Day: 12 June 2014

Patent reform starts with bold pioneers

Tesla Visit 2

You got to hand it to Elon Musk CEO of Tesla motors. He just opened up the patents they had on the electric car for anyone to use.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

So it sounds pretty interesting so far… Specially the stifle progress part.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

This is pretty incredible and its amazing to see and hear, bold and  altruistic sound decisions like this from the very top.

Google along while ago talked about Patent reform but then they bought Motorola’s mobile patents and we heard nothing more till very recently.

Maybe one day we’ll see many more bold moves like Tesla’s?

America and the beautful game?

Canada vs Team USA Woman's Semi-Finals in Football

What is it with the United States of America and the “beautiful” game of Football?

I like many others always wondered why American’s just don’t get football. Interestingly on the eve of the World Cup, those freakonomics guys explores the issue with some substantial depth and some things I never really considered… Well worth a listen.

With the 2014 World Cup getting underway in Brazil, we’ve just released an episode called “Why America Doesn’t Love Soccer (Yet).”

A variety of TV networks now broadcast European club matches all year long. MLS, or Major League Soccer — the U.S. and Canadian professional league – continues to grow. Next year it will add a twentieth team,NYC-FC, or New York City Football Club, which is co-owned by the New York Yankees and Manchester City,which has won England’s Premier League two of the last three seasons.David Beckham, the sport’s biggest star of the past few generations, is trying to start another MLS team, in Miami.And indeed, if you take a look at a magazine rack this week, it’s hard to find a magazine without the World Cup on its cover. Every four years, we hear the same mantra: this time, soccer will really take root in the U.S., the way it’s taken root elsewhere in the world. But let’s be honest. It probably won’t. Many of the people who are most fanatical about the sport in the U.S. have some kind of ties to Europe or South America or Africa.

My own experience also has me puzzled.

When I first met Sarah, I went to the states in 2002 and besides the mild culture shock. The lack of news about Football was shocking. You got a major world wide event and there was little to no mainstream coverage! Heck the funny thing was, America actually made it to the quarter finals that world cup. But no one in America seemed to be aware or cared. I think I actually found out more about the American team in Wired magazine at the time.

Also during the London 2012 Olympics, there was very little interest. I think the female football may have gotten more support than the male one? Of course they then went on and won the female football competition… Will Football one day make up America’s top 5 sports? Maybe but its going to be a long while before I can see that happening. Which seem a bit of a shame…

The BBC a long while ago did some research into people and tv sport. There were a few different groups, and the group I recognized myself in was the ones who get caught up in big sporting events like the worldcup and olympics. I feel the universality of it really unites and ignites something in most people around the world. Even those who don’t normally follow sports.

Solomon DUBNER: Well, it definitely unites the whole world because it’s in some ways it’s a universal language. Almost everywhere in the world plays and follows football, in every country pretty much. And it just unites everyone somehow, it’s kind of crazy.

Making your playlists really tangible

Tangible Playlist machine

Today my Desert.FM playlist went live to the front of the site.

Wrote about Desert.FM a while ago and also talked about the CX Tangible playlist machine/project with Lancaster University.

I connected the two of them in my mind, but it wasn’t till I saw the link to the spotify playlist. Thats when it really hit me, I could easily/will be creating a physical playlist for my desert.fm playlist. Then when its done, I’ll customise the playlist band to reflect my  music choice (unlike this).

Tangible Playlist machine

The tangible machine we built supports BBC iplayer, Spotify and YouTube. (BBC Redux and others were considered and may make it in to any updates). I noticed there is a slight difference in the Spotify version and my whole list but as I imagined Spotify hasn’t got everything. However Youtube can nicely fill in the rest, just as the guys on Desert.FM have done. For example Time to get ill by 4 Hero, which doesn’t seem to be on Spotify?

I can see a unique little collaboration coming from this, how great would that be? Imagine it, you create your list on desert.fm, it prints a nice band out for you and creates adds NFC tags to it. You then get it in the mail. Or even better you create it for someone else, you design the band and they send it out to a contact. Just need a nice way to mass produce the machines 🙂

Tangible Playlist machine

I can’t wait to explore video playlists and share some of the great ideas we’ve been thinking about.