Tuesday, April 13, 2004

UPDATE ON EOLAS REEXAMINATION: Search results for application number:90/006,831 Application Number: 90/006,831 Customer Number: - Filing or 371(c) Date: 10-30-2003 Status: Non-Final Action Mailed Application Type: Re-examination Status Date: 03-12-2004 Examiner Name: CALDWELL, ANDREW T Location: - Group Art Unit: 2157 Location Date: 04-01-2004 Confirmation Number: 9718 Earliest Publication No: - Attorney Docket Number: - Earliest Publication Date: - Class/ Sub-Class: 709/202 Patent Number: - First Named Inventor: 5838906, , Issue Date of Patent: - Title Of Invention: DISTRIBUTED HYPERMEDIA METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY INVOKING EXTERNAL APPLICATION PROVIDING INTERACTION AND DISPLAY OF EMBEDDED OBJECTS WITHIN A HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENT Select Search Option Continuity Data File History Number Date Contents Description 23 03-31-2004 Scanned in Central Reexam Unit 22 03-26-2004 Miscellaneous Letter Mailed 21 03-16-2004 Examiner Interview Summary Record 20 03-12-2004 Reexam Non-Final Action Mailed 19 03-03-2004 Scanned in Central Reexam Unit 18 02-26-2004 Reexam Non-Final Action Mailed 17 02-02-2004 Scanned in Central Reexam Unit 16 01-30-2004 Notice of Court Action 15 01-05-2004 Notice of Court Action 14 01-05-2004 Information Disclosure Statement Filed 13 01-20-2004 Scanned in Central Reexam Unit 12 11-17-2003 Miscellaneous Letter Mailed 11 11-04-2003 Scanned in Central Reexam Unit 10 10-30-2003 Determination -- Reexam Ordered 9 10-30-2003 Completion of Preprocessing - Released to Assigned GAU 8 11-17-2003 Correspondence Address Change 7 11-17-2003 Change in Power of Attorney (May Include Associate POA) 6 11-10-2003 Case Docketed to Examiner in GAU 4 11-25-2003 Notice of Reexam Published in Official Gazette 3 10-30-2003 Commissioner Initiated Order for Reexam 2 10-30-2003 Commissioner Initiated Order for Reexam in Preprocessing 7:36:24 PM    comment []

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I WATCHED BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE THIS EVENING.  BUSH IS AN IDIOT.  HE SHOULD DO US ALL A FAVOR AND BLOW HIS OWN BRAINS OUT.  7:27:02 PM    comment []

Yahoo Eyes Online Gaming, Text Messaging in China By CHARLES HUTZLER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 13, 2004 7:42 a.m. BEIJING --- Yahoo Inc. is looking to tap into markets for online gaming and mobile-phone messaging as the Internet company seeks to broaden its sources of revenue in China, senior executives said. Yahoo has been gearing up in the Chinese market. The U.S.-based company last year acquired a Chinese firm, 3721 Network Software Co., which specializes in software allowing Chinese-language Internet searches. And in a few months, Yahoo will offer online auctions as part of a venture with Chinese portal service Sina.com, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang said at a news conference Tuesday. The auctions, which will target small- and medium-sized businesses, will provide a new revenue stream for Yahoo in China to augment the advertising that is the company's mainstay, said Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Semel. Yahoo also hopes to attract Chinese to become paid subscribers for e-mail services, executives said. Yahoo currently has no Chinese subscribers, Mr. Semel said, but in the rest of the world the company is drawing in new business at a fast clip, adding 900,000 new subscribers in the first quarter, to the five million at the end of 2003. While moving ahead with auctions and making its search-engine technology more attractive to Chinese users, Yahoo has yet to capitalize on two big money-makers for Chinese Internet firms: online gaming and messaging services for mobile phones via the Internet. Messrs. Yang and Semel, along with Allen Kwan, Yahoo's vice president for North Asia, said the company would look for opportunities in those markets, especially gaming. But they suggested that entry to those fields would not be done hastily. "We shouldn't do everything in one day," said Mr. Semel. 7:20:03 PM    comment []

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SILICON VALLEY AND COOLEY VALLEY: This article comes from Bangalore: Bangalore: Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley? Print this article Email to a friend By G.V. Dasarathi Comment March 25, 2004 Politicians, bureaucrats and residents of Bangalore take pride in the fact that they live in what they call the Silicon Valley of the East. The city is considered high tech because of the number of software and software services companies located here. But is Bangalore really Silicon Valley? California's Silicon Valley In 1933 Frederick Terman, a professor of engineering at Stanford University, mentored two undergraduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, and was instrumental in getting them to start a company. They went on to form the company Hewlett-Packard. This was the first seed from which Silicon Valley grew. Today around 2000 electronics and information technology companies, along with numerous services and supplier firms, are clustered in the area. Silicon Valley contains the densest concentration of innovative industry that exists anywhere in the world, including companies that are leaders in fields like computers, semiconductors, lasers, fibre optics, robotics, medical instrumentation, and consumer electronics. Some products that went from dream to reality in Silicon Valley are the first video game, the ink-jet printer, the video recorder, the mouse, the personal computer, and much else that we take for granted in the information age. Here's a sample of some Silicon Valley firms, familiar to most of us because of their products: Adobe Systems (Acrobat Reader), Apple Computer (computer), Hewlett-Packard (printer), Intel (the CPU in your PC), Netscape (Internet browser), Seagate Technology (the hard disk in your PC), Yahoo (Internet portal), VeriFone (credit card terminals in shops), Symantec (Norton anti-virus software), etc. Such firms are called technology companies, because their chief resource is the technologies that they develop and own, not the real estate that they are sitting on or the equipment that they possess. Stocks in a technology company are called 'tech stocks.' Scientists and engineers working in these companies are called 'techies.' Indicative of the inventive spirit is the fact that residents of Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose and other Silicon Valley computer hotbeds, were granted 27,617 patents during the 1990s. Silicon Valley thrives on risk. Business in the Valley is about placing bets on people, ideas and inventions. If the Silicon Valley were an independent country, its economy would be about the 10th largest in the world. Bangalore or 'Coolie Valley' If you ask the president of any of Bangalore's software development companies what his company does, he'll say "We provide end-to-end solutions for Xxxx." Xxxx could be any or all of these - e-commerce, banking, telecom... What he means to say is this: 'We'll do the software coding in any of these areas for you. Just tell us what you need. We have a huge mass of engineers who know various programming languages.' These companies do not develop any technologies or products. They provide development services. They have engineers who specialise in programming languages rather than in technologies. Their chief resource is the huge mass of low-cost labour that they have taken the trouble to recruit. Ask them about patents, and you get the reply "Huh, what's that?" These companies start with zero risk. They do not bet on their ideas or inventions. A company is started after getting some contracts in hand. A typical engineer in these companies has no specialisation in any technology. He does not use his engineering knowledge. You could say his body is employed, but his brain is severely under-employed. Here is a sample of some prominent Bangalore software companies with what they specialise in: Tata Consultancy Services (end-to-end solutions), Wipro (end-to-end solutions), Infosys (end-to-end solutions), DSQ Software (end-to-end solutions), Kshema Technologies (end-to-end solutions), Ivega Technologies (end-to-end solutions), MindTree Consulting (end-to-end solutions). The comparison Silicon Valley companies are based on 'know what.' They know the market, they know the technology and they know what products to make to earn money. Coolie Valley companies are based on 'know how.' They do the software coding for other companies that have the 'know what.' If you tell them what to do, they know how and will do it for you. Silicon Valley companies invest huge sums of money on R&D. They generate new ideas and are constantly developing new ways of doing things. Coolie Valley companies have nothing called R&D. They do not generate any new ideas. A typical Silicon Valley engineer is a specialist in a particular technology, like inkjet printing or virus detection. He spends all his life working in this technology area. A typical Coolie Valley engineer is a specialist in a few languages. He is not concerned about the technology that he is working on and is willing to develop any software with the languages that he knows. A typical Silicon Valley engineer's education and work experience all relate to a technology. When he changes jobs, he changes to another company working on the same technology. A typical Coolie Valley engineer's work experience does not teach him any technology. He may be a mechanical engineer currently working for three months on banking software, and then the next three months on shoe retailing software. Silicon Valley is all about the excitement of creating things out of nothing. Companies like HP actually started in the garages of their founders. Coolie Valley does not know the meaning of creativity. Some companies are started by people who quit other companies and take some of the parent firm's software development contracts with them. Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs bet on people, ideas and inventions. Coolie Valley's entrepreneurs bet on certainties. They start a firm after getting software development contracts. Silicon Valley's firms are about technology management. Coolie valley's firms are about man management. It is extremely presumptuous to compare Bangalore with Silicon Valley, so all you Bangaloreans, please do me a favour and Don't call your city Silicon Valley ('pub city' or 'garden city', I have no problem with -- lots of pubs and lots of trees, but very little silicon). Don't call one of your new software companies a 'high technology start-up.' Don't call your engineers 'techies.' They've forgotten their engineering long ago. Don't say you've invested in 'tech stocks' ('body stocks' maybe ?). If you are from Delhi or Mumbai and encounter a Bangalorean 'techie' spouting off about his work or about his Silicon Valley, you no longer need to develop an inferiority complex. G.V. Dasarathi is director of a software products development company. This article was originally carried on the website of the Indian news site Rediff and is reproduced with permission 7:07:06 PM    comment []

THIS SAYS IT ALL: Lopsided trends in profits and wages threaten to topple growth The rise in the stock market over the last year reflects spectacular growth in profits but not a generally healthy economy nor sustainable growth.  Profits have never fared better, nor wage and salary income so poorly for this period of the business cycle.  Since the last expansion ended in the first quarter of 2001, corporate profits in the United States have expanded by 57.5%.  Meanwhile, private wage and salary income has contracted by 1.7% and total labor compensation has increased by a meager 1.5%. This imbalance is potentially bad news for the economy.  Labor compensation is more likely to be converted to demand for domestic production and fuel a sustained growth spiral.  In contrast, when income goes to corporate profits, a larger share is likely to be spent abroad (on imports or investments abroad) or to pay down debt. Corporate profits grew from $635 billion in the first quarter of 2001 to exactly $1.0 trillion in the latest quarter of available data (the fourth quarter of 2003).  In the eleven quarters after the peak of the previous eight business cycles (going back to 1948), profits rose by an average of 14% and never more than 21% (see Figure 1).  Had profits grown at the average pace of the past, they would have been $278 billion lower. While corporate profits expanded by $365 billion, private wage and salary income contracted by $73 billion (from $4,330 billion to $4,257), as shown in Figure 2.  Had private wage and salary income grown at the 6.3% pace typical of the last eight cycles, it would have grown by $272 billion and be $344 billion higher than the actual level. Other forms of labor compensation have grown, but at slower rates than in the past.  Government wage and salary income grew 8%, down from the prior average of 12%.  Likewise, all other labor costs (e.g., pension contributions, health insurance premiums, and payroll taxes) grew 10%, compared with 24% growth in earlier cycles. Total labor compensation – wage and salary income plus other labor costs – has grown just 1.5%, far below the average 8.8% gain in past business cycles.   If labor compensation had grown at the average pace of the past it would be $447 billion higher. The nation’s income has grown more slowly in this cycle than in the past – 6.7% versus 8.4%, a difference of $158 billion.  This recovery will not be on sound footing until a sustained growth in jobs and incomes kicks in. 4:17:37 AM    comment []