B. Mann Consulting

Via INSNA and Mark Surman (who is doing seriously cool things with the Shuttleworth Foundation around Open Everything), I was copied on a request to look at prior art around a Microsoft patent application:

Microsoft has a patent application posted on the Peer-to-Patent site for Recommending contacts in a social network.

We are soliciting your help and that of the communities you know in finding prior art that will help the Patent Office to examine this application and determine if it deserves a twenty-year grant of rights to prevent all others from making, using, or selling this invention (this includes any research and R&D that would touch upon the claims of the invention, if patented). Can you let people know about this opportunity? We invite them to submit:

1. prior art
2. to annotate the prior art submitted by others
3. to vote on the relevance of the public submissions, and
4. to suggest fruitful avenues for research for the USPTO when examining this application.

Peer-to-Patent is not just another blog, wiki or website. It is an "extension" of the government institution! Posted information will be forwarded directly to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and be used in the examination process.

Here's a bit more detail about the application and about Peer-to-Patent:

Recommending contacts in a social network

A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user's contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out.

I originally blogged about the local dev center last July when I heard that Microsoft was opening it here in Vancouver.

A lot of this Vancouver / Canada startup / tech hub topics I'm now blogging about on the Bootup Labs blog, which you should follow if you're interested in those topics: Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

I've been recently going down the path of re-shuffling my home media environment. Since I'm also still kicking the tires on various PC games (the new Steam community site is very interesting (link is my userid, you may need to be logged in) -- for the record, all the other games I mentioned I'm no longer playing.

Anyway, I've been thinking about a game console at home. The choice is really between the Xbox 360 and the PS3: the Nintendo Wii is a great supplementary machine with its very different interface options and social nature, but not such a great media center. I'm more likely to buy my own Wii controller and go over to friends that already have one.

Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 seem to have solutions in place to easily share media from your Mac. There is Nullriver's Connect360 and there is the open source MediaTomb which can let you run an open source UPnP server to share to both platforms (older how-to).

The Xbox LIVE and Xbox Live Arcade is compelling. Easily download small mini games. Get an account, earn achievements. Even playing "simple" games, you can compete with other people at home anywhere else online with you, and "invest" in an identity.

But...

...it's Microsoft. I acknowledge they've built a very interesting machine. It's much more of a market win than the PS3 by a long shot (at this stage of the game...). But it's optimized to work with Windows Media Center, and it's not really that hackable.

The PS3 on the other, I love for its open-ness. It actually has "install other operating system" as a *menu item*. That's fantastic, and totally appeals to me wanting to tinker.

But...

...for the price of a PS3, I could buy both an Xbox 360 *and* a Wii. It's pricey. Am I buying into tomorrow's technology, today? Also...it does come down to the games. And to the social network. My social network mainly has Xbox 360s (aside from Mark Yuasa who has a PS3 in addition), and some of the upcoming games that I'm interested in (e.g. Mass Effect) are Xbox only.

Hmmm...it seems like in writing this, I've convinced myself. My heart says I should get a PS3, but my head says Xbox 360.

What would you get? Why? Do you have one already? What do you use it for?

I'm going to be on Business News Network this afternoon, 4pm PST / 7pm EST, talking about if Microsoft is still innovating? This is, of course, related in part to earnings announcements from a bunch of companies, and more directly, the Microsoft investment in Facebook. I'll be on a mini-panel with Fred Vogelstein.

Some related links / thoughts below, I'll clean this up after the interview:

• John Battelle on Facebook and Microsoft
• Paul Kedrosky on Facebook and the Microsoft Curse:
  

  Do you believe that Microsoft knows its own strategic interests, and that it can act rationally and appropriately in their defense? Ten years ago I might have said yes, but today I have a much harder time. So when it comes to defending a large strategic premium over a credible competitor with a better basis for economic valuation, I have a hard time.

• Recent interview with Steve Ballmer at the Web 2.0 Summit -- from Ballmer on Windows Live search, "it's like a 6 year old playing hoops with the 12 year olds"
• Did Microsoft pay too much for Facebook? Well, Facebook might be overvalued, but it's small dollars for Microsoft and gives them potential insite into profile / social based advertising
• MSFT failures -- Zune, Windows Mobile (failure outside of the US), search
• MSFT wins and/or in progress -- Silverlight, an Adobe Flash competitor, casual gaming and home based social networks (XBox Live Arcade, Windows Media Center, etc.)
• innovation? Microsoft Research (PhotoSynth), new offices and working environments down in Redmond and elsewhere
• closing thought: competition is good, Microsoft isn't going anywhere; they *should* compete more on innovation rather than dollars and marketing

So, my phone was ringing off the hook this morning with people wanting feedback on the announcement that Microsoft Canada is opening a software development center here in Vancouver.

What's my reaction? It's great! Microsoft Canada has been taking some interesting steps lately, like hiring David Crow, who kick started the Toronto tech scene over the past few years. It was great to catch up with him at the Microsoft Expression launch event I attended a couple of weeks back.

Yahoo missed the chance to have an engineering team here when they moved the entire Flickr team down to San Francisco (the last big tech acquisition here in town, rumoured to be around $40M). Google has spoken with some local universities, but they tend to be computer science snobs, so they went for the more well known Waterloo (also to keep an eye on RIM, which being in the mobile space is going to become increasingly important).

I see the Microsoft lab here in Vancouver as an increasing acknowledgment that "stuff is happening" here. We've got a unique mix of creative and tech people, big companies and start ups, and world events like the 2010 Olympics that are going to put us at center stage.

So...Yahoo and Google...when are the labs coming to town? And, unlike Microsoft who are rumoured to be going to boring Burnaby or Richmond -- stick a center downtown somewhere. Gastown and Yaletown still have lots of room for you!

If you tune to Global TV for the noon show, I may be on there. I've also briefly talked to Business News Network, so we'll see if that's a go for the evening slot. Busy day....

Update: I got a small clip on Global TV in the noon show, which re-aired at 5pm and 6pm. I didn't manage to get the digital version of that clip, I'll update again if I can get a copy. I did end up getting interviewed by Howard Green from BNN (was formally Report on Business TV). It was myself and Bernie Magnan, Chief Economist for the Vancouver Board of Trade. The clip was up about an hour after the show, and I managed to find this direct link to the episode. I'm about 5 - 7 minutes in, and unfortunately it will only play on Windows as far as I can see.

On Thursday night I was invited to the Microsoft Expression launch event. I was soubly glad to attend because David Crow, who is now with Microsoft Canada, came through town for the event (a post from David about the upcoming BarCamp Vancouver ... which looks to be at capacity already!).

From comments by Sherif on Todd Dominey's post about Flash Player and Adobe Reader being combined:

Hmm, I wonder if Adobe just shot themselves in the foot with this announcement vis-a-vis Microsoft Sparkle (aka Expressions), which I realize isn't currently meant to be a Flash competitor. I see two possibilities:

1) Adobe tries to integrate PDF into Flash, the plugin becomes enormous, people balk at downloading it, Adobe backtracks, and keeps the two apps separate (I don't see the PDF plugin becoming smaller, at least based on past experience).

2) Microsoft sees an opportunity to win over the Flash market, after several failed versions (typically true with MS), develops an excellent, fairly small plugin (2-3MB) that does what Flash can do and more, and splits the market, forcing designers like us to buy two apps - Flash and Sparkle, giving us more headaches to deal with.

This at the same time that Dave Shea tells us that Macromedia is no more, but notes that "it has always seemed that Macromedia was fundamentally more in tune with the technology and the community."

Rasmus has a short sample PHP script of how he keeps a Windows XP box in sync with an OS X iTunes library.

Roland already did the podcast for Bryght Radio with Dan, but I owe him a post talking about some of the ideas we discussed regarding outliners, OPML, the universe, and everything.

Dan is aiming high. He's here in Vancouver doing heads down work on Focus, the best outliner for Windows. Basically, he says he wants to build the Omni Outliner for the Windows outliner market. I asked him all sorts of devil's advocate questions, like what about web-based outliners, or cross platform ones, or Dave Winer's OPML Editor. Well, for starters, he's got a wiki filled with all the outliner apps he can find, so he's definitely surveying the competition. The next part is that he's got some definite market segments in mind. He's going to build his outliner so it meets the needs of Getting Things Done disciples. And he's building it on Windows because he a) wants to make money and b) thinks there's room for a great desktop outliner on Windows (maybe cross promote with Omni?).

I bugged him a bit about open source, but there are very few examples of great desktop apps in that category. As well, Dan plans on a plug-in architecture -- actually, embedding Python via the .NET framework to make the whole thing scriptable. Sounds pretty cool, and pretty much the equivalent of AppleScript on the Windows platform.

I think he's got some other plans with regards to "instant outlining" and connecting with Dave's OPML editor, but I'll let him make the big splash about that.

So, welcome to Vancouver, Dan. I'm sure we'll see you at some more Vancouver Web 2.0 User Group meetings, and of course, if you're a supporter of the Innovation Commons concept, go add your name to the list.

I was amazed when I heard the Xbox 360 would support iPods out of the box. But, of course, it has to. Embrace AND extend.

One of the big take-aways for me was hard drives vs. optical. Everyone knows what a pain it is to burn discs. They're the floppy drive / sneaker net of this era, only being used if there are no other alternatives. So of course Microsoft bypasses them with a portable hard drive.

But basically, click through to Mitch's overview of how the XBox is going to kick the PS3's butt.

Here's how Microsoft will win the Game Wars by next summer, before the Playstation 3 ships in volume, using a wireless handheld Xbox that plays games, movies and TV stored on the detachable hard drives announced in the Xbox 360—and, building on .NET, Microsoft will turn both the game console and the portable game system into full-fledged productivity systems.
RatcliffeBlog -- Mitch's Open Notebook: A bone-jarring Ah-ha moment: How Microsoft wins the Game Wars