The Dolcera Blog

The US India IP conclave on Information technology organized at Taj Krishna, Hyderabad started on a low note with the news of death of YS Rajasekhara Reddy, Chief Minister Andhra Pradesh in helicopter crash on 3rd September 2009.
The two days event organized by CII (confederation of Indian Industry) in association with USPTO Global Intellectual Property academy soon started to blaze as reputed panelist, both Indian bureaucrats and members of US embassy started addressing the audience. Welcome address was given by Shakti Sagar, Vice Chairman CII_AP & MD ADP Inida Pvt LTd. Theme address was given by Dominic Keating, IPR Attaché where he applauded Indian IT industries for their contributions to Indian economy. He mentioned that IT business has grown from 150 million US $ in 1991 to 50 billion US$ in 2007 and is further expected to rise to 900 billion US $ by 2020. Hyderabad alone exports IT worth 163 billion US $ and has shown a growth of 323% from year 2002.

GS Ragahavender, Registrar of copyrights, Copyright office, Government of India in his key note address discussed about legislation, management and enforcement as three pillars to assure working of IP laws. Cornelis M Keur, Consul General, US Consulate admired Andhra Pradesh as third state after Maharashtra and Gujarat in terms of growth in Economy. Concluding remarks of the inaugural session was given by Dr. S Chakravarthy, IAS(R), Advisor-APTDC.

Soon after a short coffee break the conference resumed on special plenary: The digital dilemma: Intellectual property in the information age. Dr. A Garg, Director-IPR department of Information technology, Govt of India emphasized that SMEs (small and medium enterprises) has to play a leading role in innovation. Incubation parks, multiplier grand scheme, SIP-EIT (support international patent protection in electronics and IT) have been started by government to support innovation. Under SIP-EIT, a financial support of upto 50% of total patent processing cost including Attorney’s fees, patent office filling fees, examination fees, patent search cost and additional cost for entering national phase up to grant/issue will be given. The support will be in the form of reimbursement of expenses in actual to the applicant. Support will however be limited to Rs. 15 lakhs or 50% if the total incurred on filling each invention, whichever is less.

Prof M Sridhar Acharyulu, MHRD IP chair professior, NALSAR, Jennie Ness, Regional Inteleecual propery Attaché for South east Asia US embassy Bangkok and Madhukar Sinha, Prof-IPR, center for WTO studies, IIFT shared their knowledge on various dilemmas to be confront in the rapidly growing age of IT.

Third session on strategies for protection of incremental innovation and patentability of software: challenges for IT/software industry started after high-lunch. The session was mainly headed by corporate professionals enlightening on Indian, US and European laws on software patenting and copyrights. BLV Rao, VP- corporate affairs, Infotech enterprise Ltd initiated the session with a focus on incremental innovations. Dawn Jos, Pat Engg-Asia, Texas instrument was next speaker in the session. Himanshu Goswami, IP attorney, Microsoft India and Santanu Mukherjee, lead-IPR attorney, Qualcomm India discussed intrinsic details on IT and Indian patent article 3 (k), European article 52 (2), 52 (3) and US laws on software patenting.

Dominic Keating unfolded the legalities of patenting software and business methods in US. Anil Sharma, Knowledge scientist Dolcera took the stage and discussed one of the most talked about cases in US, “In re Bilski & its implications on software patents.” The presentation kindled interest amongst the audience from the word go. The talk showcased the research work that Dolcera had undertaken in collaboration with Medtronic in Bilski case and its impact on software, medical devices and pharma method patents.

The last session of the day was on open source software: who needs IP, was chaired by Venkatesh Hariharan, Director, corporate affairs, Redhat Asia-Pacific, Prof. KS Rajan, IIIT-Hyderabad and Pavan Duggal, leading advocate in the Supreme Court of India. The panelists presented their views on pros and cons of free software versus paid software in context of IP and public interest.

The conclave was a major success and big boost to the city of Hyderabad. The city being an IT hub and IPR industries and law firms already budding, conferences like such will enhance awareness amongst the professionals. Overall, the conclave was a great experience and CII - USPTO effort to increase IP awareness in India is definitely commendable.

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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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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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The Dolcera Sequence Dashboard video demo is available on YouTube now. Here is the link.

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.

Excellent post from Andrew McAfee. Key points:

One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes –  ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups—are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions.

Today, the parts of a business process that are executed with the assistance of IT are the easiest ones to control, monitor, and enforce. They’re also the easiest ones to reengineer with confidence…

The current issue of the Harvard Business Review has a fascinating study of patent sharks and their tactics. The authors make five recommendations to counter patent sharks. To that, I’d like to make a sixth: Use IP landscaping (samples on our wiki) to understand the key players and key inventions before jumping into a new field.

It seems like WalMart too has decided to go with the “tested and true” SAP platform. If this had happened 5 years ago, it would be considered a HUGE win. Today, WalMart doesn’t have quite the cachet… the aura is gone. But a big win for SAP nevertheless.