Silicon Valley

Paul Allen sues the Web for being obvious

The co-founder of Microsoft declares war on Apple, Google, Facebook and eBay. Their crime? Making good websites

  • more
    • All Share Services

Paul Allen sues the Web for being obviousPaul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and the world's fourth richest man according to Forbes Magazine, speaks to the media after he announced plans to build a $20 million science fiction museum adjacent to his Experience Music Project, in Seattle, Washington, April 17, 2003. Allen, whose estimated 2002 worth was $25.2 billion, is a music and science fiction fan and temporarily named the upcoming project "The Science Fiction Experience." It is scheduled to open in summer 2004. REUTERS/Anthony P. Bolante APB/HB(Credit: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters)

As patent suits go, let’s give Paul Allen credit. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft is nothing but ambitious. On Friday Allen filed a lawsuit alleging patent infringement against America Online, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

The suit claims that the companies have violated patents granted to Interval Research, a Silicon Valley research lab Allen founded at the height of the dot-com boom, poured $100 million into, and then closed up after failing to successfully commercialize any of its technology.

Interestingly, as the Wall Street Journal reports, “notably missing from the defendants’ list are Microsoft, in which Mr. Allen remains a major investor, and Amazon.com Inc., which is based in Mr. Allen’s hometown of Seattle. [A spokesman for Allen] “declined to comment on the selection of defendants.”

The absence is notable because a cursory look at the patents in question suggests that they are broad enough in scope that just about anybody with a state-of-the-art website could be construed as operating in violation of them. But the practices covered by the patents are also so obvious that there is little question that Microsoft and Amazon must also be engaging in them too. So are those companies paying license fees to Interval? And if so, why not disclose that?

Here are the four patents:

  • United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
  • United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
  • United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
  • United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

The first patent (507) is summarized in the complaint as having to do with “making and using websites, hardware, and software to categorize, compare, and display segments of a body of information …” The second (652) deals with “making, using, offering, providing, and encouraging customers to use products that display information in a way that occupies the peripheral attention of the user…”

But the last patent (682) is the most intriguing, so I pulled up the legal filing that included the actual patent.

Here’s the abstract describing the patent:

Disseminating to a participant an indication that an item accessible by the participant via a network is of current interest is disclosed. An indication that the item is of current interest is received in real time. The indication is informed that the time is of current interest.

You see, there’s just a whole lot of stuff out there on the Web, and it’s changing all the time, and it’s very confusing.

…[T]his proliferation of content, such as audio, image, and video content, presents certain challenges from the perspective of users seeking content of current interest. First the sheer volume of content available makes it difficult for users to find the content in which they are most interested in accessing at any given time. Apart from having to sort through the enormous volume of content available, much of the content of potentially greatest interest, at least to many users, is dynamic. At certain times, a file or other electronic resource may be of great interest while at other times, or perhaps even most of the time, it is not of great interest or not interesting at all.

So here’s a brilliant idea! Let’s come up with a dynamically generated alert system to solve this problem. We’ll patent it, but fail to incorporate it in a product, and then a few years down the line, when we suddenly notice that all the major Web-based businesses have somehow coincidentally also realized that this was a great idea, we’ll sue them. Easy money!

HTWW has long tended to take a dim view of companies that rely on intellectual property litigation as their primary form of revenue. But one has to imagine that Allen thinks he has a pretty good case, simply from the sheer scale of his attack. You don’t sue the entire aristocracy of the Web (aside from Microsoft and Amazon) lightly. Just choosing to sue Google and Apple alone demonstrates remarkable chutzpah.

Nonetheless, the entire spectacle is ridiculous and Paul Allen should be embarrassed. Allen has been spectacularly unsuccessful in many of his post-Microsoft endeavors, and I’m betting he will fail here too. Dynamic alerts? Attracting peripheral attention? Using a browser to make sense of information? These are ways of exploiting the Web that are beyond obvious, as proven simply by the fact that all the companies named in Allen’s lawsuit would be regarded as run by abject imbeciles if they did not incorporate such features.

Interval Research employed oodles of top computer scientists in its heyday, but if this was the best they could come up with in terms of potentially commercializable patents, no wonder Allen ended up shutting the lab down.

Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

IBM’s Watson wins practice round of “Jeopardy!”

Computer, which tech giant calls "profound advance" in artificial intelligence, beats two former game show champs

  • more
    • All Share Services

IBM's Watson wins practice round of "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter, right, look on as an IBM computer called "Watson" beats them to the buzzer to answer a question during a practice round of the "Jeopardy!" quiz show in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. It's the size of 10 refrigerators, and it swallows encyclopedias whole, but an IBM computer was lacking one thing it needed to battle the greatest champions from the "Jeopardy!" quiz TV show - it couldn't hit a buzzer. But that's been fixed, and on Thursday the hardware and software system named Watson played a competitive practice round against two champions. A "Jeopardy!" show featuring the computer will air in mid-February, 2011. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)(Credit: AP)

The clue: It’s the size of 10 refrigerators, has access to the equivalent of 200 million pages of information and knows how to answer in the form of a question.

The correct response: “What is the computer IBM developed to become a ‘Jeopardy!’ whiz?”

Watson, which IBM claims as a profound advance in artificial intelligence, edged out game-show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Thursday in its first public test, a short practice round ahead of a million-dollar tournament that will be televised next month.

Later, the human contestants made jokes about the “Terminator” movies and robots from the future. Indeed, four questions into the round you had to wonder if the rise of the machines was already upon us — in a trivial sense at least.

Watson tore through a category about female archaeologists, repeatedly activating a mechanical button before either Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter could buzz in, then nailing the questions: “What is Jericho?” “What is Crete?”

Its gentle male voice even scored a laugh when it said, “Let’s finish ‘Chicks Dig Me.’”

Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive “Jeopardy!” games in 2004-05, then salvaged the category, winning $1,000 by identifying the prehistoric human skeleton Dorothy Garrod found in Israel: “What is Neanderthal?”

He and Rutter, who won a record of nearly $3.3 million in prize money, had more success on questions about children’s books and the initials “M.C.,” though Watson knew about “Harold and the Purple Crayon” and that it was Maurice Chevalier who sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in the film “Gigi.” The computer pulled in $4,400 in the practice round, compared with $3,400 for Jennings and $1,200 for Rutter.

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM servers running the Linux operating system. It’s not connected to the Internet but has digested encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news, movie scripts and more.

The system is the result of four years of work by IBM researchers around the globe, and although it was designed to compete on “Jeopardy!” the technology has applications well beyond the game, said John Kelly III, IBM director of research. He said the technology could help doctors sift through massive amounts of information to draw conclusions for patient care, and could aid professionals in a wide array of other fields.

“What Watson does and has demonstrated is the ability to advance the field of artificial intelligence by miles,” he said.

Watson, named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is reminiscent of IBM’s famous Deep Blue computer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But while chess is well-defined and mathematical, “Jeopardy!” presents a more open-ended challenge involving troves of information and complexities of human language that would confound a normal computer.

“Language is ambiguous; it’s contextual; it’s implicit,” said IBM scientist David Ferrucci, a leader of the Watson team. Sorting out the context — especially in a game show filled with hints and jokes — is an enormous job for the computer, which also must analyze how certain it is of an answer and whether it should risk a guess, he said.

The massive computer was not behind its podium between Jennings and Rutter; instead it was represented by an IBM Smart Planet icon on an LCD screen.

The practice round was played on a stage at an IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, 38 miles north of Manhattan and across the country from the game show’s home in Culver City, Calif. A real contest among the three, to be televised Feb. 14-16, will be played at IBM on Friday.

The winner of the televised match will be awarded $1 million. Second place gets $300,000, third place $200,000. IBM, which has headquarters in Armonk, said it would give its winnings to charity while Jennings and Rutter said they would give away half theirs.

In a question-and-answer session with reporters after the practice round, Rutter and Jennings made joking reference to the jump in technology Watson represents.

“When Watson’s progeny comes back to kill me from the future,” Rutter said, “I have my escape route planned just in case.”

Jennings said someone suggested his challenge was like the legend of John Henry, the 19th-century laborer who beat a steam drill in a contest but died in the effort. Jennings prefers a comparison to “Terminator,” where the hero was a little more resilient.

“I had a friend tell me, ‘Remember John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man.’ And I was like … ‘Remember John Connor!’” Jennings said. “We’re gonna take this guy out!”

——

Associated Press writer Leon Drouin-Keith in New York City contributed to this report.

Continue Reading Close

Goldman Sachs’ Facebook ploy

The investment bank buys, big, into the social network -- and expands a shadow stock market

  • more
    • All Share Services

The “great vampire squid” of finance, Goldman Sachs, has invested $450 million in the emerging great vampire squid of cyberspace, Facebook. As the New York Times’ DealBook reported, the deal is gives Goldman a leg up on the huge fees investment banks will get when the social-networking company eventually sells shares to the public. And as the Times and Wall Street Journal also report, Goldman will also haul in huge fees from those clients who want to invest themselves.

Meanwhile, Facebook gets the capital to keep buying talent and startups, and to fuel its expansion in all kinds of other ways — and it gets to sell stock in what amounts to a shadow stock market that’s growing faster than regulators seem willing or able to understand, much less deal with.

This looks like a better deal for Facebook than its investor, putting Facebook’s value at $50 billion, which makes sense in today’s increasingly bubble-like market. Silicon Valley is going a bit wild again– not as crazy as the late 1990s, mind you, but there’s a froth element to the local economy.

An interesting question now is whether Facebook will do a a real public offering anytime soon. Federal rules require significant data disclosures when a company has 500 or more shareholders, and surely Facebook is at that point or nearing it. The Goldman deal may be an end-run around the rule, with Goldman not selling Facebook shares to its clients, but rather selling shares in something it (Goldman) owns. If this is the game, and if the SEC lets it happen, the 500-shareholder rule has become meaningless — and markets are all the more opaque at a time when transparency is more needed than ever.

Opacity is a growing issue. A thriving shadow marketplace has emerged for big startups that haven’t done IPOs, so big that the Securities and Exchange Commission is, at least in that space, looking into the wheeling and dealing. For good reason: Many if not most of the investors in these markets have no idea what the true financial picture may be of the shares they’re buying.

Facebook seems like a no-brainer right now. It reportedly has passed Google as the most visited website, and it’s growing in power and people. And Goldman, for all its sleazy ways, has smart people making investment decisions.

But Goldman was also a big investor in the financial bubble that nearly toppled the global economy. It escaped ruin only because we, the taxpayers (actually our children and grandchildren) rescued it and the rest of the banking industry. That was and remains Goldman’s real genius: making giant bets with other people’s money.

Continue Reading Close

A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor. More about Dan here.

Another big Web company erodes user trust

Yahoo says it'll sell bookmarking service, a reminder that we exist online at other people's whims

  • more
    • All Share Services

Another big Web company erodes user trust

UPDATED

(Please see the note at the bottom of this piece.)

Yahoo says it will try to sell its Web bookmarking service, Delicious. This news, posted on the Delicious blog, comes a day after widespread reports — unchallenged until now by Yahoo — that the company was shuttering the service.

One result of the earlier reports was a frenzied search for a new social bookmarking service to replace what many people, including me, have used over the years to stockpile and organize links to online material we’ve found interesting. A second result was a further hit to Yahoo’s declining reputation.

But the most important result may ultimately be what this move, among others. does for public understanding of the role of Internet service providers of all kinds. As Amazon.com’s recent takedown of the Wikileaks site it was hosting demonstrates, we are at the whims of the companies that provide the services, and they are increasingly demonstrating that we should be highly skeptical about their commitment to our data’s longevity.

We put our data — our websites, photos, bookmarks, email and more — on their sites. But they can, and do, change their terms of service at will, doing what they please with what we’ve put on their servers. And sometimes they just shut down the services they’ve been providing. They may do it for good reasons, or absurd ones. It doesn’t matter. The point is, they can.

As noted here some months ago, we all need a Plan B for just about everything we do online these days. If we give others a choke point over our communications, we are inviting them to throttle us.

Note: The original version of this piece said Yahoo was closing Delicious. That was based on a variety of credible — and, as noted, unrefuted — news stories that started appearing more than 24 hours ago. They were based, initially, on a Twitter posting that linked to a screenshot taken at an internal Yahoo meeting. The screenshot, which has now been taken down, had Delicious among a group of Yahoo services that were being “sunsetted,” which is corporatese for end of life.

Whatever Yahoo’s intentions with Delicious, my points here stand. Even if the service is sold, a new owner might radically change the terms of service (as Yahoo itself could do at any time). The users’ insecurity remains, whatever the ownership may be.

Continue Reading Close

A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor. More about Dan here.

Netflix’s streaming push: Charging more for less

The DVD-rental company moves hard onto the Net, and raises prices for early customers despite slimmer inventory

  • more
    • All Share Services

Netflix's streaming push: Charging more for less

I just downgraded my Netflix account, and will be sending the company $7 less each month than I’ve been sending for several years now. Why? Because Netflix is moving fast to live up to its name — to become an online video-streaming operation instead of the DVD-rental outfit it’s been — but in the process it’s raising prices while making its service worse, in key ways, for longtime customers.

These changes appear to make plenty of sense for Netflix, because the company will avoid the cost of buying and then mailing the millions of DVDs customers like me have been receiving. And, indeed, on Monday Netflix announced it was going to offer customers an all-online streaming plan for $8 a month.

I suspect there’s been a misstep, however, if I’m any example of the Netflix customer base. I’d been paying $17 per month for a plan that allowed us to have three DVDs out at a time, plus being able to view streaming content anytime. But Neflix has raised our rate by $3 a month, or about 18 percent.

There are way too many problems with the streaming-only plan to even consider it at this point. At the top of the list is the fact that the Netflix catalog of DVDs is vastly, vastly greater than what you can watch online. If the company really wants to be a streaming-only outfit, it needs to persuade the robber barons of Hollywood to digitize everything sooner rather than later.

And while the quality of the streaming is generally OK if you have a fast enough broadband connection — though it doesn’t look as good on my computer as a DVD — network congestion (in my experience) can cause the video to degrade in quality or, in some circumstances, pause altogether. I tried it on a hotel Wi-Fi recently, and finally gave up as the film kept stopping while the stream caught up.

So when the e-mail arrived announcing the price hike, my reaction was: Sorry, no sale. We’ve moved to a lower-cost plan that allows one DVD out at a time, for $10 (also more expensive than that plan used to be), plus streaming. The various plans Netflix offers now range up to $56 a month, and slightly more if you’re renting Blu-ray discs.

Netflix has leveraged the broadband Internet structure like no other company. It now accounts for a significant amount of evening data traffic, by all accounts. I’m guessing that heavy Netflix users are going to pay for the money they save in other ways when they start running into data caps that some carriers have put on their basic Internet service.

Wall Street was thrilled with the latest Netflix maneuver, pushing the stock price way up on Monday (though it eased off slightly this morning). The share price has roughly quadrupled in the past year — evidence of investors’ love for the company, an infatuation I believe has been mostly justified.

But I’m convinced that this move by Netflix is too little, too soon. And I’m betting I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Continue Reading Close

A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor. More about Dan here.

Google gives Gmail users more control over inboxes

Now users can choose chronological stacking over threaded messages

  • more
    • All Share Services

Google Inc. is addressing one of the biggest complaints about its free e-mail service by giving people more control over how their inboxes are organized.

The new option announced Wednesday will allow Gmail users to choose whether they prefer their incoming messages stacked in chronological order, instead of having them threaded together as part of the same electronic conversation.

Gmail has been automatically grouping messages by topic or senders since Google rolled out the service six years ago.

But this so-called “conversation view” confused or frustrated many Gmail users who had grown accustomed to seeing all their newest messages at the top of the inbox followed by the older correspondence. After all, that’s how most other e-mail programs work.

The complaints grew loud enough to persuade Google to revise the Gmail settings so users can turn off conversation view and unravel their messages.

“We really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people,” Google software engineer Doug Chen wrote in a Wednesday blog post.

The aversion to conversation view doesn’t seem to be widespread. Gmail ended July with nearly 186 million worldwide users, a 22 percent increase from the same time a year ago, according to the research firm comScore Inc. Both Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo’s e-mail (303 million users) are larger, but aren’t growing nearly as rapidly as Gmail.

Continue Reading Close

Page 1 of 24 in Silicon Valley