The Richter Scale^®

If you follow patent law at all you’re likely aware that Congress is looking to meddle with patent law and practices once again, theoretically to streamline the patent system and make it more “fair”. However, it’s not entirely clear how the proposed changes, which include reducing the ability to force injunctions upon infringers, stricter rules for determining willful infringement, changing to a first inventor to file precedence, and several more major modifications, will be more fair across the board.

Dennis Crouch, in his Patently-O: Patent Law Blog, yesterday summarized the three coalitions he sees supporting changes (or the lack thereof) in patent reform.

These three were large high-tech companies, other large patent holders like Big Pharma, and small inventors/start-ups. He had several comments from others, including some bloggers on his post, which Crouch summarized in another blog entry.

Some of the comments indicate that small inventors would be fine with the proposed patent reform if they simply understood it, but I question that. And this morning, I stumbled across the April 28th testimony of Nathan P. Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, which I think does a good job of explaining things from the perspective of a small inventor, in particular why injunctive relief should not be reduced, how defining a component for export to exclude software is unreasonable, and how the currently proposed reforms would actually increase the complexity and cost of patent litigation.

Mind you, Myhrvold was and is a wunderkind - entering college at 14, and graduating with a doctorate at age 23. Never mind he was the CTO of Microsoft at one point, and now runs a company which is snapping up patents left and right to build an unprecedented portfolio, presumably to license to those making inventions which infringe on that IP. No doubt his current business interest has some bearing on his stated position, but that makes him no different than Microsoft and Intel, for example, which are apparently in full support of any patent reform which might help them avoid liability and damages. From a business perspective, supporting such reform is only good business sense for large companies which frequently find themselves at the defendant’s end of patent litigation.

Stephen Nipper makes this same argument in The Invent Blog today, where he looks at patent reform from the perspective of small inventors.

One issue that seems to be rarely addressed, except by outspoken PTO critics like Greg Aharonian is patent quality. But this is something that Myhrvold does address, albeit in more calm and reasoned measures - he expressly makes the point that what the patent reform on the table does NOT do is improve patent quality, and in fact, due to greater strain on current resources, could even reduce patent quality. And what a tragedy that would be.

Links to various other positions on Patent Reform:

- NAPP (National Association of Patent Practitioners) Position
- IPO (Intellectual Property Owners Assocation) patent reform page
- Microsoft’s Call For Patent Reform

Wandering the depths of Kentia Hall at E3 last week, I came across a variety of odd products. Perhaps the most amusing while at the same time disturbing was Rude Tonz.

Rude Tonz are downloadable ring tones for one’s mobile phone. We’re all used to being serenaded by obnoxious melodies, alarms, whistles, vocals, and more when a nearby phone rings, but Rude Tonz escalate that to a whole new level.

The makers of Rude Tonz, Bonus Mobile, have come up with a descriptive tag line: “Ringtones Guaranteed to Offend” Living up to such a high standard, Rude Tonz consist of burps, fats, laughs, sneezes, gagging, and comic routines “from a wide range of stand-up comedy acts featured on the Comedy Time network”.

Looking at their web site, where you can sample these auditory delights, are ring tone names like “Dirty Fart”, “Gagging”, “Deep Burp”, and dozens more like these.

As a person who almost always keeps his phone on silent/vibrate mode, I don’t quite get the statement that folks seem to want to make with personalized ring tones. Unlike when a cell phone rings somewhere in a room or restaurant and a dozen people nearby clutch their cell phones to see if it was theirs (even if they personalized the ring, since one apparently nevers knows if the phone’s reverted back to its original ring I guess), I know when my phone rings because it can feel it on waist - or if I miss the call, at least I’m not bothering others with a song no one wants to hear.

That said, it might be fun to abscond with someone’s phone, download a Rude Tonz ring tone onto it, and return the phone without the owner knowing, and then calling them… Of course, this would only work once or twice (and cost the owner of the phone or you $1.99 for the pleasure of embarrassing them).

I’ve been on a low-carb diet now for three months, and the results are good. I’ve lost about 30 pounds, generally have quite a bit more energy, and am not having troublesome food cravings as I have had on other diets.

That’s not to say I don’t occasionally crave something sweet - I do, but there are lots of decent low carb options out there now.

Among them are peanut butter cups.

I’ve tried two different brands of peanut butter cups, with mixed results.

The brand leader in chocolate covered peanut butter cups is undoubtedly Reese’s (a division of Hershey). Their full carb peanut butter cups are great.

Not so the Reese’s 1 Gram Sugar Carb Peanut Butter Cups, which come two to a package and claim to have one gram of “sugar carbs”. (In the Atkin’s low carbohydrate diet, during the initial 2 week induction phase you should limit your carb intake to no more than 20 grams per day, and can scale up slowly from there).

I tried these both at room temperature and out of the fridge, and politely stated, they are gross. While the chocolate coating is just okay, the peanut butter filling is bland and has a disgustingly mealy texture. About the only thing with a worse mealy texture I have experienced is “uni” (raw sea urchin) or maybe an overdry nectarine.

Brand visibility only goes so far, and with this product, Reese’s has utterly failed in producing a palatable product.

I give Reese’s 1 Gram Sugar Carb Peanut Butter Cups a pitiful 1.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

The other product I tried was from Atkins Nutrionals - the Atkins Endulge Peanut Butter Cups. These come three to a package (same weight for three as for two of the Reese’s cups - 1.2 ounces or 34 grams), and claim 2 grams of carbs for all three pieces total, double the number of carbs of the Reese’s product, but still very low.

These peanut butter cups are an amazing contrast from Reese’s. The peanut butter has flavor, and texture-wise, it feels a lot closer to a full carb peanut butter cup. The chocolate coating also tastes and melts like chocolate. While it’s still a far cry from real peanut butter, it’s still a pretty decent substitute.

You can get 5-packs of the Atkins Endulge Peanut Butter Cups for around $6.00 at CVS. I’ve got a fridge full of them for after dinner treats.

I rate the Atkins Endulge Peanut Butter Cups a respectable 7.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

eBay has been interesting to explore this week as all sorts of goodies from
E3 are finding their way on-line.

E3 Show Directories and Show Daily publications are selling for $3.99 and up.

Paper bags, available at the LA Convention Center by the thousands are being offered for as little as 99 cents apiece. Xbox water bottles and buttons are going for a similar amount.

But what has really taken eBay by storm are the so-called Limited Edition Xbox 360 Face Plates. There are dozens of these being offered, and almost all have bids on them starting around $100 and going on up to well over $200.

This is what these face plates look like:

Part of the Xbox 360 design is the ability to customize the look of the box, and that’s done by replacing the face plates. To commemorate the press launch of the Xbox 360 this past Monday, Microsoft created a limited edition, 5000 piece, numbered, E3’05 face plate for the Xbox 360. Everyone who attended the press briefing on Monday the 16th of May, got a little
card which could be exchanged for a face plate upon exit. Extra cards were available to those who lost theirs.

I ultimately ended up with three of the face plates (and no, I have no intention of selling them), as a result of friends who didn’t care for theirs. But here’s the point - there are apparently quite a number of enterprising media event attendees who are looking to profit directly from their participation in the Xbox 360 launch by selling their free swag to the
highest bidder. I can only hope that none of the people doing the selling are members of the press, although based on what I saw during the week of media attendees, I have my doubts…

At the current valuations per eBay bids (and I assume they will go way up in value once the Xbox 360 ships), these face plates, the whole load of 5000 of them, could be worth at a half a million dollars or more on the open market. That’s staggering, especially for something that’s just so much vapor at the moment. On the flip side, limited editions are meant to
be special and collectible. It’s just that I would rather at least see some charity at least partially benefit from the desire of people to spend money on these face plates than seeing individuals lining just their pockets.

After the Nintendo Media Briefing last Tuesday, held above the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland, a trendy open-air mall with a great view of the HOLLYWOOD sign in the hills, I found myself rather hungry.

As I am low-carbing it, my options are occasionally limited, with sashimi (that’s sushi without the rice) usually a pretty safe bet.

So I wander into this place several floors up called Koji’s Japan, where the words Sushi and Shabu Shabu are boldly displayed next to the restaurant name.

Most folks know what Sushi is (although on Bonaire, where I live, that word, and a variant, “Shushi”, means trash, of all things), but Shabu Shabu, and its cousin, Sukiyaki, is less well known.

Modern Shabu Shabu involves boiling a meal in a pan of water, and then eating the cooked food dipped in sauce, with rice. The last time I had Shabu Shabu, it was a rather elaborate set-up for two, at the Osaka Tea Garden in Nashua, New Hampshire, about a decade ago. My wife and I greatly enjoyed it, so I was thrilled to see that Koji’s was set up for individual-size Shabu Shabu.

As you can see in the above pictures, Koji’s Shabu Shabu includes the pot of boiling water, a platter with meats (that’s that part you order), a platter of vegetables to add to the meat, two dipping sauces (a sesame based one and a soy/vinegar based one), and some additional sauce condiments (scallions, fresh minced garlic, and minced daikon radish for texture).

They also provide a bowl of edamame (boiled and salted soy bean pods) which you can eat whenever - you pop the soy beans out of the pod (the pod is too chewy to eat).

When the water starts boiling you add things to the pot, let them cook, then take them out, dip them in sauce, and eat them (I skipped the rice because it is decidedly carb laden).

I ordered the mixed meat and seafood Shabu-Shabu, with came with premium beef, chicken, salmon, and tiger shrimp.

All the meat and seafood was very fresh, as were the vegetables.

Made for a great meal. And with the hamachi (yellowtail) sashimi appetizer I had, it made for a most excellent lunch. The service was excellent too, and the prices were very reasonable - $39.00 for everything including a nice tip and some green tea.

I give Koji’s Japan at Hollywood & Highland a stunning 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale (note that I have never given a 10.0, since that implies perfection, and I doubt there is such a thing).

A few weeks ago, Barry Moltz dropped me a note asking if I would mind looking at his book You Need To Be A Little Crazy, which he has subtitled “The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Own Business”.

I presume Barry found me via the web and the Garage Entrepreneur columns I wrote some time back.

In any event, I agreed, and finally made it to the book in my reading pile.

Barry’s approach is certainly different from most other entrepreneurial texts. Whereas most books on the subject give you an action list of things that are surefire to work but rarely do in real life, You Need To Be A Little Crazy explains that failure is a natural, and expected part of being an entrepreneur, and that typically there’s not much you can do to prevent failure.

External events, like market conditions, world happenings, key client failures, and partners with different agendas, among others, impact one’s business in uncontrollable and unforeseeable ways.

Barry has filled his book with examples from his own personal experiences as an entrepreneur, along with snippets and anecdotes from other successful and failed entrepreneurs he has encountered along the way, organized into topical sections.

I found a lot of parallels in places between his tellings and my own entrepreneurial background, but there were small differences too (like never having gone bankrupt, for example).

One topic that Barry addresses as pivotal in entrepreneurialism is the concept of luck, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. While it is said that one makes his own luck, that only goes so far - things like being in the right place at the right time are too much a matter of happenstance to be able to be planned. However, there are other factors you can control when you run your own business, and Barry touches on those too, including the benefits that networking and maintaining contact with friends and past co-workers can provide.

You Need To Be A Little Crazy provides a healthy dose of reality, and is a great book to temper the feel-good but unrealistic advice most entrepreneurial books dole out.

I give You Need To Be A Little Crazy a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

The second day of the E3 Expo exhibits was a bit disappointing. All I had left to cover was Kentia hall, which, as I discovered was basically the basement of the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC).

And it was to there that lesser known companies were relegated.

The companies in the LACC Dungeon seemed to be a blend of foreign software developers (Asian and Russian for the most part), smaller distributors of video game software and hardware, companies which specialized in DVD and CD media repair (I never realized there were so many of them!), alternative game controller makers, and a few random entities thrown in between.

Among the alternative game controllers was a mouse replacement which looks like a handgun - once I figured out where all the mouse button equivalents were in the demo FPS they had set up, it was pretty easy to use, and certainly more intuitive than a mouse. Company is MonsterGecko and the product is known by the innovative name of “PistolMouse”. Just make sure you don’t pack it in your carry on if you’re planning on flying.

Speaking of fake weapons resulting in one’s arrest at TSA airport check points, THQ was giving out toy hand grenades in support of their forthcoming title, Company of Heroes.

If you pull the tab on the top it causes the hand grenade to rumble. I asked the booth staff about the wisdom of handing out toy weapons in this age of excess paranoia at airports, and they just laughed it off. In face, I was told that the THQ media rep had one in his carry on and the TSA staff, once they realized it was a toy, let him keep it. The TSA folks I’ve dealt with in the past haven’t seemed quite as lenient. So, erring in favor of safety and wanting to avoid potential incarceration, I think I’ll be leaving this little baby for the maid at the hotel to clean up.

I’ll be adding more E3 and video game related commentary here in the coming days as I work my way through my notes from the show. Of course, some of my more in depth work will show up as articles in Monday’s TechWatch.

The industry sure has gotten bigger in the nine years since my last E3 conference, or at least the show floor has gotten bigger - now in three halls, with many thousands of attendees.

While this is supposed to be a show for the “trade”, a whole lot of pure fans with no obvious trade affiliation managed to get in. And some looked a lot younger than the required 18 year minimum age posted at the entrance.

In any event, after getting through the ESA presentation in the morning, and discovering the power outage, I hit the West Hall exhibits area. The lighting was subdued due to the power outage, which did not affect power to the booths, but did affect ceiling lights. The power finally returned at 1:21pm PDT, and there was much rejoicing, as the power outage had prevented the concessions from opening, many of the upstairs meeting rooms from being usable, and impacted the press room and press registration pretty badly.

The West Hall’s star attractions were Nintendo and Sony, each featuring huge tracts of booth space, many dozens (if not hundreds) of game demo stations showing the latest titles in development. Folks got to hold the new Nintendo Gameboy Micro, as well as scope out a variety of single and multi-player game titles.

I will skip over the various Nth generation franchise game titles, the “new” war gaming titles, and all the other standard genres, as you’ll undoubtedly be able to read about them elsewhere.

The most interesting non-standard things I found were a VoIP program on the Nintendo DS, the Video Chat on the Sony PS2 using EyeToy, and a preview of EyeToy Kinetics. The latter was something I think I could finally get my wife to use as an entry to possibly finding game consoles useful for more than playing DVDs or distracting her three children (my two kids and myself). EyeToy Kinetics let’s one use the PS2 with an attached EyeToy camera as an interactive exercise device, with exercises ranging from a sedate but rewarding Tai-Chi-like session, to a heart pounding aerobic kick boxing work out. Can’t wait until it ships.

There was no sign of the PS3 or the Revolution in action anywhere, however.

In the South Hall were Microsoft, Ubisoft, THQ, EA, and another half dozen major game publishers, also with huge booth space. Microsoft even had a bridge/walkway one could use to by pass the crowds checking out upcoming Xbox titles. And, tucked away in the back of the booth were a handful of Xbox 360 demos, running on development systems. Shown were Activision’s Call of Duty 2, 2K Sport’s Top Spin 2, and Full Auto and Condemned from Sega of America. The visual quality was definitely closer to that of a higher end PC, and better than that of a current model Xbox, but it was tough to tell more than that.

I had my own chance at using the Xbox 360 development platform at the Electronic Arts booth, where I played a short segment of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (and inadvertently hung the system when I press the Xbox 360 button on the controller (if you’ve seen pictures, it’s the silver button in the middle). This button will be used for pulling up the Xbox Live! and related menus, but apparently that wasn’t implemented on the demo system I played with.

I know I saw many more interesting and cool things, but my brain and body are a bit toasty from walking around all day with far too little food and water for sustenance. Once I revisit my notes I will post more.

Until Day 2....

It’s a bright and sunny day in Los Angeles today, but a serious power outage in the West Hall of the L.A. Convention Center is causing consternation. The show floor opens at 10am.

A free breakfast for media attending an opening presentation by Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein resulted in over a thousand “media” waiting in line for a long time for not much more than a bagel. Apparently their publications don’t pay them very
much, or perhaps the emotional response to ‘free’ overwhelms reason.

Nintendo’s president just announced a whole new dimension to ‘backward compatibility’.

He says the Revolution will pretty much run ALL Nintendo content for the last 20 years, meaning NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, and Game Cube.

Smart move.