Seth Levine's VC Adventure

A tree fell in the forest - IBM's Patent Portfolio

In the category of “big news that no one seems to be talking about”, two days ago IBM announced that it was launching a new licensing program with the venture community to allow easier access to IBM’s broad patent portfolio for start-up companies. This is actually a big deal (it is to me at least, which is why I’m shocked at the lack of press on the announcement). IBM is vastly simplifying how companies can gain access to its patent portfolio. It’s catered to the venture community (the program is intended to be administered through the companies’ venture investors) and was in part put together by IBM’s venture capital advisory board. In a nutshell if you are a company that has less than $10m in revenue you can access the entire IBM patent portfolio for $25,000 for a 3 year term. Companies with above $10m in revenue sign a customized five year agreement (the information I saw suggested that the license fee would be 1%).

I’m not a big fan of our country’s IP laws - patent law is kind of like the IRS code (its overly complicated for the sake of being complicated, doesn’t do a good job of driving desired behavior, but works just enough for most people to figure its not worth the incredible pain in the ass of trying to reform it). But for the moment, at least, we’re stuck with the current system and moves like this one from IBM vastly simplify the process of navigating the patent waters. Hopefully more companies with large patent portfolios will follow suit.

The downside of technology

Brad sent me an article a few days ago that described the very unplugged world of Warren Buffett (according to the article the most technologically advanced device he has in his office is a telephone, which he uses sparingly). It’s a pretty amazing read and reminded me of another article that was sent to me recently – this time by Dave Jilk – describing how technology is changing (negatively) the way people work (too distracted, shortening our attention span, ruining our vacations, etc.).

Rather than rant about people using cell phones in restaurants or checking e-mail in meetings, I’ll relate a personal story that reminded me that it’s not the technology that’s to blame, of course, its how you use it.

I was in the car with my wife one afternoon (I was driving) and my portable e-mail device (a Danger Hiptop) was buzzing with e-mails. I must have been expecting something that I really felt I needed to see right away because I started to glance down at my hiptop. My wife turned to me and asked if it would be helpful if she took the wheel (from the passenger seat) while I checked my e-mail. Clueless that she was 1) completely making fun of me; and 2) not even the slightest bit serious, I responded that this was a GREAT IDEA and went to pick up my hiptop and relinquish the wheel to her. My get a clue radar kicked in about that time and I realized that this was not what she actually had in mind .  Point well taken. . . .

What's your million dollar idea?

Thanks to JB for pointing this out.  Pretty interesting idea.  I particularly like it from a data representation standpoint (see my post on that subject  here).

http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

Time and place

I’m annoyed at the sate of the user interface for computing these days. It’s too hard to sync or share data across applications (the ‘suite’ concept for office seems to be missing completely – little app buttons in various programs or not) and it’s both annoying and difficult to get my computer to present information to me in the way I want it. I think the root of the problem is that there is no concept of relationship in (or god forbid, between) applications. I’m constantly typing information and then retyping or cutting and pasting it somewhere else. I can’t easily clip something from one work area and put it into another. Other than folders (which are painfully annoying and take forever to sync), there’s little concept of work-group or workspace in computing today.

Here’s a great example, which both shows what a bone head I am as well as how far away from ideal we are. I missed a call this week. It was a short update call with one of the companies I work with, but still I missed it and it annoyed the heck out of me (which for me means that I’m its going to be on my mind for the next week). Here’s what happened:

When I travel, I put information in my calendar in the time zone of the place where I will be that day, rather than in my ‘home’ time zone. To me, this just made sense – no need to adjust for where I was when looking at my calendar. Since there’s no way in Outlook to easily change between time zones this seemed like the best plan (although I really like their feature that allows you to place a second set of times on the left side of the screen – very very helpful and even better, only six short clicks away! [sarcasm intended]). The problem, which is what messed me up today, is that when someone sends me an invite it shows up in my home time zone, so I need to remember to change the meeting in Outlook to the time zone where I’ll actually be. I forgot to do this today, looked at the meeting time, assumed that it was in the calendar in pacific time and missed the meeting.

Apparently somewhere between Office v1 and Office v11, no one ever figured out that time shifting is important. There’s no ability in Outlook Calendar to set different time zones for different days (let alone w/in a single day). There’s literally dozens of time zone options to choose from, but you can only display one at a time (other than the kluge I describe above) – there’s just no concept of shifting time temporarily.

I would have thought software was more well thought out than that by now . . .

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