Do you ever wonder what people do in this technology driven fast pace environment? Origami. Between the Folds is showing on PBS's Independent Lens this month.

Origami: it's no longer just paper cranes. A determined group of theoretical scientists and fine artists have abandoned conventional careers to forge unlikely new lives as modern paper folders.

U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years with a number of patent filings dropping 2.3% at the same time as U.S. patents issued to inventors and businesses in foreign nations jumped 6.3% for the year. At the same time the revenue of Patent Office dropped 200 million, which means a growing backlog of filings.

Currently, there are 740,000 patents pending, with an average wait time for approval of 40 months. The Patent Office isn't even able to look at applications for three years because of the backlog. That's an eternity for tech inventions, which tend to cycle through product generations in a year or so.

If backlog of 40 months is of no concern to the cutting edge innovators, perhaps the cost of filing and later on defending the patent is worth keeping up in mind.

The application, processing and legal fees average about $15,000 per patent, but the cost to defend those patents in court after they've been granted typically runs between $3 million to $6 million...

Starting with iPhone OS version 3.0 and QuickTime X, you can send streaming audio and video over HTTP from an ordinary web server for playback on iPhone, iPod touch, or other devices, such as desktop computers. This is called HTTP Live Streaming. Because it uses HTTP, this kind of streaming is automatically supported by nearly all edge servers, media distributors, caching systems, routers, and firewalls. HTTP Live Streaming also provides for media encryption and user authentication over HTTPS, allowing publishers to protect their work.

Read the rest...

According to the article in the Business Week, the upgrade to the iPhone operating system is going to change user experience with mobile video by utilizing HTTP adaptive streaming:

"HTTP streaming enables publishers to give users a better video experience by employing adaptive streaming techniques, something other players such as Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe Systems (ADBE), Move Networks, and Swarmcast already offer (though Adobe uses a more traditional proprietary real-time streaming protocol to do so, rather than sending chunks of video over standard HTTP like the others). That means that watchers can enjoy a continuous, smooth video experience. The stream intelligently adjusts to the highest quality a viewer can receive at each moment. If the connectivity worsens, a lower-quality stream is substituted without interruption or buffering. (For a more extensive explanation about adaptive streaming, see this subscription-only piece from GigaOM Pro.)"

Clip from "The Workshop"

Rupert Murdoch is looking into ways to block Google from indexing content of the sites owned by News Corp which owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.

"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly." Read more...

How did JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs make $6.8 billion in profit last quarter? Very simple. They borrowed money from the US Govt at 0% and then bought bonds from the US Govt that paid 2-3%.

What kind of bonds are they buying? Are they investing the money in American business? "No, they are mostly buying Treasuries." So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? "Pretty much."

Read the rest

Google page turners got caught in action. This is page 471 of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code book.

Emigre has released a sans serif companion for Mrs Eaves, Mr Eaves. In my opinion it is a fantastic contribution to visual clutter along with Mrs Eaves, Apollo, Arbitrary, Backspacer, Base 9 and 12, Base Monospace, Big Cheese, Blockhead, etc.

Leading business schools including University of Cambridge Judge Business School, Fuqua School of Business, and Yale School of Management make course content available for download through iTunes University (iTunes U), part of the of the iTunes online store. Read more...

Related: iPod in the Classroom

At France's leading business school, HEC Paris, students are taking the idea of iPods in the classroom a step further, with what associate dean Valerie Gauthier describes as "technology in the pipeline that will set the standard for the use of quality education tools". As part of an exclusive partnership with Apple, the school issues students with the latest iPod Touch loaded with dedicated browsing software and podcasts. They can then preview courses from a browser menu, and put together a personalised programme to review at their leisure. "Millennials are accustomed to receiving the exact information they want, when and where they want it," says Gauthier. "The podcast of tutorials gives them all the information for review whenever they want."

Read full article on The Independent

The competition to save newspapers online heats up, with Google being the front runner.

It is hard to tell what payoff would go to the winning technology provider, says Gordon, nor is it even known who would own the content. There is also the question of whether the various pay-for-content ideas would fly with consumers. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told British broadcasting executives that charging for online content won't work except for niche and specialist markets. Consumer surveys tend to support those doubts. A Belden Interactive survey released in mid-September found that computer users who said they'd pay for news online would shell out an average of only $4.64 a month, while 47% of the group surveyed said they wouldn't pay anything.

"The Hydrozoan species Turritopsis nutricula is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again. This means that there may be no natural limit to its life span."

Related: Google map of oldest things in the world.

The research was based on 24 million speed tests done in 66 countries via speedtest.net. The test focused on download speeds, upload speeds and latency - the delay that happens as information is routed around the net. Using this measure alone, the UK was ranked 31st. Only nine countries, including Japan, Sweden and Latvia, were ready for future demands, such as watching high-definition video. The study was conducted jointly by Oxford University's Said Business School and Spain's University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics.

While this research addressed an attitude towards DRM in the independent music sector, it could be applied equally as well to the independent film distribution. Most widely used DRM systems currently are not user friendly in the terms of usability and carry very serious drawbacks such as a prohibitive cost of implementation and sub-optimal speed of viewing the encrypted content. To make matters even worst, there was not developed up to this date a system which could prevent the content to be captured by a knowledgeable hacker. It could always just be shot on a DV cam as it is done during the releases of new movies in the theaters by unsavory patrons.

It is interesting to note three major differences for the Indies in comparison to the majors’ perceived strategy of active and extensive DRM-protection. First, the smaller and more independent the label, the more sympathetic it is to consumers’ convenience and perceived rights. Second, Indies try to avoid active DRM whenever possible. But they acknowledge that this decision is up to the distributor. Third, Independent labels’ preferred DRM strategy is a passive one: watermarking. They feel that this does not limit their customers’ convenience and at the same time identifies users in case of infringement.

Again, among the labels using the portal for online distribution, there is not a single one insisting on DRM-protection, Mr. Krieger affirms. The company feels that legitimate buyers of digital music should not have less usage rights than those downloading pirated material.

Justice Department urged a federal court judge to reject a proposed settlement which would allow Google to digitally scan massive libraries of books and place them online.

"The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search and search advertising," said the Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. All three are Google's biggest rivals.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg advises businesses to post quickly. (Think Twitter.)

“This isn’t about perfect messaging,” she said. “Do it often and quickly and imperfectly and just keep changing it.”

Both she and Zuckerberg said the company became profitable last quarter, beating its goal of getting out of the red by the end of 2010. I wish there were some details on where the money coming from.

The Boston Globe has published an interesting editorial piece on the balance theory both in social networks and in the movies.

Balance Theory:

Examples of unstable social network include Mexican standoff in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and “Reservoir Dogs” with all three pointing guns at each other.

On the other hand, if you and someone else hate the same third person, but like each other, balance theory says you’re golden - all three can persist without changing their opinions.

Six Degrees of Separation:

Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram attempted to measure the number of connections separating people in Nebraska and Kansas from those around Boston, and found a typical distance of about six steps. Since then, this concept of a tightly connected world has captured the public imagination, and in math and science has spawned a large field known as social network theory.

Thinking about the ubiquitous confusion surrounding the concept of 'free'; yes, Linux is 'free' and yet it is a 38 million dollar industry, so somebody is paying for something. I think the proper analogy is this: Linux is to programming as ...the English alphabet is to anybody who writes in English. To use it properly and effectively you still have to know the basics of grammar and not just anybody can write Moby Dick.

If you stretch the analogy further, programming code, whether Linux or php is like all alphabets, meaning that code is as old as Cuneiform tablets, and so is the concept of free. This brings me to two other commonly confused points regarding the concept of 'free': free as in free speech and free, as in free beer. They are not the same, i.e. your right to free beer is not guaranteed in the Constitution.

Facebook launched it's Lite version which is supposed to be "a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates," according to the statement.

Facebook relies heavily on the applications which are slow in the Mobile environment. Optimized for Mobile will be a more correct definition.

"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution. But it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites," said Mr Murdoch.

The firm has suffered from plunging advertising revenues. New Corp's $3.4bn loss was due to $8.9bn in write-downs already announced, compared with a $5.4bn profit a year earlier. Revenues at the media giant, which owns BSkyB and 20th Century Fox, fell 7.8%. In the fourth quarter, News Corp lost $203m compared with a net profit of $1.1bn in the same period a year ago.