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Is the Web "contracting"?
The numbers show a bigger slice for the top sites -- but most of the pie remains in the hands of the little guys.
By Scott Rosenberg
[08/26/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 47: The contractor's contractor -- migrant labor on steroids
By Thomas Scoville
[08/25/99]

Books
Stalking Gates
In "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," Gary Rivlin provides a much-needed outsider's view of the Baron of Redmond -- and the rogues of Silicon Valley.
By Janelle Brown
[08/25/99]

Palestinian refugees get wired
What can the Internet bring to a culture that has been scattered across the world?
By Flore de Preneuf
[08/24/99]

We have computers. Why aren't we more productive?
Technology doesn't usually save companies time or money -- but in a competitive world, it often keeps them in business.
By Cate T. Corcoran
[08/23/99]

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In essence, the patent covers the creation of an electronic marketplace for the sale of expert advice and services. But that doesn't really do justice to it. Here is an example, taken from the text of the patent, of the kind of problem the invention is supposed to solve:

Imagine a professor of nanotechnology at the University of Makinsk, located in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. Although the professor's teaching schedule keeps him fairly busy, there is not much to do in Makinsk. To relieve the boredom and to supplement his limited salary, he decides the time has come to embrace capitalism by using some of his time to offer freelance nanotechnology consulting. The professor begins by making a list of what needs to be done before being able to sell his nanotechnology expertise ...

And so it goes, enumerating the problems of finding clients, finding clients who will have work that the professor can do at his preferred Saturday evening time, finding clients who will pay on time (unlike the "many unscrupulous nanotechnology companies that have been known to prey on ex-communist scientists in the former USSR"), finding a way to get the information they want to the clients, hiding all this activity from his boss, and so on, almost, but not quite, to infinity. By the end of the passage, a two-column page of small type, the patent examiners must have been half-ready to imagine that if they rejected this patent application, they would be condemning a brilliant nanotechnologist to poverty and obscurity.

This is a pity, because the long story of the nanotechnologist serves to gloss over a pertinent fact about the invention: The idea at the heart of it simply isn't new.

The original idea of selling information on an electronic marketplace was tried first by an economist named Phil Salin. Salin started working on the software for an electronic marketplace as early as 1984, and launched AMIX, the American Information Exchange, in 1991. The company was well-publicized. Walker's own patent cites an analysis in the Economist magazine and a Forbes article by computer industry guru Esther Dyson discussing the system.

The system, as Dyson describes it, was fairly sophisticated even by contemporary Net standards. It involved both the posting of documents -- information that has already been created -- by experts as well as the solicitation of consulting services by buyers looking for advice. It included a mechanism for auctioning information and advice; Dyson said Salin also envisioned complex, automatic pricing systems that, for instance, could let information drop in price as it ages. Though high-profile names like Dyson and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor were involved, the company was unable to realize its ambitions and folded.

Walker's own patent recognizes AMIX as the most notable experiment with information marketplaces. "To understand the failure of AMIX, and all other prior attempts to create working expert-exchange marketplaces, it is necessary to understand that effective markets, whether they be physical or electronic, require a complete and highly specialized set of conditions in order to function and thrive," the patent notes, "A single missing ingredient ot feature might ... lead to the collapse of the Exchange."

But then the patent launches into a description of Walker's own system, and the reader, alas, never does find out exactly what feature was missing from AMIX that made it fail.

Observers, including Doc Searls, who worked on AMIX, say its greatest failure was being ahead of its time. AMIX existed before the Internet and struggled to build an online service that could handle its data and traffic. Now that the Internet exists, however, there are other businesses following in its footsteps. In fact, whereas Walker Digital simply has a patent, at least two companies, Advoco.com and Adeste.com, are working on full-fledged businesses that connect buyers and sellers of information and expert advice.

Ironically, Salin himself was a vocal opponent of patents on software and software-based systems. He likened creating software with writing, and said, in a public comment filed with the patent office as it was considering rules on software patents, that "patents on writings discourage trial and error [and] perfection of important ideas."

Salin's skepticism when it comes to software patents is shared by some of his successors. "Do software patents promote innovation?" queries Adeste founder Michael Stern. He leaves it as an open question. One senses that depending on whether the patent is his own or somebody else's, the answer can go either way. Like everyone else in the post-Walker era, however, he's hired a hotshot intellectual property law firm, in his case the New York firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler.

It might seem perplexing that an idea so obvious that several companies would have launched businesses around it even as the patent wound its way through the patent examiners' hands could be the subject of a patent at all. But if it seems perplexing in the case of a complex system for expert-based commerce, Walker's patent for a method for "establishing and maintaining user-controlled anonymous communication" seems downright awe-inspiring in its chutzpah.

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