Performance Matters: Share Your Insights On Web & Mobile App Hosting For A Chance To Win
from the insights-from-the-community dept
Filed Under: applications, development, insight community, performance
Companies: new relic
Stories filed under: "development"
WIPO: Informal Economy Innovates In The Absence Of Intellectual Monopolies
from the well,-look-at-that dept
One of the problems with the debates around copyright and patents is that they too often assume that intellectual monopolies are necessary in order to promote innovation or even basic economic activity. But that overlooks all kinds of domains where that’s not true. In the field of technology, free software and the other open movements based on sharing are familiar examples of this kind of thing. Less well known so are the so-called “informal economies” found in many parts of the world.
To its credit, WIPO has commissioned a report on this whole area, entitled “Conceptual study on innovation, intellectual property and the Informal economy” (pdf). Here’s how it defines the informal economy (IE):
The most appropriate conceptualization of the IE is as a continuum from formal to informal, where different activities and actors occupy different points along this continuum. The transition from informal to formal status is gradual; single firms, households, and workers may carry out some activities informally and others formally at the same time.
Despite that vagueness, the informal economy is important for many countries:
Estimates suggest that over the past two decades, informal employment or employment in the IE made up more than half of non-agricultural employment in most middle- and low-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the largest estimates for the contribution of the informal sector to gross domestic product (GDP): the IE makes for nearly two-thirds of GDP including agriculture and half of non-agricultural gross value-added (GVA). It is followed by India, with around 50% of total GDP. Then come countries from the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America.
For BestNetTech readers, the most interesting part of the report will probably the chapter that concerns the use of what it calls “Mechanisms to appropriate returns from innovation in the informal economy”, including “formal appropriation” through intellectual monopolies — or, rather, their absence:
On the one hand, it can be argued that the absence of formal appropriation and the work in clusters make up the strengths of the IE’s innovation system. In this view, the innovation system in the IE largely rests on “collective learning experiences” based on low entry barriers and free flows of knowledge. The dynamics among similar enterprises in collective geospatial clusters determine rates of innovation, economic successes and the value of the cluster. Individual firms or economic units are not the key determinants of innovation and efficiency.
Appropriation efforts must also be considered in light of the social systems — specifically family structures, community networks and commercial clusters — within which the IE operates. Knowledge flows are characterized by trust, reputation, reliability, social and cultural signaling, and the willingness to pool resources and collaborate. This facilitates access to information, and critically reduces transaction costs.
Clearly, in this context, the notion of formal appropriation of ideas can be considered alien and inadequate in this IE context. As one study suggests, actors believe that formal IP based on exclusions and proprietary knowledge is not compatible with the knowledge diffusion and learning processes of the IE which are based on communities, clusters and the exchange of information.
Naturally, as a report commissioned by WIPO, the opposing viewpoint is also considered:
On the other hand, and in contradiction to the above view, it has been argued that the presence of perpetual copying and absence of appropriation mechanisms is seen as a barrier to scaling up innovative activity in the IE. Entrepreneurs are unable to develop their businesses beyond a certain stage as they lack exclusive rights to or control over their innovations. Therefore, they have fewer incentives to invest in machines or human capital (e.g., training new apprentices), and are unable to reach certain economies of scale.
Firms may also forgo the possibility to specialize in different styles and techniques, as copying is the norm. The absence of branding or certificates/labels, leading to anonymity of the sector’s products in the eyes of consumers, is said to prevent producers of good quality products from being rewarded.
Due to this systematic effect, only small incremental improvements in processes and some incremental improvements or adaptation of products are likely to be achieved. Economic growth and productivity gains in the informal sector are hence below par. The IE might also have a negative influence on the formal sector. The reasoning behind this is that informal firms that fail to comply with various economic regulations or to meet their tax obligations are able to expand and take market share away from formal firms, even when they are less efficient overall. At worst, economists are concerned that informal firms may also undermine the incentives of formal sector firms to innovate, adopt new technologies, develop their IPRs or develop brands.
There seem to be a lot of assumptions in there — for example, that those operating in the informal economy don’t pay their taxes fully. That’s conflating the black economy, where taxes are certainly dodged, with the informal economy, which is about how work is organized, not its compliance with the law.
Similarly, the assertion that companies will give up innovating just because others don’t try to patent everything they produce is contradicted by the experience of open source, which eschews patents, but has driven an accelerated pace of innovation in the world of proprietary software.
Despite these biases, the report is a valuable contribution to an area that has been largely overlooked until now. The more that WIPO and its world become cognizant of the very different nature of the informal economy, the better it will be for them — and for future debates about patents and copyright.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: development, economics, informal economy, innovation, wipo
DailyDirt: Big Data On Kid Development
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Long term studies of children are expensive, but the data collected may be invaluable — especially if wide-ranging policies are based on them. The amount of data Facebook is collecting on kids may be massive, but it’ll probably only be data mined for marketing purposes. Here are just a few examples of some kid research that could influence the way people raise their kids.
- Measuring the difference between heart rates when a baby inhales and exhales could lead to predictive indicators for whether or not that kid will overcome poverty. For “sensitive” babies, where the difference is large, a stable environment may have a greater effect on the child’s future well-being. [url]
- Preschool seems to be important for disadvantaged kids, but the benefits for middle class kids are not as clear. So flip a coin, tiger-moms, but some economists might have a good argument for government funded access to preschool for at-risk toddlers. [url]
- The 7 Up documentary began in 1964 and followed seven year old kids from different economic backgrounds as they grew up. The latest installment, 56 Up checks in on these people now as they face retirement (or not) — and presents a fascinating snapshot of society. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) BestNetTech post.
Filed Under: 7 up, babies, data, development, kids, prediction, preschool
Obama's Techies Want To Open Source Their Work, But Politicians Want To Keep It Secret
from the techies-vs.-politicians dept
Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama’s technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there’s an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds. The world class team of technologists who helped build up Obama’s campaign tech are trying to release their work as open source — but Democratic Party operatives are trying to keep it secret, believing (almost certainly incorrectly) that this gives them a proprietary advantage:
But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign’s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app. When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It’s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.
The politicians who want to keep it locked up are making a huge mistake for a very large number of reasons that people who are steeped in technology understand. Let’s list out some of the ways in which it’s stupid to keep this secret:
- It basically makes the technology useless. As one of the techies who worked on the project notes, the software “will be mothballed,” meaning that four years from now it’ll be useless. What the politicians see as keeping an advantage is really just squandering a useful framework.
- It completely misunderstands how technology advances and works. No one expects software from today to be the same four years from now. By mothballing the tech, it will mean that the next campaign will effectively be starting from scratch. Open sourcing it would allow additional work to continue on this.
- You can learn from others as well. The really shortsighted part is this insistence that open sourcing it “helps the other side.” Again, what will be used four years (or even two years) from now will be quite different as the technology advances. And having it open sourced means that lots of folks can jump in and build on the tech in the meantime. And, yes, even Republican techies might work on it, and the Dems can learn from them as well.
- Keeping it closed pisses off the techies, who will be less likely to contribute or join the team next time around.
- If the Democrats believe they have stronger technologists, then next election they should still be able to make innovations faster than their opponents.
- It quite possibly violates some open source licenses, since much of the code was built on open source software, some of which requires any additional work to also be open sourced.
- Keeping the tech secret also means that other campaigns (beyond just elections) can’t make use of the technology as well, which could actually hurt causes that the Democrats support.
In many ways this is the same old battle we’ve seen from legacy companies vs. more open upstarts for years. The legacy players think their advantage is in keeping the code secret. The upstarts know that’s wrong: the pace of innovation and the rate of change means that by being open you can better keep up and do more. Keeping it closed guarantees stagnation and falling behind.
Filed Under: democrats, development, obama, open source, politics, techies
Why Patent Injunctions Are Even Worse For Open Source
from the yes,-hard-to-believe dept
The damage that software patents cause to innovation in the computer world is a constant theme here on BestNetTech. But as a fascinating new paper by James Boyle explains, the threat to open source, particularly from patent injunctions, is even greater because of the special characteristics of that software development methodology:
If open source innovation has great social benefits in fostering competition and innovation, it also has particular vulnerabilities. First, precisely because open source development takes place in a network and allows both small and large players to participate by building on a common technology, it is particularly susceptible to attack and disruption. A proprietary monopolist fully internalizes both the costs and benefits of policing its technology and its intellectual property. Members of an open innovation network, however, do not. Individual members can be “picked off,” forced to abandon promising lines of technological development, or to pay ruinous “stacked” royalties because the costs of litigation are too burdensome for any one member of the network to bear. It is in this context that the threat of injunctions is particularly worrisome. In fast-moving technology markets, the dead stop forced by an injunction can be enough to doom a product. An entire network of innovation could be shut down by an injunction obtained against a single small participant who lacks the resources necessary to challenge the patent or defend against the injunction.
Second, most of these markets are characterized by strongly cumulative innovation. A finished product may “read on” literally thousands of potential patents.
Boyle explores these great points at length in his paper, which is well-worth reading. He also offers some suggestions for ways in which the threat of patent injunctions against open source can be reduced thanks to a ruling by the Supreme Court, eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C, and the four-part test it introduced:
the Court held that permanent injunctions in patent law are governed by the same equitable four-part test as injunctions in other areas of law.
A plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) that it has suffered an irreparable injury; (2) that remedies available at law, such as monetary damages, are inadequate to compensate for that injury; (3) that, considering the balance of hardships between the plaintiff and defendant, a remedy in equity is warranted; and (4) that the public interest would not be disserved by a permanent injunction.
Boyle writes:
this Article argues the Supreme Court’s test in eBay, properly understood, offers some constructive ways to respond to both the benefits of open source innovation and the threats posed to it by injunctions. In particular, the third and fourth factors — the “balance of hardships” component and the “public interest” component — are ideally suited to allow recognition of the unique vulnerabilities and the unique competitive and innovative value of open source production.
As open source becomes more widely deployed, so the potential damage that software patents can cause to it grows. Boyle’s paper is a timely reminder that judges need to take into account the special nature of open source when considering whether to grant patent injunctions if society as a whole is to benefit, and not just the patent holders.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: development, injunction, innovation, software patents, supreme court
HP Tablet Fire Sale Lets Us Put A Price On The Value Of A Strong Development Community
from the apple-and-orange-sales dept
A couple of weeks ago, HP made the significant decision to get out of the consumer hardware business, simultaneously shutting down their PC business and their mobile device business built around the WebOS purchase that came with Palm, Inc. When they abruptly did so, HP also announced they would be clearing out the supply chain by offering their very capable, $500+ TouchPad tablet for $100 (16GB models).
What followed was a mad rush of purchasing, with people clamoring for a cheap, but powerful tablet. This is by no means a bad device: remember that the WebOS was critically acclaimed, and this tablet had a 9.7″ screen, webcam for video chat, lightweight, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and more. These are flagship-grade tablet specs, and although we’ve learned that UX is more important than specs, good hardware is a definite plus. The biggest problem with the device was the lack of developer support for the ecosystem, so there are “thousands” of apps available according to HP, but not the ‘hundreds of thousands’ that work with the iPad.
This fire sale has provided a fairly interesting experiment in the market clearing price for non-iPad tablets. The base iPad sells readily for $500, and is often sold out. This is the high-water mark for tablets, which no other has matched. Other vendors have built competitive hardware and tried to sell it in the same price range (Motorola Xoom, Samsung, Playbook) but were rewarded with lackluster sales. Some of those devices, on paper, are arguably better than the iPad, so the most likely reason Apple can extract a premium is the power of their App developer community. An iPad can do much more than a Xoom partly because of what Apple offers, but mostly because of the ‘whole product’ which includes 400,000+ apps.
Device industry executives must stay up at night wondering how to price their tablet. The HP experiment will prove useful. Now we know that at $500, buyers walk away from the deal. But at $100, they literally rush the store like Walmart on Black Friday. This tells us that the correct price for a good tablet with weak developer support is between $100 and $500. That’s a fairly wide range. I wish HP had set the price higher, to provide a better test. Unfortunately, whenever an OEM company sets the price, what we get is their desired price, but not the market value. For that…we have eBay. Many of the buyers at HP’s firesale were just arbitrageurs looking to flip the tablet to make a quick buck, and those tablets quickly showed up on the auction site. A look at eBay today reveals a high number of TouchPads on offer, and sold for a market price of ~$250.
If the hardware alone is valued at about $250, how does iPad sell for $500? Well, we’ll have to attribute some of the premium to the “cool, sexy” mystique of Apple products. But I wouldn’t go too far with that. The Samsung Tab or HP TouchPad are both very slick looking products. A chunk of the premium has to be allocated to Apple’s excellent and easy UX. The mass market doesn’t want to geek out, they want easy products. But Honeycomb and WebOS aren’t so far behind…
No, the dominant reason that iPad can sell out at $500 (even as sales have tipped well beyond the fanboi segment) is the value brought by apps. Apple is making cake because it has the biggest developer community coding around the OS, and the value of that community is currently worth something on the order of $200-250 per tablet. It’s going to be tough for any other tablet to breach this market, where Apple already has the supply chain dialed in, the developer community, the innovation lead, and the brand. Android may progress bit by bit, but for now Tablets are Apple’s private playground. Competition will heat up if Android tablet versions of the Nook and Kindle go to market around the $325 range (making their profit on books instead). Note that the TouchPad has an estimated $318 Bill of Materials (BoM). In a few years, Moore’s Law and steady Android progress will reduce the cost and app advantage iPad now enjoys.
HP will be emptying the supply chain in a couple of weeks with the final production run of TouchPads. I wish they would bump up the price to see if the market would bear $318 direct from the manufacturer (ostensibly, a more desirable seller than eBay members), but it seems that they will keep the current fire sale price.
Filed Under: community, computers, development, price, tablets, value
Companies: apple, hp
Drug Companies Overestimate Cost Of Developing A New Drug By Merely $1.26 Billion
from the and-there-you-go dept
It’s one of those numbers that comes up every single time we talk about the pharma industry: the claim that it costs $1.3 billion for pharma companies to develop a new drug. In fact, in our recent discussion on the FDA banning drugs that have been on the market for decades, it didn’t take someone long to toss out such a number (they used $1.2 billion, but $1.3 billion is the “standard” these days — just a few years after it was $800 million). Of course, every time people point this number out, I point to the excellent research by Merrill Goozner who did a massively thorough debunking of the $800 million number seven years ago, showing that the true number was closer to $35 million.
And yet, the $800 million number has lived on, boosted by inflation to $1.3 billion.
And it’s still bunk. Gerd Leonhard points us to some new research that appears to have dug deeper into the question today, and found (once again) that the $1.3 billion claim is total bunk and the real number is more like $55 million — based on the same data used by the study used to support the $1.3 billion number. In fact, they point out that it appears the pharma industry and those seeking greater protectionism appear to be overestimating the actual cost of drug development by $1.265 billion.
Now, there are some reasonable quibbles with the lower number as well, but there’s a growing body of evidence that the real number is a lot closer to the lower one than the higher one. There are certainly some outliers, but the idea that the average cost to develop a new drug is over a billion dollars, and therefore pharma companies need special extra protection is bunk and certainly shouldn’t be cited any more.
Filed Under: costs, development, drugs, patents
US Ambassador To The UN: Protecting Patents & Copyrights More Important Than Development
from the say-what-now? dept
The US’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Betty E. King, recently gave a press conference in Geneva to talk about a variety of issues. What caught our attention, not surprisingly, was the discussion on intellectual property issues, which seemed to raise a lot more questions than it answered. Towards the end of her talk, she basically complained about WIPO, and how various developing countries are hijacking WIPO to focus on “development,” at the expense of things like patents and copyright. She says that she, and the US government, are pro development, but not if it comes at the expense of patents and copyrights.
Of course, that makes no sense. The whole point of patents and copyright is supposed to be to create incentives for development. So development should always be at the core of the discussion. It’s not, as King implies, that the two should be in conflict. Instead, if the two are in conflict, it suggests that there’s something wrong with the way our intellectual property laws are working. What’s really scary is she seems to think that more and longer patents automatically means better results:
Now long before I got here the United States has been stationing its experts around the world to help more countries be better able to apply for patents. We have our patent officers in our Embassy in Egypt as well as in other places around the world, and that has worked because we have seen an increase in the number of patent applications from a broader range of countries. That is good. However, the group in Geneva seems hell-bent on shortening these patents and creating more exceptions.
My point is if you create too many exceptions to a rule, you may as well not have the rule.
The problem is that she doesn’t seem to realize that those exceptions actually have been shown, time and time again, to improve overall development. Which is what she should be in favor of supporting. But, it quickly becomes clear that King is simply unfamiliar with the history of copyright or pretty much any of the details of how intellectual property works, when she makes the laughable claim that exceptions to copyright will mean we’ll have no more books:
While we certainly want access to books for a lot of people around the world, I think denying the authors of these books their rights, or abrogating the rights of these authors, would mean that eventually we will never have a book.
Someone should send King a study on the history of copyright in the US, including the fact that, during its developmental stage, the US refused to respect the copyrights of any foreign book… and how, despite that, Charles Dickens made a ton of money in the US by using the cheap copies of his books that were abundant to fund lavish tours of the US which were quite profitable for him. There are ways other than copyright to make money. And there are many reasons, other than copyright, to write books. It’s kind of scary when an official so high up in US government policy circles doesn’t seem to know that.
Later, in the questions, a reporter goes back to King’s statements about WIPO, and references how ACTA was done outside of WIPO. We’ve actually discussed this before, pointing out that the reason the US and a few other countries went outside of WIPO was because those countries were upset that WIPO was actually listening to countries like India and Brazil, and paying attention to the actual evidence that showed you could actually create more culture and more opportunities by pushing back on copyright expansionism. The reporter asks whether or not ACTA means that WIPO is becoming irrelevant, and she responds that basically if the “Development Agenda Group” keeps pushing that darned “development” angle over intellectual property rights, then it will “kill” WIPO:
I think the people at WIPO are aware that without successful conclusions to these longstanding negotiations the people who apply for patent protection may find ways around WIPO. That is obviously the sort of existential threat to WIPO. I think the Director General understands that very clearly. But we’re also in an era where you have emerging economies that want to have their voices heard. It is important to note that the Development Agenda Group is led by Egypt, Brazil, India and Indonesia — countries that themselves have patents to protect but also have thriving businesses in generic drugs.
…
But if we get to a system where the protections of patents are abrogated in the name of development then we certainly will kill that organization.
In other words, if these countries who are concerned about economic development don’t get in line and accept draconian US patent and copyright laws that will significantly curtail development in those countries, then the US will move to shut down the venue in which they negotiate such things, and focus instead on agreements like ACTA that shut them out. How nice.
Filed Under: betty e. king, copyright, development, patents, un, us, wipo
Apple To Face Antitrust Investigation Over Its iPhone Development Policies?
from the better-things-to-do dept
The FTC and the DOJ are reportedly holding talks over which group will launch an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s policies regarding app development for the iPhone and iPad. Apple recently made a change to the terms of its iPhone SDK, barring developers from using third-party development tools. Apple claims it did this to ensure that iPhone apps are of the highest quality, but the real reason appears to be to push developers to only develop for the iPhone, and not other rival platforms. The behavior may be as annoying as it is unsurprising, but it’s hard to see how this warrants antitrust action and government intervention. Apple isn’t restricting access to that market completely, they’re just forcing developers to use certain tools in order to participate in it. While Apple is trying to throw its weight around for its own benefit, what its doing may not necessarily be illegal — but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea either. This policy seems likely to fail in the marketplace more quickly than any resolution through government intervention could take effect.
Filed Under: antitrust, development, iphone
Companies: apple
Apple Reminds Everybody That It Controls The iPhone Ecosystem
from the from-the-do-you-have-permission-for-that?-dept. dept
Last week, when Apple announced version 4.0 of the iPhone OS, it also made a significant change to the license agreement for its iPhone developer program. One section of the agreement was changed to say that iPhone “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine” — a move that blocks developers from using cross-platform development tools and third-party development environments. So, for instance, if a developer already had an app written in .NET, they can no longer use something like Monotouch to port it to the iPhone. There has been a lot of speculation that this was just the latest step in the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe, since the latter company will soon release a Flash-to-iPhone compiler, triggering a “go screw yourself Apple” from an Adobe employee.
But this move is actually bigger than that: it’s Apple’s attempt to lock developers in solely to the iPhone. Steve Jobs claims “intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform”, and they do — from Apple’s perspective. By requiring developers to use Apple’s tools and follow its rules, the hope is that developers will follow along blindly and develop first for the iPhone, since it’s currently the best monetized channel to market for them, and then will develop for other platforms later, if at all. The issue for Apple, though, is that it’s not competing in a vacuum. Everybody and their mother are opening app stores, with other major smartphone platforms like Android and BlackBerry building theirs into viable competitors for the Apple channel. And as the App Store continues to get flooded with apps and becomes more competitive (and it becomes more difficult for developers to earn a living there), its position at the top of the pile is far from assured. At that point, heavy restrictions on developers and the closed ecosystem becomes a real burden for the company, not a benefit.
Filed Under: developers, development, iphone
Companies: adobe, apple
