Dear Google you've patented my published idea...

Okay so a while ago I had an idea, that people should blog about ideas they had and tag them as 'prior art' as a way to defeat patents.  Well today I read an article about Google patenting a location specific ad service which takes in local information (the weather) to give people targeted adverts. Well back in 2008 I had an idea, where I talked about temporal information including the phrase:

The final piece in the puzzle is then time. "Here" Services would need to know not only where "here" is but they would also need to know when "here" is. I don't want to be told about a show that finished yesterday or about one that is six months away. If its 11pm tell me about the Kebab shop, if its 9am tell me where to get Asprin.

Now in this I also talk about ad-servers and some sort of federated deployment model so arguably Google's great big central implementation is 'sufficiently different' to mount as a patent but I don't think so. However you can find lots of elements out there about location specific campaign management so the only 'difference' is that Google are talking about taking into account some environmental information to direct the advert.  This is something that retailers already do... ever noticed how they have more adverts for BBQs if its going to be sunny and more adverts for brollys if its going to rain?

So what is Google's patent really?  Well its the combination of temporal based (time/location) advertising with environmental information.  Its incredible that this passes a threshold of being original and not being something that anyone with decent experience could do.

I've had other ideas at other times but not been arsed to implement them.  Feel free to be the person who actually takes on the challenge.  The real point of this post however is to make the point that yet another patent has been granted that shouldn't be.  Its not about privacy moaning its actually about business and economic growth.  

What Google are patenting is what a corner shop keeper has been doing for as long as there have been corner shops.  Looking at who is on the street, looking at the weather and then picking their window display.  Re-writing that and putting a 'e' infront of it shouldn't be the bar that has to be cleared to get a patent, patents should be for genuine ideas that move us forwards and where the creator should be rewarded not for being the first person to work for a company with enough money to file a patent on the obvious.

Integrating the cloud with an incremental backup solution

Okay its time for another "can someone please just build this" type of request. So lets get a few things straight

1) I know that there are cloud backup solutions out there
2) Yes I know that theoretically you could set up rsync to do this.

Now here is the problem

On my computers I have three basic sets of data

1) Work related information - Needs to be backed up securely and if I lose it then its a pain but anything decent will be in my email archive
2) Personally highlighted information - e.g. my flagged photos, stuff that is irreplaceable
3) Stuff I'd prefer not to lose - e.g. the rest of the photos and videos

Now effectively this could give 3 different backups but instead I'd say that actually its only two sets but they need to work together.

1) a Local disk backup
2) an occasional cloud backup

Now to people who run data centres this is all old hat and is basically the "ship the tapes off" part, but I think we can make it a little smoother. So what do we need?

1) A way to specify what is in the backup
2) A way to specify what is backed-up further into the cloud
3) A way to specify the security applied to the backup files

I'm going to deal with 3 first. Now if you have an encrypted hard-drive or password protected elements then clearly the default on the backup needs to be at least that strong, this presents a bit of an issue as it means you have to be able to decrypt to determine the deltas so in other words an approach which is linked to the security profile of the user makes sense and where its hard-drive encrypted its easier as once you are in you are in.

So now to the other pieces, I won't cover item 1 as that is pretty standard in most backup solutions but I'll go onto the second instead.

What we need is some way of specifying which elements we want sent to the cloud for offsite backup. As an example in iPhoto you might decide the flagged photos need to go to the cloud or you might decide that all photos go. These elements are automatically added to the local disk backup but would then be added, for instance daily, to a cloud backup.

Now the surprise here is why TimeMachine doesn't have this sort of facility in conjunction with MobileMe or another Apple branded cloud provision or why Microsoft's massive spend on the cloud hasn't produced something similar. It really is an obvious idea which is basically that key sections (or all if you have a fast enough connection and cash) should float from your local storage onto the cloud.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Public Cloud is temporary, virtual cloud will move compute to the information

This is another of my "prior art" patent ideas, its something I've talked about before but reading pieces around increasing data volumes its made me think about it more and more.

The big problem with public cloud is that the amount of data that needs to move around is getting exponentially higher. This doesn't mean that public cloud is wrong, it just means that we will need to look more and more about what needs to be moved. At the moment a public cloud solution consists of storage + processing and its the storage that we move around. In that I mean that we ship data to the cloud and back down again. Amazon have recognised the challenge so you can actually physically ship storage to them for large volume pieces, there is however with the continuing rise of Moore's Law and virtualisation another option.

Your organisation has lots of desktops, servers, mobiles and other pieces. The information is created and stored fairly close to these things. The data centre also will contain lots of unused capacity (it always does) so why don't we view it differently? Rather than shipping storage we ship processing? You virtually provision a grid/hadoop/etc infrastructure across your desktop/server/mobile estate as close as possible to the bulk data.

This is when it really gets cloudy as you now move compute to where it can most efficiently process information (Jini folks can now say "told you so") rather than shifting storage to cloud.

The principle here is that the amount of spare capacity in a corporate desktop environment will outstrip that in a public cloud (on a cost/power ratio) and due to its faster network connections to the raw data will be able to more efficiently process the information.

So I predict that in future people will develop technologies that deploy VMs and specific process pieces (I've talked about this with BPEL for years) to the point where it can most efficiently process information.

Public clouds are just new data centre solutions, they don't solve the data movement problem. A truly cloud based processing solution would shift the lightest thing (the processing units) to the data rather than moving the data to the processing units. The spare capacity in desktop and mobile estates could well be the target environment for these virtual clouds.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Cloud media backup store - not a patent

I'm writing this because its an idea I've written about before but I just want to make sure that if there is some idiot or idiot company out there who tries to patent this then I've already written it down in a way that is internationally accessible so arguably could be considered as prior art.

Amazon's Kindle store is a bit like this already in that the purchases that you own are held by Amazon for syncing to multiple devices from their cloud but this doesn't go far enough hence the idea... bloody obvious in my mind but that hasn't stopped people previously applying for patents.

When you buy something from either a physical or virtual channel it comes with a form of identified (e.g. DVDs and CDs have identifying information which can be used to uniquely identify its content independently of that content... its a title of the CD in other words) this identifier can then be looked up in a database to prove that you own the content whether via a physical channel purchase or a virtual store....

Now for the cloud bit....

The cloud service holds the identifiers to which you have content access rights and provides you with future access to that information and the associated content from any device which you own or have access rights to. The cloud service provides a library of approved content from the original distributor and copyright owner. The access identifiers that are purchased (by physical or virtual channel) then act as access tokens to this library and enable the information to be copied to devices that you own and streamed to those that you use.

This service therefore provides a single copy of each file rather than a file per user and maintains the access to that information and content.


Or put it simply, its like having iTunes remember what you have bought and allowing you to download it all again with the added advantage of it recognising that you have already bought a specific CD in the real world and allowing you to download the digital version because you have registered your ownership of the CD via iTunes.

This is for me an obvious addition to MobileMe for Apple and the sort of thing that Amazon, Google or Microsoft could also do. It is also the sort of thing that the record industry should do as it would provide them with a degree of control while providing obvious benefits to consumers.

I don't want to patent this and I don't think software and architectural elements should be patentable... so this is prior art.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Idea for proximity wakeup call

This is a simple idea to stop people missing their stop on a train or bus station by using a proximity detection from the phone or other mobile device of a person. Once the device is within 10 miles (configurable) of the destination it will emit a loud noise or vibrate in order to inform its owner that they should be awake and ready.

Yes I missed my stop on the train today.

Technorati Tags: Prior Art

Defeating software patents using ideas and the internet

There has been much talk in IT about the evils of software patents, most specifically the stark raving obvious patents that abound. Now looking at the US Patent definitions (the worst of the global ones) the key bit that invalidates a patent is of course Prior Art. Where Prior Art is defined as

known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country

Now to me it seems that a blog post can be classified in this day and age as the modern equivalent of a "printed publication".

So here is a simple idea, any time you have an idea, just quickly right a blog post on it. Then in later years you will never think "but I thought of that" when you see a patent application that is just an obvious thing with paperwork. Most of the dumb ideas are things that people either implemented, or thought about, and just didn't bother getting them patented because that would be silly, and didn't even publish the information because it was so obvious.

If every idea that is had is blogged about then rapidly all of the obvious ideas will have clear and documented prior art. You think its obvious that you could use a PVR to create targeted ads? Blog about it, use the technorati tag "prior art" and suddenly there is prior art to cite. By publishing it like this you are clearly saying "I'm not going to patent this idea" and you aren't going to get into some silly license argument. The reason to publish your ideas is because you don't like the current patent regime and you want to get rid of silly patents.

Now clearly I'm not a lawyer, but under the definition of the US Patent Office why wouldn't that count?

Technorati Tags: patents, Prior Art