Monthly Archives: June 2011

Some thoughts on software patents

A very big day for us at Kerika: after more than six years of perseverance, we finally got our first patent issued today: United States Patent No. 7,958,080. (Yeah, that’s certainly a big number: a lot of people were granted patents before us!)

There is a lot of debate in our profession about software patents: strong opinions have been voiced in favor of granting software patents, and equally vociferous views have been aired in opposition to the entire concept. What’s discussed much less frequently is how long it can take to get a software patent, or expensive and arduous the process can be.

Our original provisional application was made on October 29, 2004; this was followed up with a final application, and then dead silence for a couple of years. When the Patent Office finally examined the patent application, there was a multi-year exchange of correspondence with the Examiner, with the Examiner making various arguments in opposition to granting a patent, and our lawyers making counter-arguments in favor of Kerika being granted a patent.

All this back-and-forth is quite normal, by the way, and works as designed: it’s the Patent Examiner’s job to not grant patents without challenging their claims, and it’s the applicant’s responsibility to offer increasingly stronger arguments in favor of being granted a patent. What is finally granted is usually a subset of the claims that were made in the initial application. It’s very rare for all of the initial claims to be granted.

Software patents are harder to get, and take much longer to be granted, than hardware patents, probably because it is easy to compare one tangible object with another and determine whether one is materially different than the second tangible object.

Software is harder because it is intangible: you have to describe an intangible item, using the jargon that’s peculiar to patent applications, in way that clearly distinguishes it from another intangible item.

The net result is that a software patent can take many more years to be granted, in comparison to a hardware patent. One of the problems with the process taking so long is that, by the time the Patent Examiner gets around to examining your application, the technology may have become so prevalent in other, competing products that it no longer appears to be as innovative as it was when the application was first made.

The entire process is also very expensive, particularly if you are a solo inventor or small startup (as we are): the Patent Office has been hiking its fees over the years, with the stated intention of hiring up more examiners, and thereby speeding up the process, but clearly they are having a hard time keeping up with the flood of applications because it seems like the delays are getting worse, not better.

Regardless of whether you are pro or con software patents, we would argue that both sides of the argument would be served better if the process of examining, granting or rejecting a patent were shortened very considerably. If a patent could be examined and acted upon within 2-3 months, it would entirely change the debate as to whether software patents are good or bad for innovation.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… we have other patent claims in the works, which we hope will take less time to work its way through the Patent Office now that our first patent has been granted!

Our latest, greatest version: Copy/Paste, Share/Join, and more

We have been hard at work over the past couple of months: taking in feedback from our early adopters and using this to fix bugs, improve usability, and provide some very useful new features.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the stuff we have built in the past month or so:

  1. Added Copy, Cut, Paste as New, and Paste as Links. The Paste as Links feature is particularly powerful.
  2. Added a Share! button and a Join! button that makes it easy for people to create public projects and get people to join in their particular advocacy cause.
  3. Brought back double-clicking (after having taken it out in an previous version…)
  4. Made the text blocks more flexible, with the ability to embed URLs and autosizing.
  5. Improved our Google Docs Finder.
  6. Worked around numerous limitations of Google Docs.

We will describe each of these in more detail in subsequent blog posts, and we obviously have a lot of work on our hands to update our website to reflect all this new functionality! Oh, and about 200 bugs were found and obliterated in the past 2 months…

(Lots of people have provided useful feedback, but special thanks go to Michael Parker from Marketingeek and Alexander Caskey from High Bridge Communications.)

 

Running Windows on my iPhone…

Some years ago, a friend presented me with an old iMac that he didn’t need any more – one of those blob-like machines with a clear cover that let you see its innards. It was a heavy, inconveniently shaped machine that nevertheless started a slow migration to all-Mac household today: Mac laptops, iMac desktop, Mac wireless router, iPod, iPhone (and, soon, iPad).

Macs were always attractive for a simple reason: you didn’t have to worry about tuning the operating system. When I had PCs at home, I found myself having to do a clean re-installation of the operating system every 9 months or so, just to clean out the grit and gum that clogged up the Windows registry and system directories.

The way Windows programs were installed was particularly problematic: each application would leave bits and pieces of code and configuration files lying around all over the place, where it would inevitably trip up some other program. If you liked trying out different software, as I did, this meant that every 9-12 months you had to rebuild your PC from scratch: repartition the hard drive, reinstall the operating system (and several years worth of updates), and then all your applications, and then all your files. It typically took a full day, but it was worth it because your machine was all zippy and fast once again – at least for a few months…

The main selling point of Macs was that all this fiddling with your machine was unnecessary: your computer would “just work”, and you wouldn’t have to worry about rebuilding the machine periodically to get it in fighting trim. And, with the new iCloud strategy, Apple is trying to take that brand promise even further, by demoting your expensive gadgets to “just another device”.

Is this all going to work like magic, as Jobs promises? I doubt it, based upon my recent experience with my iPhone… For the past few months I had noticed that many of my basic iPhone applications would just quietly crash when I first tried to launch them: launching the music player, for example, would frequently take two attempts. The maps application would take up to a minute to launch, and then it would operate so slowly that there would be a 2 second delay in echo-back of character input.

I assumed this was due to the fact that the iOS operating system was getting fatter with every new update, while my hardware remained svelte. After all, the upgrade to iOS 4.0 had been particularly painful for my iPhone 3GS: it taught me a painful lesson about not automatically taking the latest software updates, even from Apple!

(And it wasn’t just me: lots of iPhone 3GS users complained bitterly after upgrading to iOS 4 – it was like trying to run Vista on hardware designed for Windows 95)

And that’s the long-winded segue into why it feels like I am actually running Windows on my iPhone: a couple of weeks ago my battery started to run out very quickly (it wouldn’t last even a few hours of slight use), I took my iPhone to the local Apple genius bar where they quickly determined that my iPhone’s OS was in terrible shape. Their recommendation was to do a complete rebuild of the iPhone: from scratch, which meant setting it up as a brand new phone and adding back in all my email accounts, music, etc. by hand.

This rebuild worked: now my iPhone is as fast and responsive as it used to be, but the experience of completely rebuilding an iPhone (which, incidentally, is not the same as doing a “restore from backup”), was all too reminiscent of having to rebuild my Windows machines periodically to clean out the gunk in the registry and system directories.

It is to the credit of the Apple “geniuses” that they quickly determined that my phone’s OS was in trouble, but I also suspect it is because this is a “known but not publicized” problem with iOS 4. Over time, iOS 4 gets in trouble just like Windows XP and Vista (and perhaps Windows 7 as well, although I use that too infrequently to say for sure).

Think different, work same.