The Dolcera Blog

James Watson was on Charlie Rose last night. He made some very interesting points:

• In the 21st century, psychology will finally become a science
• The genetics of psychological disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder etc. is not understood at all, and very little investment is going into these fields
• We need a fight against psychological disorders on the same scale as the fight against cancer
• A lot has been learned in the fight against cancer (from the billions spent), and a cure for cancer seems to be closer than ever

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Dolcera has worked with Mike Jaro, the Chief Patent Counsel, to create the Patent Dashboard platform that is now used by dozens of Fortune 500 companies around the world.

Here is an article on InsideCounsel describing Medtronic’s requirements and the Dolcera-powered solution.

Some quotes:

“We have a lot of different technologies that we work with, and as the amount of patents has been escalating, it became more and more difficult to make sure we had good current awareness,” says Chief Patent Counsel Michael Jaro. “We had TMI—‘too much information’—going on here.”

“We knew we needed to do something different,” Jaro says. “We had tried machine-based categorization, but it was not altogether acceptable, because we were getting overinclusive or underinclusive lists.”

“Human beings are much better at categorizing documents into meaningful topics than machines are,” he says. “This is a nice hybrid.”

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Summary: Use of both wikis and iPhones is growing within enterprises. Using wikis from iPhones is not very easy yet, though there are some promising applications/approaches in the works. A notable application is Mini Confluence for the iPhone.

Wiki usage is growing rapidly in enterprises, and the success of Wikipedia has encouraged information technology (IT) and business units to try and set up something similar to a Wikipedia within their organizations as well.

A concurrent trend is the growth of smartphone use by business users. The Blackberry devices, currently the favorites of enterprise users, have always had top-notch email capabilities, but have not focused on the web browsing experience, though that’s changing rapidly.

The Apple iPhone is the real game-changer when it comes to mobility. Now comes the news that it is making big strides in enterprise adoption. Via GigaOm, we have the following quote from the Apple COO, Tim Cook:

The phone is particularly doing well with small business and with large organizations that allow people to purchase the phones for individual use, and this is both in corporate and government settings. Specifically, to give you some numbers, almost 20% of the Fortune 100 have purchased at least 10,000 units or more and there’s now multiple corporations and government agencies who have purchased in excess of 25,000 each.

Business users will soon want to access their wikis from their iPhones. In most cases, they will want read-only access and for that, a variety of options are already available. For example, there is an iPhone app out for the the popular Confluence wiki. The app’s called Mini Confluence

and it allows for browsing, searching and commenting. Editing does not seem to be supported.

Other wikis are taking a different approach. SocialText made an announcement in 2006 for something called the Miki, which, for all practical purposes, seems like a ’skin’ or a stylesheet that makes the wiki content readable on a mobile device. Many other wikis (including Twiki) follow the same model.

Yet a third approach is that of dumping the entire wiki on to the phone, since these phones have plenty of memory. Wikipedia-iPhone, for example, lets you take the whole encyclopedia with you on your device.

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Last week, we’d reported the results from the success of Rapamycin in increasing mice longevity.

Assuming the life expectancy improvements continue at the rate of three months per year, here are some estimates of how long one can expect to live given the year of birth. The expected life expectancy in the US today, for example, is somewhere of the order of 78 years. But by the time the person born today is 78, the life expectancy would have gone well past 110. Here is some math on expected life expectancy at birth and the actual life expectancy:

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The New York Times today has an article describing how the German Mittelstand companies are coping with the downturn. One interesting concept they describe in the story is that of “time accounts.”

Employees are tapping “time accounts,” a device that Trumpf and many other companies created over the last decade to cushion the effects of a slowdown.

During the fat years, employees stored hours of overtime, for which they were not then paid, in anticipation of tougher times. Now those hours are being paid out, keeping paychecks heftier than they would be otherwise.

Why doesn’t the services world employ this strategy around the world?

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The Google Chrome OS announcement was greeted with plenty of interest by bloggers and mainstream media alike. The opinions vary, of course. The New York Times has a summary of the technology opinionators’ thoughts here.

The most interesting opinion — from all I’ve read so far — is that of John Gruber at Daring Fireball.He says that the Chrome OS sounds more like Palm’s new Web OS — a collection of HTML, CSS and Javascript with lots of APIs to access native applications.

From a software development perspective, this won’t be a very appetizing option, given that using AJAX etc. is painful enough already.

PS: Cringely has an excellent summary in the New York Times. About Google v Microsoft, he says -

…these companies will posture, spend a little money on research and development, and keep each other in check, while reporters and publications pretend that it matters.

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(Via In the Pipeline) A study reported in Nature magazine concludes that Rapamycin can increase the longevity of mice. The effect seems to be better than that of Resveratrol, which has also shown anti-aging effects in several organisms.

According to a 2002 paper in the journal Science, the longevity of women has been increasing linearly at the rate of 3 months per year. We may even see that rate accelerate within our lifetime. So get ready to live well past 100.

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Here is the explanation: For this option “Reduce to One Member per Family” we use the default order US-WO-EP-JP-GB-DE-FR for selecting the representative document, the Worksheet retains only one family member and deletes the other patents from the list. This feature gives you the basis for analysis of patents by family, eliminating the distortion that results from counting the same invention in each country. This is how we determine what document to keep. In each family, documents are sorted by country code, in order of preference: US WO EP JP GB DE FR. The first group of patents or authority (let’s say there are multiple US documents) is then sorted by date (oldest first) and then we choose the first record or oldest record.

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I have put together a short video describing what my company, Dolcera, does. It’s just three and a half minutes long… Click on this link.