Month: August 2011

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

My latest article published in India Telecom Brief on the patent wars-

 

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

Why are Apple, Microsoft and Google spending billions to acquire patents? Recently Google, maker of the largest selling mobile operating system, Android decided to acquire Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion dollars, giving it some 17000 patents with another 7500 patents pending.
Meanwhile some months ago, a consortium led by Microsoft, Apple and Research in Motion (maker of Blackberry) bought 6000 patents by Nortel Networks for 4.5 billion dollars.
These are only the defensive moves in these patent wars. In offensive moves, Microsoft has sued HTC, Barnes and Nobles, Motorola for patent infringement over them using Android operating system claiming some aspects are patented by it. Though Google does not earn any money directly from selling Android, ironically Microsoft is earning money from Android vendors including up to 5 dollars per handset from HTC.

Read the full article at http://www.indiatelecombrief.com/from-the-editors-desk/51839-patent-wars-in-mobile-software

 

Related–

A brilliant infographic  from George Kokkinidis at Design Language http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1473307539 sums all the absurdity up- where almost everyone is suing everyone. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

 

 

 

Google Plus Games : Crime City or Fun with Funzio on G+

Probably the best designed game on Google Plus right now is Funzio’s Crime City at Google Plus

Funzio which has Zynga alumni http://www.funzio.com/games/ creates a mix of the best games in social game history Farmville and Mafia Wars (with some ideas from the classic Dope Wars) to make https://plus.google.com/u/0/games/865772480172

CRIME CITY

Zynga better hurry up with Farmville on this new G+ platform and the new platform needs to sort some teeny quality issues (which I shall elaborate later)

 

New Community for Analytics- All Analytics

Here is a brand new community for analytics called allanalytics.com or http://www.allanalytics.com/

 

 

It seems to be managed by http://www.ubmtechweb.com/about/ who have a lot of other internet properties as well.One feature I disliked was the lengthy registration form which seems anarchic in these days of OAuth

Currently the community seems to be sponsored by SAS Institute, and it is basically a curated blog aggregator, like TeraData has SmartDataCollective , but much different than SAS Institutes’s affiliated sascommunity.org which is more for coders and consultants in SAS Language.

The community talks about analytics as a paradigm and way of getting business down. Have a look, notable names include Thomas C Redman and SAS’s very own Gary Cokins at http://www.allanalytics.com/bloggers.asp. The list of bloggers seems to be much lesser here, a kind of trade-off for high profile bloggers and thinkers. Worth a dekko or RSS subscription at least IMHO

 

Also see-

https://decisionstats.com/interview-thomas-c-redman-author-data-driven/

https://decisionstats.com/interview-gary-cokins-sas-institute/

Games on Google Plus

You can see the games icon quite discreetly- thus gaming is in a seperate universe of its own, not cluttering your stream ala you know who.

The only flipsyde- you may end up spending much more time here 🙂

Angry Birds-

https://plus.google.com/u/0/games/971508122032

 

Bejeweled Blitz-

https://plus.google.com/u/0/games/78439823804

 

Number of Games is too low- though I am glad Zynga is on Google Plus- but then Google is an investor in Zynga and by any standards it is a wonderful platform

Rest of the games as below-

Some future additions to Google Docs

1) More Presentation Templates

2) More HTML 5 clipart

3) Online Latex (lyx) GUI  (or a Chrome Extension)

4) Online Speech to Text dictation  (or a Chrome Extension)

5) Online Screen Capture software for audio and video editing  (or a Chrome Extension)

6) Some sharing of usage and statistics with world tech community

7) An on -site in house version for enterprise software customers (|?)

8) An easy to make HTML5 editor using just the browser

Seriously http://googledocs.blogspot.com/ needs to be challenged more.

Ah! The Internet.

On the Internet I am not brown or black or white. I am Anonymous and yet myself. I am free to choose  whatever identity I wish to choose, free to drink from whatever pools of knowledge my local government wishes to forbid. The Internet does not care about how rich or poor I may be. It has ways to track exactly where I am, but it has tools to disguise that as well. On the internet the strongest government, the richest corporation and the deepest pockets can tremble before the bits and bytes of a talented and motivated hacker working from his basement in his parents house.
There are no losers on the Internet: only winners. Except for those who seek to covet and control the uncontrollable- the human desire to seek knowledge beyond the confines of whatever cave they may find themselves borne in.
There are no countries to wage war on the Internet: there is nothing to kill and die for. The Internet allowed a million writers to write and publish without the interference of brokers and intermediaries. It allowed a billion people to download a trillion songs that were locked away in some rich man’s virtual vault. It allowed a dozen countries to overthrow their dictators without wasting a billion worth of goods and treasure.

On the Internet, everyone is equal, free and true to the own nature they choose, not the fate that is chosen by corporation, country or circumstance.
Ah! The Internet- it will set you free.

Using Two Operating Systems for RATTLE, #Rstats Data Mining GUI

Using a virtual partition is slightly better than using a dual boot system. That is because you can keep the specialized operating system (usually Linux) within the main operating system (usually Windows), browse and alternate between the two operating system just using a simple command, and can utilize the advantages of both operating system.

Also you can create project specific discs for enhanced security.

In my (limited ) Mac experience, the comparisons of each operating system are-

1) Mac-  Both robust and aesthetically designed OS, the higher price and hardware-lockin for Mac remains a disadvantage. Also many stats and analytical software just wont work on the Mac

2) Windows- It is cheaper than Mac and easier to use than Linux. Also has the most compatibility with applications (usually when not crashing)

3) Linux- The lightest and most customized software in the OS class, free to use, and has many lite versions for newbies. Not compatible with mainstream corporate IT infrastructure as of 2011.

I personally use VMWare Player for creating the virtual disk (as much more convenient than the wubi.exe method)  from http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/player/  (and downloadable from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_downloads/vmware_player/3_0)

That enables me to use Ubuntu on the alternative OS- keeping my Windows 7 for some Windows specific applications . For software like Rattle, the R data mining GUI , it helps to use two operating systems, in view of difficulties in GTK+.

Installing Rattle on Windows 7 is a major pain thanks to backward compatibility issues and version issues of GTK, but it installs on Ubuntu like a breeze- and it is very very convenient to switch between the two operating systems

Download Rattle from http://rattle.togaware.com/ and test it on the dual OS arrangement to see yourself.