New low in patent stupidty: searching for a used car with a clean title

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: The US Patent and Trademark Office has just granted a particularly ludicrous patent: Carfax now owns the idea of searching for cars that have clean titles. Somehow, this didn't qualify as "obvious."

A method of searching for used vehicles comprising:

* Using VIN numbers to look up the title status of a vehicle; * Storing the title status of the vehicle in a database; and * Providing a list of vehicles based on title status to users who search for them online.

Could this be any more obvious? Even the patent itself admits that methods of compiling title information on used cars have been around since 1991. So what's the novel aspect of this invention?

Why does stupid stuff like this matter? It matters because every click and every idea is becoming someone's property. It doesn't matter if we've been doing it forever (like querying databases!), or if it's totally obvious, someone ends up owning it. The USPTO is open for anyone who wants to claim ownership of any idea (no wonder -- their funding comes from filing fees for patents), and once those patents end up in the hands of patent trolls, it's open season on the firms and people who make great stuff.

We all pay: we pay for the legal costs of fighting patent battles, built into the price of our stuff. We pay for the technologies that never come to market because of patent fears. We pay for all the ridiculous "defensive patents" filed by startups (there's no such thing as a defensive patent: having a patent doesn't mean that the USPTO won't give the same patent to someone else, and then your "defense" consists of not running out of money to fight the patent in court), which then turn into patent-troll armaments when the startups tank.

Astroturfing companies run bogus sites like this one, where they argue for "patent reforms" that consist of not reforming anything. Sites like Patent Fairness are a good place to get the real story.

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Promising New Technology for Wi-Fi Enabled Secure Digital Memory Cards

from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection by Thomas Hawk

Wi-Fi memory cards coming to cameras | CNET News.com CNET News.com is out with an article on Eye-Fi, a company that is set to release new camera memory cards this Fall which will allow you to transfer your photos wirelessly to your PC or to online photo-sharing websites. This is exciting technology indeed. It looks like the cards will hold 2GB and sell for about $100. Even more exciting to me than Wi-Fi image transfer is the possibility to use Wi-Fi hotspots to auto geotag images prior to transfer. If by using hotspot geolocational data, Wi-Fi enabled chips could accurately geotag images, this would represent a great step forward for geotagging. It will be interesting to watch this technology unfold.

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Nothing Me.dium about its Funding

from GigaOM by Liz Gannes

Me.dium, a company making a browser add-on that relates the webpages you are browsing to those being viewed by other people concurrently using the tool, today announced it had raised $15 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount of capital to $20 million from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and Elon Musk.

Really? $15 million? I didn’t realize it had taken off to a level to attract that kind of bet. Me.dium is something I tried out for an early review and ended up uninstalling a week or so later during a plug-in purge.

I called Me.dium co-founder David Mandell this morning to ask how many users the company has. He said it had just opened up its private beta a week ago, and has 20,000 registered users total. How many were active users, he couldn’t say (though he said he would try to follow up). The users tend to be pretty geeky, he said, because the plug-in is only available for Firefox (IE is coming “in the next couple weeks”) and the sign-up process was until recently not very accessible.

The funding, Mandell said, is to be put toward infrastructure costs — “managing and making recommendations based on the real-time activity of everyone online actually uses a lot of hardware and engineering” — and also consumer marketing in the fall.

I have to say, $15 million is a pretty big bet for a company that has not proved many people will use its tools. In this latest round of post-bubble-burst web funding, I thought it was users first, money later, but here that doesn’t seem to be the case.

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China kicks Three Gorges Dam turbine generator into motion

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

The AP reports that China has flipped the switch on the first of 12 turbine generators on the right side of the ginormous Three Gorges Dam, with it apparently already pumping electricity to the national power grid after a 72-hour test run. The dam itself, as you're no doubt aware, is the world's biggest hydropower project evar, totaling up to some $22.5 billion. In addition to giving it something to brag about, China is hoping that the dam will let it cut its dependence on coal, as well as control flooding on the Yangtze river. This latest development follows the activation of 14 turbines on the left bank of the dam, which began operating in September of 2005.

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Virgin Charter Launches: Private Aviation Marketplace

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Virgin’s most recent new business, Los Angeles based Virgin Charter, launched this evening. The company was founded by CEO Scott Duffy with the hope of modernizing the booking systems for charter aircraft. Virgin’s Richard Branson got wind of the startup, gave the company three times the funding they were looking for and took a controlling interest. The company was renamed Virgin Charter.

Today, the Internet doesn’t play much of a role in chartering private aircraft. Well to do clients have their organizations contact small operators who generally control 3-5 jets. Schedules are compared and prices negotiated. The entire process takes up to five hours on average. And inefficiencies in the marketplace result in very high prices - the average U.S. flight is $18,000 round trip, and a cross continent, Los Angeles to New York flight is generally $35,000 - $65,000. Much of the price is due to “empty legs” - flights that have to come back early instead of waiting for clients, resulting in four legs flown for a round trip. The most well known Internet site for operators to list their planes is CharterX, but it leaves much to be desired.

Virgin Charter aims to change all that by putting small operators of charter aircraft together with potential buyers. In a process that is much like booking a trip on expedia, buyers can look through available aircraft, view ratings on the companies and actual planes, and choose to big on flights. Sellers respond, and flights are booked. Payment is completed via the site using a credit card, wire transfer or EFT, and Virgin Charter keeps a percentage as their fee. Following the flights, both the buyer and seller are requested to leave feedback on the other party. And Virgin Charter will work hard to fill those empty legs, which increase marginal revenue substantially for operators.

The U.S. is most of the worldwide market for private aviation, Duffy says, with about 75% of operators based here. The company is starting out only in the U.S. for now.The company has been in private beta for a few months, with 60 operators (out of 2,500 in the U.S.) By September, when they go live, they plan on having the largest 500 operators under contract.

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