By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews
Usually when a company coins a term or a phrase, or attempts to, it checks around to see whether someone else has thought of it first. But in the case of "netbook," it seemed to be a term that entered the popular vocabulary just before marketers got a hold of it. Or so we thought. But this story turns out all for the better, as we can all say "netbook" now with confidence.
Psion tells Intel it can use "netbook"
Afternoon of Monday, June 1 · Perhaps you've noticed how Microsoft had been gingerly avoiding the use of the term "netbook," and other manufacturers followed suit, including Sony. The reason is that Psion Teklogix, a long-time components producer, had a trademark on the term, and it had been using it for a line of notebook computers up until 2003. Early in the year, after Psion made a case about Intel's use of the term (which, you have to admit, sounds a lot better than "MID" or "UMPC"), Intel fought back the way Intel's been known to do, claiming that Psion's claim to the trademark had passed since it had been out of use for six years.
Things were starting to get nasty, as we began to hear questions about whether anyone had ever heard of a Psion Netbook (capital "N") in the first place. Well, yesterday afternoon, the companies apparently reached a decision that it's just not the right economy these days to be conducting a street brawl over what's now a pretty common term. Psion will withdraw its trademark registrations for the word, it announced (Dell had some as well, which were withdrawn a few months ago), and it will hold harmless any and all third parties from ever having said the word.
Now, you begin to wonder whether "Starter Edition" is just the right phrase for Microsoft to be using for its netbook SKU of Windows 7.
Supreme Court agrees to look at business-method patents
Morning of Monday, June 1 · For the first time in over a quarter-century, the Supreme Court will examine standards for what business methods may be patented. An appeals court has previously ruled that only methods that involve actual machines or physical transformations can be patented -- a tightening of the previous "new, useful and not obvious" definition so disliked by many software firms. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and Financial Times all have good summaries. (More on this development in What's Next.)
Prime View buys E Ink (by the barrel)
Morning of Monday, June 1 · The digital-ink tech that underlies the Kindle and the Sony reader will now be the property of the Taiwanese OEM that makes the displays. Prime View International has announced that it will buy the Massachusetts-based E Ink Corporation, which which it has partnered over the years, for $215 million.
The acquisition makes Prime View the muscle in the nascent e-book market by most accounts; Reuters' coverage stated boldly that "The future of e-book readers, at least most of them on the market today, now lies with" the firm. GigaOm's looked at the market numbers, though, and cautions that that's not necessarily a good thing, or a good sign for the venture firms backing the development of various e-book readers.
Tetris turns 25, which makes you... old
June 1984 · A quarter-century ago this week, Alexey Pajitnov stayed up late and turned the well-known Pentamino Puzzle into a computer game for Electronika, a Russian computer system. The rest is brain-wave-altering history, with over 125 million copies sold (and untold millions more downloaded, in original and clone versions). The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look back.
The cultural impact is being celebrated in, among other things, dishware and tattoos and fanciful photography. And what's the legendary Alexey doing these days? Well...
Waiting on a Pre
Monday morning, too early · Tinycomb has the first known photos of a fellow allegedly waiting on line for a Palm Pre, due Saturday. The site didn't identify the guy or even the location of the store, but it's not at all out of the realm of possibility; over the weekend, Craigslist was already aflower with people offering to sit on line, people claiming they had Pre access such that they could avoid the line, and the usual incoherent bleating about wanting stuff cheap, no questions asked. On behalf of the rest of the world, *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*.
Tuesday's tech headlines
Wired
· The CIA's using tiny radio-frequency chips to guide killer drones to Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Impressive tech, but getting the chips near the right people can be very dangerous work, as the article details.
· Billion-year data storage? It's theoretically possible, according to new carbon nanotube research at Berkeley. Information density could be as high as 10^12 bits per square inch -- equivalent, the article says, to nearly 25 DVDs in the space of a postage stamp. The story is based on an article previously appearing in ScienceNOW.
· Security consultants take note: In the wake of the CardSystems Solutions breach back in 2004, their auditor, Savvis, is getting sued because they said that the company was CISP-compliant when, as the hackers proved, they weren't. (All the security folk in the house who have been "asked" to rubber-stamp compliance by a client or a boss, say AAAA!)
The Wall Street Journal
· The Anita Borg Institute points out that persons of African, Hispanic, or Native American heritage are remarkably underrepresented at tech companies. Persons of color accounted for just 6.8% of tech staffers at the seven large Silicon Valley companies surveyed. The study is available as a PDF.
· (subscription required) EMC and netApp are going to fight over who'll acquire Data Domain. EMC says it's ready to pay around $2 billion, or $30 per share, from the de-duplication specialist. netApp already announced plans last month to pay $1.5 billion (or $25 per share) for the firm. Cue hijinks.
· Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg recap their recent All Things D conference.
The New York Times
· Stephanie Clifford has a fine article on how older folk are using social networking. Are you ready for your grandmother to see what's on your Facebook page?
· Seth Schiesel covers the latest version of The Sims, launching today. It's less a review than a meditation on what we're really doing when we create our individual characters, but not a bad read for all that.
PC World
· Matt Peckham, on the other hand, does review The Sims 3 itself. He liked it so much we're not quite sure how he managed to stop playing enough to review it: "Want the year's most compulsively playable, demographically far-flung PC game? You've found it." Come to think of it, we're not sure how he managed to quit customizing his Sim long enough to play -- his description of "traits" and of the insane level of configuration granularity would be daunting if we weren't ourselves frantic to get started.
· The PCW staff has clearly been logging too many flight miles, as they have banded together to review some of the weirder tech products one sees in the Skymall catalog. In case you'd ever wondered about the USB Roll Up Drum Kit, here's your sign.
WHAT'S NEXT? Clearing the patent-guideline fog...
The Supremes take on the fog around patent awards
The Supreme Court wasn't necessarily expected to grant the a certiorari for Bilski v. Doll, a case involving a denied patent application for a method of using masses of data, specifically weather data, to predict movement and hedge bets on the commodities market. That they did agree to look at the case indicates that we may, very soon, see the definitive close of an ugly period in patent law as it applies to technology.
The patent system itself, developed for a different era, hasn't been made well-suited to the non-physical nature of code, and so we floundered. For years there was the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" metric derived from the State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group case, decided in 1998. Before State Street, it was commonly believed that one couldn't patent a simple method of doing business, just as one can't patent an idea. After State Street, chaos, an explosion of software and business-method patents, the rise of the "patent troll," and other things one shouldn't have to have seen outside a Sam Raimi movie.
Enter Bilski, which described a commodities trading method that, though requiring computers to deal with its sheer complexity, was still an abstract idea in its nature. The patent examiner rejected the application, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences backed her/him up, and the Federal Circuit upheld the ruling (PDF available here) last October -- tossing the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" concept and stating that a patent can only be granted if the claim is tied to a particular machine or if it transforms something into a different thing or different state. (Patently O wrote a terrific explanation of the ruling when it was released.) The decision blew away State Street -- as Michael Risch at ProfsBlawg so memorably put it, the ruling "effectively wiped out the last 10 years of patentable subject matter jurisprudence -- it's like Bobby stepped out of the shower on Dallas."
And now the Supremes are stepping up to the mic. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say it's not right that an industrial-era system hasn't been revamped to handle our current age, and some observers say that smaller firms with smarts but little development muscle will suffer if they can't protect their work. On the other hand, a number of tech firms -- Microsoft and IBM among them -- like the machine-or-transformation idea, and prefer, if nothing else, a sharper line between what can and cannot be patented. And then there are constituencies who'd like to see software patents all but history; for instance, some segments of the open-source movement.
Your reporter is (dammit, Jim) not a lawyer, but she certainly spends a lot of time untangling what lawyers do. Law.com this morning has a great blog post handicapping what the Court review of Bilski might accomplish. As for us non-JD'ed tech folk, what the Gang of Nine hears, sees and asks when they take this case up next term will without a doubt shape how many of us earn our living and advance the industry.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
You know the guy I'm talking about. What's-his-name. The guy with the big chin, from that movie you like that had the girl in it. Kind of rugged. Looks a little like Scott Bakula. Not William Holden.
