Posts from October 2007
October 30, 2007
Taikanglu
Right down the street from my house is a cool artsy touristy cafe ridden bastion of bohemianism filled with little trendy shops and galleries that I only discovered this weekend when a Taiwanese artist friend took me there. Now I have a place to wear my beret. Obviously I didn't want to share any pictures of something you can already imagine, so I turned around and took photos of things I saw instead.
Plower Prebent
October 26, 2007
What's with the pajamas?
This whole wearing your pajamas thing out in public cracks me up. I shot this at the Tesco at around 6pm.
October 25, 2007
Man-made leather
What's the point of calling it "man-made leather" when it's just a cheap plastic notebook?
October 15, 2007
Gourmet powder?
Went to the grocer to pick up some sugar for the wife (and some beer for me) and walked over to the white powdery section filling up one wall. Wow, that's a lot of sugar I thought until I saw "wei jin" printed everywhere. It's called gourmet powder now. Now that's a clever twist to the stuff that this guy invented a hundred years ago that makes you actually need to drink gallons of the super sweet drinks here just to wash the extra delicious gourmet flavor away.
October 14, 2007
Hairy Crabs
A friend was in town today and we all went out to Yangcheng Hu in Kunshan for their famous Dazha Hairy Crabs. Chinese love these little guys. I'm not a big crab guy, but I'm always in for a road trip. When we got there Crab City loomed out of the skyline, and was pretty much a parking lot with a row of crab restaurants along the murky water of Yangcheng Lake. We picked out our restaurant, picked out some crabs, and started up with huang jiu with ginger. I kept trying not to think of how disgusting the water was or what B told me when he called during the meal that the crabs were full of the cancer causing antibiotic nitrofuran. Why mess up a perfectly decent Chinese excursion in to the country with a cross straits issue?
October 12, 2007
Flattening of Raj's World
I recently finished reading "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, which puts a nice framework around the current globalization trends and how this is changing companies and people. He spends a lot of time talking about Indians and how they are a major force in flattening the world, and how they've educated themselves on the American way of getting things done, and adapting them to their own advantage.
Then today I received from a radio personality friend of mine this hilarious American call-in radio clip with a uniquely Indian twist. It's about a guy named Raj who has educated himself on the American way of getting things done and adapted it to his own advantage, sort of.
October 11, 2007
A Look at the Fortune 100 and Patent Litigation
I found this very interesting, and wanted to share it with any IP geeks out there. An anonymous person called Troll Tracker (who it seems works in the industry in a firm somewhere) has made a ranking of Fortune 100 companies by how many times they have been sued since 2006, and whether it's by their competitors or what people call patent trolls, more specifically non-practicing patent holders without a product.
The reason why it's interesting is because of the push for patent reform bill that was passed by the House and is now going to the Senate. This is a knee jerk reaction lobbied by hi-tech, insurance, and financial companies who have recently been hit hard by patent litigation rulings, who argue that patent trolls are the cause. Pharma and chemical companies do not support the bill interestingly enough. If you read further, you get to Troll Tracker's interesting conclusion.
I of course, am firmly on the side of the individual inventor, who is screwed by this new bill, and am tired of all this bogus patent troll whining by larger companies who just want to maintain their IRR irrespective of how the law has worked well for years. It makes me even more committed to stick to my guns and "stick it to the man" when possible. Remember, these are guys who are used to getting their way. Now they think they can just reboot the legal system, and start all over again with things in their favor.
Just to add some fuel to the fire, here's an interview from Sky Radio's progam called "America's Premier Lawyers" with a top lawyer from McDermott Will & Emery who is asked to talk about patent trolls, and amusingly he essentially says flat out that they're not really an issue as the larger companies have much more patent prosecution and litigation between them. (To hear this, you have to go to this link at Sky Radio and scroll down to "Stephen J. Akerley - On Patent Trolls -Companies That Produce No Products Or Services" since their page embeds javascript meaning I can't link directly to this page)
Aerospace/Defense: 7 companies, 10 lawsuits
Automotive: 4 companies, 21 lawsuits
Chemicals/Food Processing: 9 companies, 7 lawsuits
Energy: 8 companies, 7 lawsuits
Entertainment: 2 companies, 5 lawsuits
Equipment/Machinery/Metals: 3 companies, 3 lawsuits
Financial/Banking/Securities: 13 companies, 16 lawsuits
Grocery/Drugstore: 5 companies, 19 lawsuits
Health Care: 9 companies, 13 lawsuits
High Tech/Telecom: 13 companies, 192 lawsuits
Insurance: 12 companies, 12 lawsuits
Pharma/Consumer: 4 companies, 28 lawsuits
Retail: 9 companies, 87 lawsuits
Transportation/Freight: 2 companies, 10 lawsuits
"Overall, out of the 430 patent cases filed against Fortune 100 companies, 138 were filed by competitors (32.1%), 54 were filed by Universities, individual inventors, or research organizations ("U/II/R") (12.6%), and 238 were filed by non-practicing entities, which I will call patent trolls for the sake of this study (55.3%)."
How did it break down by industry?
Pharma/Consumer: 28 lawsuits, 24 competitor, 4 U/II/R, 0 trolls (0%)
Chemicals/Food: 7 lawsuits: 6 competitor, 1 U/II/R, 0 trolls (0%)Aerospace/Defense: 10 lawsuits: 7 competitor, 1 U/II/R, 2 trolls (20%)
Retail: 87 lawsuits: 44 competitors, 17 U/I/RR, 26 trolls (29.9%)
Automotive: 21 lawsuits: 4 competitor, 6 U/II/R, 11 trolls (52.4%)
Grocery/Drugstore: 19 lawsuits: 9 competitor, 10 trolls (52.6%)
Health Care: 13 lawsuits, 5 competitors, 8 trolls (61.5%)
Equipment/Machinery/Metals: 3 lawsuits: 1 competitor, 0 U/II/R, 2 trolls (66.7%)
High Tech/Telecom: 192 lawsuits, 35 competitors, 24 U/II/R, 133 trolls (69.2%)Energy: 7 lawsuits: 1 competitor, 1 U/II/R, 5 trolls (71.4%)
Insurance: 12 lawsuits: 2 competitors, 10 trolls (83.3%)
Entertainment: 5 lawsuits: 0 competitor, 0 U/II/R, 5 trolls (100%)
Transportation/Freight: 10 lawsuit, 10 trolls (100%)
Financial/Banking/Securities: 16 lawsuits, 16 trolls (100%)
"Now does anybody wonder why Pharma and the Chemical companies are on one side of the patent reform debate, with High Tech, Insurance and Financial on the other? The two groups are seeing completely different patent litigation. The Pharma and Chemical companies are seeing lawsuits by their competitors, at the rate of about 1 per company every 3 months. High Tech, on the other hand, is seeing primarily patent trolls, and at a much faster rate. The High Tech industry is seeing far more patent litigation, too."
October 06, 2007
What's happened to the music industry?
I used to be very active in the music industry in Asia. First as a recording artist, then as a record company exec, then as a producer, then as a manager/promoter, then as a new media tech company exec. A lot of people still believe the old industry exists, especially those colleagues still getting salaries for putting out acts. Many of them have bled their companies dry, funneling funds to their own artists, or taking the standard kick back to fund their personal clubs, lounges, restaurants, production companies, and other paid-by-the-major-label who-can't-control-the-situation-but-doesn't-have-other-options perks. It's been a grab it now while you can mentality.
People always ask me what my opinions are on file sharing, CD burners, pirate CDs, etc, and I often get into long discussions about how the artist is the last to get paid, the fate of the industry, parallel imports, hardware taxes, new formats, et al...
Today during the typhoon, I stumbled across this fantastic roundtable discussion on Freakonomics.com about the future of the music industry that says everything in a much better way than I could hiting all the points I kept arguing about with stubborn (and now out of work) record company execs 10+ years ago.
It's worth a read if you wonder what's happened to the music industry.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
