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Showing posts from February, 2011

Another US Patent granted

Just got this from the Uniloc in house counsel: “Today we received the Issue Notification for this patent entitled “System and Method for Auditing Software Usage” invented by Ric and assigned to Uniloc.  The patent will officially issue on March 15, 2011. Congratulations to Ric on another patent!” This patent follows a thread that I originally wanted for the Uniloc patent which was to regulate rather than stop sharing all together… fair use says that you should be able to share to a reasonable degree your own property. This technology allows software licenses to accomplish that. I remember writing this when I was back in the States. What a great environment to do business… I really miss Craig and the vibe of the team over there. But then again the view out my office at the time wasn’t this… Ha… what a gloater!

More on the location wiki project

Wow… a lot of feedback on the idea of a location based wiki but obviously I have not explained what the idea is because everyone seemed to miss the point… To me wiki’s are two things: A communal resource for information and A convenient way for me to collect information conveniently for myself… The idea of a location wiki is simply the ability to link a location to a page and the ability to search by location and not only keyword… ie a button at the top of the wiki that says find pages near here (where you are now)… to me the results would be presented in two columns… 1. Pages that have location identities that are nearby your current location irrespective of keyword and… 2. Pages in another column that are my private notes from pages with location ids that are nearby and sorted by distance from your current location… So going into Byron I see: On the public side of the page list – a picture and page of a street busker from last Thursday night, a review of a cafe

Intellectual Ventures… let’s see what happens

Back in December last year I ran into the Australian team that is running a patent acquisition company based in the states called Intellectual Ventures . They buy patents and inventions and put them into portfolios for licensing to large companies giving the inventor a stipend of the royalty stream. While I would probably not use this model for any of my major projects it certainly sounds interesting so this month I’ve decided to run some ideas past them and see what strikes their fancy.  They have a list of areas that they are actively buying solutions for and out of those I chose the area of Grey Water utilization and water conservation. I submitted two ideas to them and it will be interesting to see if either of them strike a chord. There is certainly a place for this business model as there are really prolific minds out there who can solve problems quickly but don’t have the resources or skills to turn them into businesses… maybe this is a way to go.

Location based wiki concept

Searching is so proactive… every time you want to find something you have to initiate the search… what if relevant stuff was presented to you simply based on location? This idea is being worked on at an operating system level by one of the inventors we help but my idea is a lot simpler… what about a Wikipedia that showed you search results based on your location rather than a search term? Here is a for instance… I go into Byron and look in my location wiki… I can switch between a list of the nearest notes/ wiki pages I’ve written myself or pages by others but I can do things like… See the latest photos from locations near where I am standing… see the notes of the waiters name at my favourite restaurant just up the block. Or that the book shop around the corner is having a special on Clive Cussler books. What would it take to do something like this? A simple interface to Google Maps where a pin sts the location of your note or wiki page, a second list allows yo
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