of IT professionals worry that migrating to Windows Vista will make their networks less stable and more complex, according to a new survey."

"Ninety percent of 96% IT professionals surveyed said they have concerns about migrating to Vista and more than half said they have no plans to deploy Vista."

What do people perceive as the major roadblocks for implementation of the operating system?

1. Stability (I can concur, Vista is less stable than XP, but this a problem that can be remedied–over time. I will also point out that there is a sensationalist element to this.
2. Compatibility (Getting better but I can name a laundry list of programs that don’t run.
3. Cost (Implementation and hardware add significantly to the cost of the most expensive consumer OS in the world.
4. Complexity (I think this is partially laziness, part truth. IPV6 is something that needs to be implemented, and Vista has an untested, sub-par but advanced network stack in the OS.

Perception…  Vista was thought to be the clear road to the future, and things now look cloudy. I like to think I was one of the first people to say that there are some real crazy thinkers amongst our good friends in the EU over across the pond, and that it’s very possible that Microsoft’s operating system Monopoly might fade away soon.

The report goes on to say that many companies are thinking about breaking up with Microsoft:

Macintosh leads the pack of Vista alternatives, with support from 28% of respondents. About a quarter said they would opt for Red Hat Linux, with SUSE Linux and Ubuntu each garnering 18% of the vote. Another 9% cited other Linux operating systems and 4% were unsure.

They list Virtualization as a key driver in client innovation but for some reason they leave out the fact that many companies are reverting back to a early to mid 90’s think client computing initiative. The report talks briefly about the many roadblocks to getting off of Windows but doesn’t specifically mention exchange as a factor.

I run Mac Hardware, and I recognize that each OS out there has a strength and weakness. By running all operating systems (not all at once always but I can if I want to do so) I am learning about the evolving strengths and weaknesses of each OS.

I believe that the following features will be key drivers that will decide what operating systems are ran in the consumer and enterprise space. (the requirements are slightly different for each group but I’ll lump them for the sake of time)

1. Price: (OSS has a huge advantage here, especially if you have the in house talent in the enterprise and in the consumer space.
2. Hardware efficiency: Do more per cycle. An OS shouldn’t suck everything out of your hardware, but should enable your software to exist, and an OS not only must get out of your way, it must now help you more productive with the software you choose to run.
3.  Choice: Standards compliancy. The number 1 driver of innovation in the OS space is the standardization of protocols and services. This is becoming more and more important to architectural provisioning.
4. Price/Innovation cost effectiveness. Sure Vista and Leopard are the most consumer friendly operating systems (For the time being, and arguable in some portions like interface this isn’t always true anymore)
5. Barriers to adopting new technologies: These are still in place, perhaps not as much, but there are still many barriers that are costly to change off of a Microsoft ecosystem.
6. Software and Developer Adoption:, as well as how important the Internet becomes and how much it makes the OS a commodity. Most services do become a commodity

Microsoft doesn’t like to loose. They are making a record amount of profit, and you can’t take to heart every report (even mine) you read.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Vista, Microsoft Vista, Linux, Ubuntu, Novel, SLED, OpenSuse, Open Suse, OSX, Apple, OSX 10.5, Leopard, Irony, OS Wars

del.icio.us tags: Microsoft, Vista, Microsoft Vista, Linux, Ubuntu, Novel, SLED, OpenSuse, Open Suse, OSX, Apple, OSX 10.5, Leopard, Irony, OS Wars

OSX “Spaces” + VMware Fusion = “Unparalleled” personal computing power.

I am soon to be a full time research associate instead of a part time one doing it in my spare time. Currently I’ve been spending the last few months teaching myself to program, install, support and generally get to know Oracle 10g and 11g on both an Ubuntu Server environment, as well as on a SunOS Unix server. Instead of lugging around five machines I only lug around two. One is my work issued "Stinkpad" (okay, IBM Thinkpads are solid machines) but nothing, and I mean nothing I’ve ever encountered delivers what I have going on my Macbook Pro. Let’s run through what I’m doing, and how I’m doing it.

VMware isn’t a multibillion dollar company for nothing, these guys understand virtualization like Lebron James does a basket ball. At the core, we are running a micro and macro kernel in OSX’s Darwin Kernel (Version 9). (Download Darwin Source Code Here) Mac OSX is powered by a Mach & BSD Kernel which enables some cool stuff which I’m about to talk about here.

I have the ability to have up to 4 operating systems (including OSX and more if I wanted) and when I want to switch between operating systems, I just press "CTR + LEFT OR RIGHT." and Wazam!! I’m in another OS. Currently I’m running OSX 10.5, Windows Vista Ultimate, Sun Solaris 10 with Oracle 10g, Ubuntu Desktop (or Server with 10g, depends on whether I’m using Ubuntu as my IDE environment or testing a program on my virtual network of up to 5 PCs. I am also downloading gOS to give it a try, it’s a Ubuntu flavored distro with tight integration with Google.

Here is the kicker. I don’t even have to have a network connection to test real world applications, I can have multiple concurrent LAOP/UAOP/LAMP stacks running. I don’t usually do all of these at once, but I plan on upgrading to 4 gigs or ram, at which point all of this would run very very fast. Having 4 operating environments at once does work fine for me, you can adjust the VMWARE Fusion settings, and your mileage may vary.

As you can see, I have Sun Solaris 10, Ubuntu Desktop, Microsoft Vista, and OSX all running concurrently thanks to the magic of a OSX Spaces, a kernel that’s advanced, dual processors, and the magic of VMware’s Fusion product.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati tags: Vmware, Spaces, Linux, Ubuntu, SunOS, Solaris, Thinkpad, MacBook Pro, Vista, VMware Fusion, Leopard Spaces, Mach kernel, BSD kernel, Macro kernel, Micro kernel

del.icio.us tags: Vmware, Spaces, Linux, Ubuntu, SunOS, Solaris, Thinkpad, MacBook Pro, Vista, VMware Fusion, Leopard Spaces, Mach kernel, BSD kernel, Macro kernel, Micro kernel

New Term: Technology Squatter

I am an advocate of innovation in all forms. What I don’t like to see is those without the ability to create keeping those who can create wonderful new novel products, services, and software. Boston.com is reporting that Northeastern is suing Google over a way to split queries over multiple computers also known as a clustered database. From the Boston Globe article:

"This particular patent has to do with the fundamental database architecture, which they use to serve up every single result they serve to you," said Michael Belanger, president of Jarg Corp. in Waltham. Jarg is a privately funded developer of advanced search technology. The company was cofounded by Northeastern associate professor Kenneth P. Baclawski and holds an exclusive license to the patent, which is owned by Northeastern.

The patent covers a method for chopping up database queries into multiple portions and having each part processed by a different computer. This allows for much faster searching of huge databases, like Google’s vast index of Web pages on the Internet.

I work for a fortune 50 company, I have written patents, and I’ve come up with new concepts. These are concepts that our company will use though. The whole idea behind patents is, to protect & reward those who go the extra mile use their creative powers to envision something that doesn’t exist, and then to create that vision until that single thought is a product or service in our economy. As far as I know, this Jar Corp doesn’t even have a product, and they need to concentrate on providing a service instead of trying to litigate. As far as suing Google, they’ve not even seen the real tech behind Google, and it’s technology that’s probably changing every day. To say that this whole concept of clustered database queries is unique is unfathomable. Oracle uses the technology in its 11g product. The idea is that you can take a bunch of commodity boxes, through common OSes and databases on them and then you have an area of memory (oracle calls it an SGA) which resides above the hardware that sends tasks over the cluster. 

To sum up what I’m thinking here. I don’t know whether or not there should be software patents. What I do know that novel approaches to doing things which require a lot of work, but could be quickly reversed engineered and then put into a competitors product shouldn’t be allowed. On the opposite side of the coin there is a troll economy. Think patents, not products…. This doesn’t help our innovative world and it only serves the selfish few who would profit off of such lame patents that never come to market. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you invent a technology, you better be bringing it to market, or you are not only a patent troll but a technology squatter.

Technorati Tags: Google , Lawsuit , Technology Squatter , Northeastern University , Michael Belanger , Jarg Corp , Boston.com , Database Architecture , Clustered databases , Oracle 11g , oracle , database design , database

del.icio.us Tags: Google , Lawsuit , Technology Squatter , Northeastern University , Michael Belanger , Jarg Corp , Boston.com , Database Architecture , Clustered databases , Oracle 11g , oracle , database design , database