Congress & Silicon Valley Billionaires Separately Launch Contests To Drive Forward Innovation

from the seems-like-a-good-idea dept

There's been a growing movement among some to suggest that it would be a lot more practical and useful for students to learn how to code as a part of their education, rather than some other "mandatory" curriculum items. It looks like the House of Representatives is working on a cool little plan to at least incentivize some code learning in schools: a nationwide technology contest for students, encouraging them to develop brand new apps for mobile devices. The hope is that it will help more students not just learn to code, but to learn that they enjoy it and are interested in learning more and going into the technology field. While this may be a "small" program, it's good to see general encouragement towards having people learn to code at a young age.

On the other end of the spectrum, three of Silicon Valley's richest techies, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner, have teamed up for a much larger program a "Breakthrough Prize" for life sciences that will award 11 grants of $3 million each year for major breakthroughs in science.

These are two different approaches towards encouraging more innovation in technology and sciences -- one at the "low" end and one at the "high" end -- but it will be interesting to watch how these kinds of incentive programs develop over time. It would be great to also see more "innovation prizes" that offer up rewards for reaching specific goals, rather than the sort of random "we pick a list of winners" that the Breakthrough Prize functions under. Still, more incentives for innovation can only be a good thing.

Filed Under: app development, innovation, life sciences, mark zuckerber, mobile apps, prizes, sergey brin, yuri milner

Patent Office, Perhaps Forgetting What Year It Is, Locks Down Mobile App Development Platforms

from the is-anyone-at-the-uspto-awake? dept

I'm spending today at a conference at Santa Clara University's Law school on Solutions to the Software Patent Problem. It seems only fitting that as this is happening, I've been alerted to a completely ridiculous new patent: Appsbar has put out a press release gleefully announcing that it's been granted a patent on offering a "create your own mobile app" development platform. Stunningly, the patent in question, 8,261,231, was just applied for in February of this year. I'm at a loss as to how a competent patent examiner could possibly think that a mobile app development platform is somehow new or non-obvious in this day and age.

Hell there are entire lists of similar platforms, and those lists appear to have been created before this patent was applied for. What is the USPTO doing over there?

Patent system defenders will immediately jump in to say that a patent is really all about its claims, but go take a look at those ridiculously broad claims. Claim number 1 is the main claim here, and what it describes is nothing special at all. It's just a simple web-based platform for developing mobile apps that can run on a variety of mobile platforms.

That's not new. Companies, like the now apparently defunct Whoop were doing exactly that years ago. Just the very concept of a simple platform for app development (even cross-platform app development) isn't even close to new. Such things have been around for ages. How can someone honestly think that this is "new" and not "obvious."

And yet Appsbar (which at least does offer a product) now not only holds this patent, but the press release was put out as way of announcing its plans to enforce the patent vigorously:

“We are proud that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recognizes the innovative and proprietary set of features offered by Appsbar and we plan on strictly enforcing our patent with other companies that currently provide similar types of services,” said Scott Hirsch, founder and CEO, Appsbar. “Until Appsbar, novice tech users, small businesses, general consumers and more had to rely on an entire internal design and software team or hire a costly agency for the design, creation and publication of apps.”

First off, the second half of that quote? Not true. I remember a few years ago we developed a Techdirt app using one of these platforms. It took all of about 10 minutes of playing around on some website. As for the first half, the fact that even they admit that there are a bunch of other companies already in this space basically shows that this patent is covering an old idea that is quite obvious at this point.

So if we're looking at how to fix the patent problem, can we at least start with this simple concept: stop approving completely ridiculous patents like this one.

Filed Under: app development, patents
Companies: appsbar