haligonia.ca

The Idiocy of Patents In The Web World

I'm not a fan of patents, let's just lay that out there. Essentially you create an idea, make the patent filing, then it is approved and made public. Someone copies it and makes a few tweaks and you just gave away your secret sauce. Then you end up in a money wasting circus of defence and suing. Like Apple is with the iPhone in suing HTC and perhaps a warning shot over Google's bow over Android .

All of which is the result of lawyers gleefully rubbing their hands, shareholders groaning or holding their collective breath. I've seen patents used as a business weapon as well, successfully. A company I worked for sued it's primary competitors and in one case beat a giant into closing a division and in... Read more...

Why Google Gets The Browser With Chrome

Aside from speed. I made the full migration from FireFox over the past week, in those odd moments I wasn't otherwise swamped. Now I see what Google understands about the browser, that Microsoft has missed, FireFox lost and Apple will take it's own, misguided role with Safari on.

Internet Explorer :
Bogs itself down trying to do everything and doing nothing. Weak on "extensions" and add-ons, slower than all of them out there and working far too hard to keep you in the Microsoft ecosystem. But then I am a Mac user after all.

Safari :
Makes for a nice " clean " experience, fast enough as a browser, but not much in the way of "extensions", in fact, practically nothing. It's certainly smooth as a UI and I ... Read more...

The Choice To Turn It Off

Two things strike me about the technology revolution underway today; 1) we've never before, in the history of humanity, been able to communicate like we do today and 2) we made the choice to participate in all these media channels we have available.

Email, Facebook , Bebo, Chat, Instant Messenger, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, Twitter , Flickr , YouTube; exist because we chose to use them. Enough people made that choice that they become commonplace.

As a result, today we feel our attention incredibly divided. I call it the " 90 Second Economy " as everything happens in such small bytes of information. We, the people, made a choice to participate and to consume. My company measure this... Read more...