Another attempt at reforming the US patent system is rumbling its way through the US legislature.  One sensible reform is to make patent claims valid only from the date the application is filed, unlikely the current lunacy (unique to the US) which makes it valid from whenever the inventor claims he or she invented it (good luck verifying that).

More controversially, the draft senate bill looks at restricting the value of compensation that can be claimed in case of infringement to the “novel and non obvious” value of a product, rather than its overall value.  This will irritate genuine patent holders and ambulance chasing patent attorneys alike, while cheering up technology firms that violate patents.  A good overview of the legislation can be found on Wikipedia.

It seems to me that tinkering around at the edges of the system is rather like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.  The US patent office needs more root and branch reform to restore its reputation following a series of fiascos in recent years.  In my limited personal experience of the US patent office the system seemed very slow (eight years to get our patent) and we dealt with with patent assessors that seemed barely able to communicate at all, never mind bringing relevant knowledge or perspective.  We got there in the end, but it was an agonising process, and a lot more painful than the UK patent equivalent (which was not exactly a racy process either at five years before being granted).

Given how important intellectual property is, it would seem important to improve the standard of patent reviewers and improve the process itself to avoid some of the crazy patents that have been granted in recent years.  The new legislation does nothing to address this core issue.

It is a big day for me today, as I have decided to move from Kalido to pursue other interests. Kalido has come a long way since I encountered some original generic modeling research at Shell in 1996 that I could see had massive potential to provide Shell with integrated information from across the world throughout business change. After success at Shell with the software, I set up a business unit to commercialize Kalido, resulting in Kalido being set up as an independent company in 2001, and, with the backing of major venture capitalists, subsequently spun off from Shell in 2003. By this time it was clear that the next phase of growth for the company was to become successful in the US market, the largest in the world, and as I am based in the UK, I handed over the reins of CEO, and assumed the role of customer champion, company spokesperson and chief strategist. There has been no shortage of projects to work on, and I have thoroughly enjoyed continuing to raise the public profile of Kalido, but now that a new CEO – Bill Hewitt – has come on board to take the company to its next level of growth, I felt it was the right time for me to move on. Bill Hewitt has exactly the right background in enterprise software to take the company to the great commercial success that it deserves.

I have immensely enjoyed building Kalido up from an idea to a company with tremendous potential, and I look forward to seeing its continuing success. It has been an exhilarating experience for me, above all because I have had the privilege of working with a group of highly talented and committed individuals. It has been an immense pleasure to see so many examples of real business benefit in customer projects that have deployed Kalido in over 100 countries. The success that the company has enjoyed so far has been based on a passion for customer success and the high quality of its people, and is something I am extremely proud to have been associated with.

I intend to initially do some independent consulting and do a little writing. This blog, of course, will live on!

For some time I have been involved with an EU project that wrapped up last week in Brussels. With the unpromising name Sun&Sup it tried to identify the issues that hold back hi-tech start-ups in Europe, and to make recommendations that could improve the current situation. The project invited periodic input from selected hi-tech start-up companies across the EU (along with various service providers to start-ups) and I represented the UK on this project.

Make no mistake that there is a problem: once you get beyond SAP, Business Objects and Sage you will be hard pressed to name a large European software company. Israel has done a better job than the combined resources of Europe, with companies like Check Point Software, Amdocs, Mercury Interactive and many others. Israel has the second highest ranking for VC investment, and even in absolute terms has the second highest number of start-ups after the USA, yet it has a population of just over 6 million. There are many reasons for Europe’s hi-tech malaise, and few easy answers. The Sun&Sup project tried to deliver some very low-key, pragmatic services in pilot form, such as a self-help network of companies wishing to expand across borders, an expert system to help companies assess their business plans, a mentoring program to provide non-executive directors for start-ups, amongst others. Its most ambitious recommendation was to lobby to replicate the US system in government procurement, which sets aside USD 100 billion of government spending for small companies. European government procurement favour large companies: 50% of economic activity in Europe is from SMEs, yet only 30% of government spending is with SMEs. Of course opening up more government business to SMEs would not be a panacea, but it would help, as the successful federal Small Business Act has demonstrated for many years.

The highlight of the wrap-up session of the project in Brussels was to hear the French Trade minister Christine Lagarde making an eloquent case for the need for change in public procurement. It was indeed refreshing to an Anglo-Saxon ear to hear a small business initiative being championed by a French minister. Ms Lagarde was an extremely impressive speaker, yet clearly faced entrenched opposition from the Commission and indeed from several member countries in trying to open up public procurement. Indeed, from the way that several of the modest Sun&Sup initiatives ended up being buried or transferred to other EU projects, it seemed clear that the lack of high-tech competitiveness in Europe is something that will remain the subject of much hand-wringing for a long time to come.

Those who are getting on a bit (like me) may recall John Cleese’s character in the 1986 movie Clockwise, who was obsessed with punctuality. I am less neurotic, but what does distress me is when conference organizers let their schedule slip due to speaker overruns. I speak regulalrly at conferences, and this is a recurring problem. At a conference in Madrid a few weeks ago they managed to be well over an hour behind schedule by the time they resumed the afternoon session, while the otherwise very useful ETRE conferences are famed for their “flexible” schedule. At a large conference this is beyond just irritating, as you scramble to find speaker tracks in different rooms, all of which may be running to varying degrees behind schedule and starting to overlap.

This poor timekeeping is depressingly normal at conferences, which makes it all the nicer when you see how it should be done. I spoke yesterday at the IDC Business Performance Conference in London, which had an ambitious looking 14 speakers and two panels squeezed into a single day. If this was ETRE they would have barely been halfway through by dinner time, yet the IDC line-up ran almost precisely to time throughout the day. It was achieved by the simple device of having a clock in front of speaker podium ticking away a countdown, so making it speakers very visibly aware of the time they had left. I recall a similar device when I spoke at a Citigroup conference in New York a couple of years ago, which also ran like clockwork.

The conference was a case study in competent organization, with good pre-event arrangements, an audio run-through for each speaker on site, and speaker evaluation forms (some conferences don’t even bother with this). The attendees actually bore a distinct resemblance to those promised, both in quality and number; recently some conference organizers seem have had all the integrity of estate agents when quoting expected numbers. The day itself featured some interesting case studies (Glaxo, Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Sun Alliance, Comet) and a line-up of other speakers who mostly managed to avoid shamelessly plugging their own products and services (mostly). Even the lunch time buffet was edible.

In terms of memorable points, it seems that the worlds of structured and unstructured data are as far part as ever based on the case studies, whatever vendor hype says to the contrary. Data volumes in general continue to rise, while the advent of RFID presents new opportunities and challenges for BI vendors. RFID generates an avalanche of raw data, and a presenter working with early projects in this area reckoned that vendors were completely unable to take advantage of RFID so far. Common themes of successful projects were around the need for active business sponsorship and involvement in projects, the need for data governance and stewardship and for iterative approaches giving incremental and early results. Specific technologies were mostly (refreshingly) in the background in most of the speeches, though the gentleman from Lucent seemed not to have got the memo to sponsor speakers about not delivering direct sales pitches. With Steve Gallagher from Accenture reckoning that BI skills were getting hard to find, even in Bangalore, it would suggest that performance management is moving up the business agenda.

Well done to Nick White of IDC for steering the day through so successfully. If only all conferences ran like this.

I write this column using some software called Blogger, which is fairly simple to use but is rather limited in some ways, so I am probably going to switch to a more flexible blog editor soon. However one cause of constant entertainment is the Blogger spell check function, which almost makes the thing worthwhile. My typing is erratic at best, so I frequently encounter the Blogger spell checker. At first I found its eccentric suggestions annoying, or even inept, but now I find that they have a certain charm of their own. It takes me back to the early days of word processing, when spell checkers were crude, and their alternative suggestions for one’s typographical errors were sometimes wildly inappropriate. Blogger’s spell checker recalls that era, as it presents sometimes surreal suggestions for what to a human eye is a pretty easy mistake to spot. For example, if you misspell:

“management” as “managemnet”

then you are presented with two alternatives. Its best guess is “mincemeat”, which is somehow appropriate in a couple of cases of managers I can recall, but not really a very likely error. Its only other attempt is “mankind”. This is not an isolated case. If you write about federated databases then it is endearing to see the typo:

“federaion” have the two alternatives: “bedroom” or “veteran”

proposed by the beastie. “Bedroom”? I would love to understand the algorithm that came up with that one. I was also impressed by:

“peformance”

Instead of the pretty obvious “performance” it rather sweetly suggests “peppermints”.

However my favorite is that if you type “Blogger” as a phrase then not only does it not recognize it. The term “blog” also sadly is a complete mystery to it, which might seem an omission given that it is intended as a spell checker for, er, blogs, or perhaps “blocs” as the spell checker so helpfully proposes. For “blogger”then it suggests the wonderfully ironic:

“blocker”

How true, how true. I would be interested to hear of your worst spell check horror, or indeed of a spell checker whose ineptness rival Blogger’s. Any offers?

Joshua Greenbaum writes a thoughtful piece on the clash of the “new media” (blogs, wikis etc) with the mainstream media. He correctly concludes that revolutions rarely go in the directions that are originally intended, and he comes down on the side of the mainstream media camp, who he predicts will subsume the newer media. I agree with his analysis. It is exciting to see new content appearing in blogs on many subjects, but if you actually want to know whether something is true you’d be advised to look at the BBC or CNN. It is positive that the barriers to entry to creating content have dropped away, but media brands will be critical in ensuring reliable, truthful content, as distinct from individuals just spouting off on their latest hobbyhorses.

In fact very few industries have been really demolished by the internet. I heard that there are 10% less people working as travel agents than a few years ago, but there aren’t too many others that spring to mind. Even that despised breed, realtors (estate agents in the UK) who essentially just control privileged information, are still very much in business. If the internet couldn’t displace them, what chance does it have with journalists?

I spent the last two weeks on holiday in China. Apart from the awesome sense of history (the Great Wall is 3,000 miles long and was completed n 220 BC) it was intriguing to get a sense of one of the world’s two great emerging economies. Shanghai was striking in this regard. In just 20 years since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms Shanghai has been transformed into the most dynamic of ultra-modern cities. There is a striking symbolism in standing on the Bund (one side of the city’s Huangpu river) amongst the fine 1920s and 1930s building built mainly by the British, and looking out across the river at the future. On the opposite bank is Pudong, a sort of Canary Wharf on steroids, a city of gleaming steel and glass. The sheer scale of Pudong is best appreciated from the Grand Hyatt hotel, the tallest hotel in the world at 1,380 feet. From either the 54th floor lobby or the 88th floor (8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture) bar you look out across at the old Shanghai, but also at the forest of skyscrapers that is Pudong. A quarter of the world’s cranes are at work here, to give some sense of scale. The desire to create an image of progress is epitomized by the Maglev train, which whisks you from the town to the international airport at a top speed of 266 mph (431 km/h). It can go at 311 mph (501 km/h), but at its slower cruising speed still does the 30 km journey in well under eight minutes. Symbols are important, and the Maglev stands in striking contrast to the shambolic infrastructure of India’s airports and trains. India does have the key advantage of widely spoken English, but China’s modern infrastructure wins hands down. One danger to Western companies is also apparent in the Maglev. Built on German technology, China now intends to build a far longer Maglev track to Hangzhou, but will build it on Chinese technology: quick learners, or intellectual property theft? Conversations I had when in China suggested that intellectual property rights are an alien notion in China, at least for now; our guide in Beijing ran a web site selling fake Rolex watch mechanisms which can be made up into expensive replica watches. He was simply bewildered at the notion that there could be anything wrong with this.

However, despite this, China is now the world’s largest exporter of hi-tech products. When you are there you can sense the sheer dynamism of the place in the air. As an example, just today Teradata announced that their new R&D centre was to be based in Beijing.

I am just off on vacation for a couple of weeks, so the blog will be quiet for a while. Normal service will be resumed on my return.

John McCormick raises a spectre more suited to Halloween than spring: the possibility that CIOs in public companies could be required by the US government to certify that the information they supply to governemnt agencies is correct. As the article points out, given that much of the information stored in corporate systems is wrong or incomplete (the article quotes a Gartner guesstimate of 25% being in this category) this could result in a few worry lines on CIO foreheads.

I think that, at least for now, this is scaremongering. The US government is aware of the considerable backlash against Sarbanes Oxley from business, and indeed some minor softening may occur in due course. The notion that they would compound this massively by asking for certification of all data in a company, something that is manifestly impossible anyway, seems far fetched. Even if the governemnt were “selective” as the article suggests, then presumably areas of interest would tend to be things which are currently carefully regulated anyway e.g. FDA documents in the pharma industry, or information in defence companies. Even the current administration would hardly try to put in regulation that would allow government agencies to go on fishing trips through corporate data, and then demand certificatoin that what they found was right.

Or would they?

As it is Valentine’s day I will depart from my usual carping about the latest creative marketing of the technology industry and observe that, according to the BBC, the escalating price of love (or at least the price of dating services) has caused on-line dating revenues to actually drop in the US. Fortunately those romantic Europeans (perhaps the Germans or Swiss, tantalizingly it is not clear) have kept their end up, with Europe’s on-line dating market growing 43% this year. It is a tribute to the power of marketing that we all feel obliged to splash out on cards, presents, overpriced flowers and squeeze into overcrowded restaurants all on the same day. However it would seem that we can blame the Romans and even their predecessors for this one rather than a modern greeting card company for this particular annual celebration.

There surely have to be a range of opportunities for technology companies here. For a start, on-line restaurant booking services like Toptable in the UK make it a little easier to find that elusive table. Perhaps someone could come up with a roses futures market that allowed one to hedge against the predictable hike in the price of roses on or around the 14th February? There are already on-line greeting card services, though good luck convincing your loved one that an on-line card is an adequate substitute for a real card.

I can’t find a single software acquisition happening today – our industry just has no romance…

Happy Valentine’s day to you all.