Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience with Google; a mutual NDA was signed as seen here https://goo.gl/K9Wd1U.

- Feb 2013 created SpeakerBlast; turn multiple devices into one sync speaker via a URL

- March 2013 Samsung released the Galaxy 4 with Group Play (same concept as SpeakerBlast)

- April 2013 Google/Motorola emails/calls me asking would I sell SpeakerBlast for inclusion into the Moto X

- May 2013 Fly out from Baltimore to demo/meet with Google ATAP in the hopes of fulfilling my goal/dream of being a successful inventor. During the meeting they bait my partner and I for our secret sauce then leave the room. They come back and say time to go and lead us to the elevator and say the race is on. See ya!

As the David in this David n Goliath story I have no idea if our work was used in Chrome Audio or not. The head of that unit is run by the Google ATAP tech lead we met with.

Ive heard this is just how it is in Silicon Valley.. treat the little guy and girls like crap. Take their hard work, steal it and stomp on them. Things need to change!!!

This has been the valley formula for at least 20 years now.

First company I worked for wrote Palm software. Palm starts a conversation with us--allegedly on how they could improve their OS for developers--and starts asking fairly specific questions about our product.

Three months later they come out with a copy of it.

Worse still, before that happened Intellisync sued us for patent infringement on our own algorithm. The boss didn't bother to patent it figuring that it had prior-art all over it. That didn't stop the USPTO from issuing Intellisync a patent though. Our attorney was sure we could win, IF we felt like investing a few years and a few $M into the legal battle.

Thanks for sharing this. Sorry to hear about how you were given the run around.

It reminded me of the advice from one of Paul Graham's essays: Don't Talk to Corp Dev [1]

>Distractions are the thing you can least afford in a startup. And conversations with corp dev are the worst sort of distraction, because as well as consuming your attention they undermine your morale.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

This advice is gold. But it isn’t easy to overcome the temptation of imagining that any convo with any division of mega Corp is the lucky break you always hoped for.

>But it isn’t easy to ...

Surely that's a significant understatement. Once mega copy dev has planted that idea in one's mind it must be hard to kill off. So maybe one needs to have thought about the possibility of an unwelcome approach and have a plan to kill it.

Maybe:

1. Ask mega corp to authenticate themselves - maybe by posting a pre-agree shared secret on their corporate blog.

2. Post the approach from mega copy dev on one's own blog telling them to go away. Eg. "I received the following unwelcome approach from a large Mountain View search company - details redacted (snark) ..."

Comments?

This is the price of weakening patents. When corporations were afraid of patent holders, this happened less. The great fear was, you infringe a patent, you get shut down. That happened to Kodak when they tried to get into instant photography in violation of Polaroid's patents. Kodak was forced to exit the instant camera business within 30 days and buy back every instant camera they'd sold.

This seems to have started around 1976/1977. Polaroid wasn't exactly a tiny startup then, so they had the financial resources to defend themselves.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6TTbCT64seEC&pg=PA91&lpg=P...

"In 1977, (Polaroid) revenues reached $1 billion"

The lawsuit took 15 years to settle:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/16/business/kodak-settles-wit...

> The lawsuit took 15 years to settle

Which doesn't contradict that thing about Kodak initially having to remove their products from the market within 30 days, of course.

My main beef was that Animat's comment seemed to say (or at least imply) that back then, patents protected smaller companies against larger bullies - which seems off since Polaroid was a billion dollar business at the time. I'm sure Kodak was larger (update: I just found a figure of $5.9B revenue for 1977), but still. A yearly revenue of a billion dollars does mean you are able to defend yourself, even if it gets prolonged - as evidenced by the case dragging out for 15 years...

In what way do you think that patents have been weakened? AIA changed to first-to-file, 20 years and added PTAB but how have issued and in force patents been weakened?

- Injunctions are much harder to get since eBay v. MercExchange.[1]

- Post-grant proceedings are easy to start and delay enforcement.

[1] https://www.apks.com/en/perspectives/publications/2016/06/20...

IPR is relatively inexpensive and quick. They must be filed within 9 months and filing costs are borne by the challenger.

https://www.uspto.gov/patents-application-process/appealing-...

I can't agree that this strictly benefits the challenger. A well funded challenger was going to challenge anyways. This lowers the costs for both sides.

I'll have to read up on the EBay case.

Thats funny, after working with most major device manfacturers on digital video for 2 years (2009-2010), I submitted a similar concept to YC in late 2010 but received no reply. My core point was mobile device manufacturers desperately need a USP and this would work nicely combined with some DSP based nearby device playlist remixing and possibly a heartbeat sense and some GPS smarts. You know for shared sports like cycling and jogging and rowing and stuff. Perfect sync not required, since everyone is on earbuds. Vary the music as you go over the hill, the sun sets, tempo manipulation, auto-transitioning between tracks, etc. Would work just as well for smarter playlists while driving. Tech's all there these days, still not aware of anyone who has done it. If you make millions on it wire me 100k. :)

Is there anything like AppleScript for iOS to control apps?

Traktor for iOS lets you select songs by beats per minute and adjust their speed to synchronize multiple tracks at once. If it adjusted target music tempo with heart rate, speed, rate of altitude change etc as inputs then your product would be realized.

If you've developed ideas on what are the best ways to choose tempos why not consider contacting Native Instruments?

A possible explanation: Google was interested in your technology. They setup a meeting. After you gave them more details, they decided that your technology wasn't anything special, and they passed. No particular malice here.

Your job during an M&A meeting is to convince the other side that you have unique technology and knowledge that will be very costly to replicate. You are trying to sell your technology.

Why don't you reverse engineer the Chromecast technology and build a case for yourself that's backed by evidence instead of continually regurgitating the same story over and over again?

You should join the lawsuit or at least talk with their lawyers, I'm sure they would be very interested in talking with you.

> Things need to change!!!

How should things change? I genuinely feel for you so keep the rest of what I'm going to say at arms distance.

The way I see it, you are essentially asking people not to learn from each other. Software is not basic science where, if you discover a process or a particle, you are putting into words something outside the human brain.

Software (mathematical formulations aside) describes how the brain works. Anyone can hear a high level description of your SpeakerBlast an imagine a way to sync speakers. Their implementation might be radically different to yours but there is no way for you to stop me from imagining a solution based simply on your two sentence description of the product.

If you want to learn more about this process, there's a book by a neuroscientist, The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran, which delves into the process of mirroring and meme spreading.

>The way I see it, you are essentially asking people not to learn from each other.

I dont think he sayimg anything like that. There's a big difference between learning from each other and baiting you for your secret sauce.

1. Baiting is learning though.

2. "Baiting" is an opinion. I have no doubt OP got baited in his view but to Google, it might have been simply the asking of questions.

Maybe the questions were asked to make sure OP's technology was sufficiently different and inferior to whatever they themselves launched. If that were the case, it wouldn't be baiting. It'd be discovery.

I don't think the problem would be the learning in this scenario. The problem would be not compensating the educator.

Say I hear from you that it's possible to sync speakers and repeat this to my best engineers. Just the notion of syncing speakers reveals nothing about how it's done so neither my engineers nor I have "learnt" anything.

The engineer goes and puts together a prototype which gets enterprise buy-in and is released to the general public.

Who is the teacher in this case? I'd argue that no one taught anyone anything.

Oh, btw OP's post taught you to watch out for your intellectual property when negotiating with anyone. Will you now compensate him every time you walk into a meeting and remind yourself not to give away your trade secrets?

Completely unrelated to the issue at hand. What is the connection you are implying?

There is a context to intellectual property. If you sign an NDA to get some information and then use it to launch a new product this argument will not hold to any judge in your defense?

There is also a huge difference between 2 individuals exchanging ideas and a large corporate specifically seeking you out for your idea to steal it. It's difficult to see how anyone can conflate the two.

Did you patent your IP first?

There is no benefit in complaining here. If you actually care, this sounds like it’s your opportunity to get a lawyer for some minimal amount of money to reach out to Attia’s lawyers and see if they’re interested. It seems they are pooling past examples demonstrating similar behavior.

Of course there's a reason to complain here. I can hardly think of a better place to get the word out to technology entrepreneurs if your goal is to do so.

(Not to imply anything about the truth or falsity of the allegations. I don't know whether any are true.)

I don’t mean a general benefit, I mean for the GP. Anything he says now without legal advisement is a liability should he choose to persue legal action.

Seriously guys. You might think it’s just online venting but these law firms dig everything up.

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