Eideard

After threatening web companies for more than a decade, Michael Doyle and his patent-holding company Eolas Technologies…may be finished.

An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access to the interactive web were invalid. That means the three upcoming trials that were scheduled to rule on infringement and damages, for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have been canceled. The eight defendant companies who resisted the lawsuits won’t pay anything to Eolas or its partner, the University of California, for using the web.

Eolas maintained its patents entitled the company to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video. The chief issue in the case was whether the first computer program that allowed access to an “interactive web” was created by the little-known Chicago biologist Doyle, who runs Eolas out of Chicago. Or was it one of the web pioneers put on the stand by the defendant companies — such as Pei-Yuan Wei and his Viola browser, or Dave Raggett and his “embed” tag?

The Eolas patents were denounced for years before this week’s landmark trial, but managed to survive repeated re-exams at the United States Patent and Trade Office.

However, Thursday’s verdict is likely a setback Eolas can’t overcome. It may well be appealed, but that will be a long process, and in the meantime Eolas won’t be able to go after new targets…

Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman for JCPenney – the only primarily bricks-and-mortar retailer who continued fighting the patent, added: “JCPenney is very pleased about the jury’s decision and thank all of them for their service. We also want to thank the true inventors who traveled from all over the world to testify in this matter and tell the real story about who invented the technology…”

As for the many companies that settled with Eolas, they might be regretting that pragmatic decision in light of the verdict.

Those companies include: Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, JP Morgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises International, Rent-A-Center, Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle while this litigation was underway), and Texas Instruments.

I truly resent the context built over over time from the policy pushed by insurance companies and lawyers that says — settle with these schmucks even though their case sucks. It will cost less over time.

The cost to integrity is never worth it.

In the brutal world of online commerce, where a competing product is just a click away, retailers need all the juice they can get to close a sale.

Some exalt themselves by anonymously posting their own laudatory reviews. Now there is an even simpler approach: offering a refund to customers in exchange for a write-up.

By the time VIP Deals ended its rebate on Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars…

By last week, 310 out of 335 reviews of VIP Deals’ Vipertek brand premium slim black leather case folio cover were five stars and nearly all the rest were four stars. The acclaim seemed authentic, barring the occasional indiscretion. “I would have done 4 stars instead of 5 without the deal,” one man bluntly wrote…

But three customers said in interviews that the offer was straightforward. Searching for a protective case for their new Kindle Fire, they came upon the VIP page selling a cover for under $10 plus shipping (the official list price was $59.99). When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation “to write a product review for the Amazon community.”

“In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free,” it said…

The merchant, which seems to have no Web site and uses a mailbox drop in suburban Los Angeles as a return address, did not respond to further requests for comment. As of last week, the company (as opposed to its products) had received 4,945 reviews on Amazon for a nearly perfect 4.9 rating out of five…

Under F.T.C. rules, when there is a connection between a merchant and someone promoting its product that affects the endorsement’s credibility, it must be fully disclosed. In one case, Legacy Learning Systems, which sells music instructional tapes, paid $250,000 last March to settle charges that it had hired affiliates to recommend the videos on Web sites.

Amazon, sent a copy of the VIP letter by The New York Times, said its guidelines prohibited compensation for customer reviews. A few days later, it deleted all the reviews for the case, which itself was listed as unavailable. Then it took down the product page itself.

RTFA. Some of it is useful, some humorous. Some of it is about as ignorant as you would expect from an American newspaper. Apparently, they expect one of the largest retailers in the world – amazon.com – to maintain a staff of reviewers to read and evaluate the personal reviews of thousands of products on a daily basis.

Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe. As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.

“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. “The only explanation I had was that they must have been trenches for the war against the Bolivians.”

But these were no foxholes, at least not for any conflict waged here at the dawn of the 20th century. According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru…

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend…

While researchers piece together the Amazon’s ecological history, mystery still shrouds the origins of the geoglyphs and the people who made them. So far, 290 such earthworks have been found in Acre, along with about 70 others in Bolivia and 30 in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia.

RTFA.

Slash-and-burn deforestation is just as likely to lead to destruction of the cultures hidden by that forest. I doubt of many of those moving in to exploit the land are any more burdened with ethics about history than they are about ecology.

Two new bee species shed light on Panama’s history as a land bridge between South and Central America…

The two sister species, one from Coiba Island in Panama and one from northern Colombia, descend from a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved north over millions of years, eventually to Mexico.

The bees have a limited migration range, since worker bees must build a new nest before a virgin queen will move in to form a new colony.

“It’s really impossible for them to get across a water barrier,” said David Roubik, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and one of the researchers who discovered the bees. So it must have been a land connection — presumably the Panama isthmus — that allowed for this migration, he said…

Most researchers believe that the Panama land bridge arose about three million years ago from tectonic and volcanic activity, connecting Central America to South America. But Dr. Roubik and his colleagues believe the ancestors of the new bees originated in the Amazon about 22 million years ago and moved north into Central America about 17 million years ago.

The bees, as well as other fossil findings, indicate that there must have been an earlier land connection, Dr. Roubik said. And that connection is millions of years older than previously thought.

“There was an earlier chunk of land that linked Colombia to Costa Rica,” he said. “These are signs of a very old connection.”

I love this stuff. Someday – only in my dreams – there should be a system invented which allows cosmic viewing back in time of a planet’s evolution. Including the flora and fauna. Better than television any day.

Diagram from the patent application

Jeff Bezos is worried about phone safety. Not your safety while you’re distracted by your phone. No, he’s worried about the gadget itself.

The Amazon boss and his colleague, Vice President Gregory M. Hart, filed a patent application to protect their idea of an air bag that inflates around your mobile device if you drop it. Broadly, the duo are seeking to patent the idea of a “system and method for protecting devices from impact damage…”

The idea is to use a device’s built-in gyroscope, camera, or other sensors to determine if the device its moving quickly toward the ground or some other object. If it determines that damaging impact is imminent, it triggers a protection system to absorb the fall…

And the patent filing isn’t just attempting to cover device air bags. Bezos and Hart also envision a “reorientation element” that would turn the device so that it hits the ground on the side of the device where the air bag has been deployed. And it doesn’t have to be an air bag. The filing also contemplates using “a propulsion element, a spring, an impact absorbing structure, and a reinforced edge,” among other protection elements.

Of course, you still could buy a humungous case or just quit dropping the bloody thing. I presume the addition of the air bag also makes it float if you drop your phone into the toilet.

Apple led U.S. retail growth in the first quarter of calendar 2011, accounting for a whopping 20 percent of all sales growth by publicly traded American retailers during the three-month period.

The data comes from retail sales expert David Berman, who told USA Today that he believes Apple’s retail success is “mind-boggling.” In the quarter which ended in March, Apple’s U.S. sales saw an 80 percent increase by $4.6 billion…

During the three-month span to start 2011, Apple’s retail sales were up 32 percent, and in-store revenue from Mac sales was up 90 percent. Revenue from retail stores was $3.18 billion, a year-over-year increase of 90 percent…

While international expansion has become a priority, Apple also has big plans for its stores in the U.S. The company’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City is currently under renovation, as the company is spending $6.7 million to replace the giant 32-foot glass cube that serves as an entrance to the underground retail store.

Though I’m a recent fanboy – I switched a few years back after a quarter-century of plodding in the wonderful world of Wintel – I post this because of discussions among investors who are already panicking themselves over what they call Bubble 2.0. That fear can be laid at their own feet if they’re foolish enough to make the same mistakes at root of the previous tech bubble: like investing in companies without a profitable business plan. The watchword among the timorous is “don’t invest in tech!”

But, Apple’s story doesn’t exist in a vacuum. What company followed them into 2nd place in retail sales growth in the 1st quarter? Um, Amazon.com.

 
Oxi, or oxidado – “rust” – is the latest drug to surface in the Amazon. It is reputedly twice as powerful as crack cocaine and just a fifth of the price.

“It is terrifying,” said Alvaro Mendes, an outreach worker in Rio Branco from the state of Acre’s Harm Reduction Association, the NGO that first detected the drug. “The majority of first-time users become addicted on their first contact with the drug. Most of them go seven to 10 days without sleeping, without eating. They start to go into a process of degeneration. After months of use … they go into a state where they look like zombies, wandering … in search of pleasure.”

Described as a cheaper and deadlier successor to crack, oxi sells for about 75p a rock and is smoked in pipes improvised from cans, pieces of piping and metal taps. According to Mendes, whose support group works with slum-dwellers, prostitutes, transvestites and homeless people who are hooked on the drug, oxi can kill within a year…

Oxi surfaced in the Amazonian border region between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the 1980s, and is said to have been originally used by a small number of hippies who came to the region to experiment with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant native to the Amazon rainforest.

In the past five years, however, its use has exploded, particularly in the slums and rural communities of Acre state in the western Amazon, where it is peddled in street-corner drug dens known as bocadas. Mendes estimates there are at least 8,000 oxi users in Acre’s capital, Rio Branco, a city of 320,000 inhabitants.

But oxi is no longer just an Amazonian drug. A series of recent suspected seizures in cities such as Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro have propelled it into the national headlines. Health workers and politicians warn of a catastrophe if its spread is confirmed…

Despite growing concern, authorities admit the exact nature of oxi is a mystery. “Oxi’s existence has only come to our attention very recently,” said Elenice Frez, the police chief in Assis Brasil, a tiny town on the border between Brazil and Peru that is a notorious route for traffickers. “It is a new thing and we don’t yet have all the technical details of what oxi really is and the damage it can cause to someone who becomes addicted and uses it constantly.”

Mendes says users often suffer from paranoia, vomiting and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea. Tooth loss can happen within months. “I’ve never seen such violent scenes of drug use,” he said. “It is very depressing…”

“The effects of oxi are so devastating,” said police chief, Sergio Lopes de Souza. “When a person starts using oxi they spend days just using, without eating properly. They start to become very thin, almost skeletons, and they want to use more and more. If you do not stop you are a candidate to either die of an overdose or of other consequences of the oxi.”

Sounds like something guaranteed to make it onto the streets of the United States – any day, now. Terrific margins, I’ll bet.

Amazon.com…now sells more eBooks than books printed on paper.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years…”

“This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition,” the company said. “Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.”

The success of eBooks isn’t limited to just Amazon and its Kindle. The entire industry is pushing more digital copies now, with eBook sales tripling over the last year.

Among the recent contributors to eBook sales for the Seattle-based retail giant is the newest, cheapest version of its Kindle — Kindle with Special Offers — which sells for $114 and has risen to be the company’s best selling eReader, Bezos said.

Unlike other Kindles, Kindle with Special Offers runs advertisements and digital coupons on the eReader’s display in a strip across the bottom of the home screen or as a screen saver when the device isn’t in use.

A few sources have published a breakout by category – but, most of those require a subscription. I did see a note that gave me a chuckle: the growth of e-readers surpasses print in every category Amazon sells – except books on religion. Got to get past that Gutenberg thing, folks.

Lots of normal people would pay $23 for a book. But $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) for a scientific book about flies!?

This unthinkable sticker price for “The Making of a Fly” on Amazon.com was spotted on April 18 by Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger.

The market-blind book listing was not the result of uncontrollable demand for Peter Lawrence’s “classic work in developmental biology,” Eisen writes. Instead, it appears it was sparked by a robot price war…

Eisen watched the robot price war from April 8 to 18 and calculated that two booksellers were automatically adjusting their prices against each other.

One equation kept setting the price of the first book at 1.27059 times the price of the second book, according to Eisen’s analysis, which is posted in detail on his blog.

The other equation automatically set its price at 0.9983 times the price of the other book. So the prices of the two books escalated in tandem into the millions, with the second book always selling for slightly less than the first.

The incident highlights a little-known fact about e-commerce sites such as Amazon: Often, people don’t create and update prices; computer algorithms do.

Individual booksellers on Amazon and other sites pay third-party companies for algorithm services that automatically update prices. Some of these computer programs purportedly work very well, getting sellers up to 60% more sales because they underbid the competition automatically and repeatedly…

“It’s pretty much like the stock exchange. What you see there is the prices changing all the time — but they never change drastically. Sometimes it’s a dollar here a dollar there — maybe $10. For a book, it probably would be pennies.”

Often producing as much useless “value” as many of the computer trades made for hedge funds and mutual funds. All you can hope for as a retail investor is to focus on what you calculate is the real value of equity over time – and let the rest of the market spin wheels in artificial endless loops.

Our stock markets will not do anything about it. I doubt Amazon will do anything about the same absurdity in their own mosh pit.

Undoubtedly, the Thread and Bobbin Sewing Kit that Aunt Mildred sent from Amazon.com for Christmas will never see a stitch. The Stallion Stable Music Box might have looked pretty on the computer screen, but under the tree’s flickering lights, it is frightful. The polka-dot nightgown has never been a good idea, even with free shipping.

These gifts sent via some warehouse many miles away are not only unwanted, but also a multimillion-dollar headache: They have to be repacked, labeled, dropped off and shipped back to Amazon’s Island of Misfit Toys. Then a new present has to be packed, labeled and shipped again. Efficient, the process is not.

Amazon is working on a solution that could revolutionize digital gift buying. The online retailer has quietly patented a way for people to return gifts before they receive them, and the patent documents even mention poor Aunt Mildred. Amazon’s innovation, not ready for this Christmas season, includes an option to “Convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred,” the patent says. “For example, the user may specify such a rule because the user believes that this potential sender has different tastes than the user.” In other words, the consumer could keep an online list of lousy gift-givers whose choices would be vetted before anything ships.

Amazon’s proposal has raised the ire of the Miss Manners crowd, which thinks the scheme rather uncouth. After all, receiving an e-mail notification of a forthcoming gift – and thereby being able to check its price – is hardly the same as unwrapping the item at home.

Anna Post, great-great-granddaughter of the late etiquette author Emily Post and spokeswoman for the Emily Post Institute, said she hopes the company realizes it is risking major backlash and abandons the idea. Because of Amazon’s dominance online, she and others say they fear the idea could spread throughout the e-retailing industry, which this holiday season racked up $28 billion in gift purchases.

“This idea totally misses the spirit of gift giving,” Post said. “The point of gift giving is to allow someone else to go through that action of buying something for us. Otherwise, giving a gift just becomes another one of the world’s transactions…”

Amazon appears to be quite serious: Its patent was awarded not just to Amazon, but to its founder, Jeff Bezos…Amazon’s patent is 12 pages long, with numerous diagrams, including a “Gift Conversion Rules Wizard” that shows how a user could select rules such as, “No clothes with wool.” The document makes for curious reading, reducing the art of gift giving to the dry language of patentry…

RTFA. The patent description is about as dry – and humorous – as you might expect.

Learn a bit more about business and traffic management – once a topic near and dear to my heart – or at least my wallet.