felix0702

The bottom line: Supreme Court will never invalidate software patent.

Image this if Supreme Court does invalidate software patent.

A big sticker will be on the US map and shows, “Welcome to take all software inventions you want. All my software inventions are yours. Oh. BTW, yours in your country are still yours!” You see how this affects global competitions in software and finance industries.

However, the current patent system still has room for improvements.

1. Software innovation changes too fast. The patent length should cut to 5 years (excluding the waiting time to get the patent). I have discussed this previously, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409917

2. Patent non-practicing entities (excluding public research institutions and schools) should be banned to sue anyone. However, even so Patent Trolls still know how to get around this. This just increases difficulty, but definitely won’t stop them.

3. Claim description has many ways to interpret. This is where the money is spent in litigation. If a standard structure and a list of words are allowed to be used in the software claim description, this probably makes easier and faster to find out if a software patent is valid. But I have to admit this is a hard problem to solve.

I bet Yelp is probably thinking the same thing.

June 2, 2011 - "Google Places Now Borrowing Yelp Reviews Without Attribution In iPhone App"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2611985

Google Place and Facebook Place will be the two dominant local review sites.

If you are running a local review site, what can you do to survive?

Probably more and more people just go to Google Place and even write reviews there because Google Place will be listed on the top of the Google search results. Don’t think most local review sites can defend themselves from Google’s search power.

The value of the social search is not the result itself. It's that you have someone you know to consult on your searched subject.

For example, I will probably see my friend's opinion in a social search result. I might actually not like what he said or suggested, which he does not know that I don't like it. However, I do know I can ask him about the subject to find out his experiences or maybe get his second opinion.

That becomes powerful because it might cut the time for you to find the information you want. It's also more likely to save us from getting nowhere to find things we want.

So, relationships do help us find things quickly. And for those friends who give me wrong opinions will definitely lose my trust.

IMHO, what Google need are

1. HTML5-based cloud address book app with ease of adding new friends and separating friends into few categories on any mobile phones.

2. decentralized social graph database with no personal information attached, only IDs and relationships in the graph DB.

3. lots social plug-ins which can utilize the graph DB so that any web developers can build their own little facebook for different context.

Would you give years of hard works freely to someone who just waits to gain benefits from your hard works? Majority of the answers will be NO. Therefore, a patent system is still needed in order to protect inventor's hard works from being stolen by big sharks.

However, there are problems with the current patent system. Why Innovation is stifled. Why trolls and litigation are likes wildfires. They all come down to one root cause. The current patent system treats all patents the same and does not factor in that the speed of the innovation in each industry is different.

If we just look at the innovation speed of the software industry and the 20 years patent length, the problems mentioned earlier become obvious. Say if the software patent only last 5 or less than 10 years, the problems become mitigated. Trolls will need to justify the litigation costs vs revenue generated in less years. Many paper patents will become no value at all.

Also, because the patent length is shorten to less than 10 year, it’ll force inventor to wait until implementation or commercialization of the patent is mature before filing the patent application. Otherwise, by the time implementation or commercialization is ready, the patent will most likely due soon.

>"...when you don’t actually know what you are doing..." This is where CEO's psychology starts melting down.

Uncertainty leads to fear and fear leads to panic. It's like driving a car blindly. What a CEO needs is a light which points to a right direction, whether this direction is really right or wrong is another topic.)

This is just my own view. All uncertainties can be grouped into two categories: Vision and Culture.

Vision is like a guiding system, it tells your customers (consumer, employee, and investor) where your company is going. Culture is like an internal machine which take your company to where you want to go. When these two things are defined and guidelines are created, uncertainties become clear. It's because now you have two groups of high-level guidelines to tell whether you should handle an uncertainty seriously or not.

However, even your company have a good vision and great culture, you will still feel uncomfortable. It's the feel like driving at 200 MPH when you are used to drive at 70 MPH. Experiences can certainly help to ease this feeling when you gradually increase driving speed.

The other way is to build a data-driven company from beginning. This is like flying a jet plane which you do not visual see what's going on outside, but rather you see if you are doing well through dashboard panels. But at least a CEO must learn and know what information is important in order to have a meaningful dashboard. This is getting too long. Any feedback on my opinion is welcome.

It would be nice to know two more numbers. 1. How much profit each employee brings in? 2. How efficient the capital is spent vs generated profit?

Absolutely right!!! I would also like to add one more thing here.

That is taking great care of employee.

Someone might ask how about investors? Well, If we do these three things right, the outcome should make investors happy.

There will always be people who will post pictures publicly at different places. (similar to Youtube) There will always be people who will check out who are the crowds in different places. (similar to Youtube) With almost every phone being equipped with camera in the future, there will be even more pictures than video stored in Youtube. They probably will let you find people who have similar interests in each location. When they have a huge stored pictures and people's location preferences, I am sure they'll have ways to generate revenues. If college kids love and often use this application, they should have a chance (I think). Otherwise, ...

I'll say it's depending on what a brand's goal on FB page is. If it's about increasing brand's visibility or engaging conversations with fans, FB should do the job. However, the most important part of the marketing is to convert people to become customers, whether they are fan or not. We are currently building a website called ProsBank.com which provides an easy way for professionals to convert fans or non-fans into customers. The gap from being fans/non-fnas to becoming customers really needs to be filled.

You can probably try this free one http://www.useapollo.com/

That's a clever tactics. I'll definitely laugh out loud if I find competitor's weakness and learn what works with their own money. However, competition is dynamic. Wining one battle is not wining a war. Would love to read your other creative tactics.

Finding right target audiences is always the most important thing to do first. However, this another direction might help at the beginning. Basically drawing itself does not create a purpose. It is the purpose which drives to draw. So one approach is to ask artists to draw for charity events. I am sure collaborative drawing for charity can create very inspiring drawings and also get more attentions to your application. Wish you the best.

hahaaa. I guess I still live in a cave.

That's a good move to increase Linkedin stickiness. At the end, it's all about how relevant the information is to the users. Apparently, everyone would definitely want to know how many of his/her business connections had moved to a new venture.

Participation is the key. Clicking like on someone or on a page does not make this user a true fan. If a campaign does not create an event making people to want to participate, social marketing will not work just like any other traditional marketings.

I certainly do not think 4sq needs a data scientist to build a basic recommendation engine at this point. Instead, hiring a social psychoanalyst might help to find ways to encourage people to check-in.

One possible reason is that Google can be a potential competitor, buyer or in an event which leaking email information to Google might jeopardize company's growth.

Would it be even more successful if Groupon model adds what PayWithATweet does? When a Groupon user is happily taking a huge discount on a product, shouldn't be that hard to ask this user to take extra step to share this product information to his/her friends.