Percolater's dashboard

It's a beautiful latch but it isn't the most functional thing in the world.

Sounds like it may be a battery that is dying. I've heard of this happening before: the system goes to sleep when it still shows plenty of power remaining. Apple has indicated this as a symptom of a bad battery. You may want to contact AppleCare before it gets worse.

Ha! I always suspected that VCs spent their days watching the grass grow.

It depends on what you blogged. Did you publish obscenities? Did you defame someone? Did you violate someone's copyright? Did you publish an image of them without their permission?

I don't know how the First Round team feels, but there are some very good reasons to avoid the software (and business process) patent game if you can, particularly as an early stage company. There's a conversation started over on the EFF community about this. That said, intellectual property is the core of most software/Web businesses and you should handle your strategy with care. The best move will vary from company to company, and should reflect both your competitive positioning and your philosophy (you have to live with yourself, after all).

Narendra Rocherolle of 30Boxes wrote a nice piece on this for FoundRead a few weeks ago called "Patents, why bother?"

Peter Hintjens, CEO of iMatix Corporation, wrote an article on this topic which answers this question well. Of course, it focuses on the most controversial patent types, software and business process patents. As he puts it, "The use of patents in software looks a lot more like the erection of a massive new system of private tolls and taxes, than the enablement of a new properties class."

The justification for software patents, established in 1982 by the Supreme Court) was that they would promote and reward new investments by businesses. As Hintjens says, "Instead, we see a sorry parade of lawsuits. IBM—who has the largest software portfolio, and who has claimed that it is against business method patents—has just sued Amazon for infringing on several business process patents."

Here's his basic points against software patents:

• Patents give their holders a claim on ideas, which are highly mobile resources [like migrating birds or fish], and in software, more mobile than most other industries.


• Patents have unclear boundaries, and in software these boundaries are even less clear than in other industries.


• Patents reduce the sharing of new ideas, and software depends on a higher volume of sharing of ideas than other industries.


• Patents are an expensive property system, and most software innovation is driven by unfunded grass-roots work.


• Patents are not a well-bounded property system, and in software a boundary between “good” and “bad” patents cannot be drawn.

Half.com hastened and exploited the structural changes happening in the industry, while most competitors were retrenching to defend their existing business. So Half.com benefited from the very dynamics that were eating away at the industry as a whole. This is how you take on entrenched players in established industries!