When I was in Prague two years ago, I met a bloke from Bristol (UK) that very convincingly explained how patents as a concept, are stupid. Because alcohol was involved, I can’t recall his actual argument, but it has since made me question: do you really need a patent to protect your business idea?
Narendra Rocherolle, an experienced entrepreneur, has written a good little article explaining when you should, and shouldn’t, spend money to protect your IP. Racherolle offers a good analysis, but I am going to extend it by stating that a patent can be dangerous for your business, and not just because of the monetary cost. Radar Networks is my case-study - a stealth-mode “Semantic web” company, that has received a lot of press lately because apparently they are doing something big but they are not going to tell us until later this year.
Scenario
Radar is apparently building a next-generation internet business, that will pioneer the semantic web. Along with Freebase, which will also launch later this year, there has been a lot of discussion of what these companies are actually doing. It should be noted that both companies are in secret “hush hush” mode - generating just enough hype without telling anyone what they are doing
Mission: Find out what Radar Networks is doing
Tool: US patent office
Means: About half an hour of work
Results
The people behind Radar Networks have filed four patents (maybe more, however one’s enough for this case-study):
As I am only trying to prove a point, I only really read the most interesting one which is the “semantic web portal and platform”. Either way, I skimmed the others and I found them all a little unusual, because they were very readable. Most patent applications I have read are full of jargon, explaining their claim in a very convoluted way. Not only are these patents an easy ready, but I found it hard to work out where the “novel” idea was being presented - as in, I can’t see why these patents would be granted. But more importantly, the CEO of Radar has very easily just given away his business model - he certainly hasn’t held back.
So what’s Radar Networks doing? It looks like a collaboration package primarily around e-mail but also makes heavy usage of blog and wiki technology. In another post I might explain this, but take my word that the semantic web will be built by humans and not technology (at least initially). Radar obviously holds the same opinion, and so is likely offering these tools to capture data. They will analyse your e-mails for example, so that you can do all kinds of crazy things - like who you e-mail the most, and which of those people live within 5 kilometres of you. Semantic technologies are about creating links to other information, so they are providing a means to show you links between different type of information. With e-mail, I imagine it will do something like Zoe.
The technology allows you to create your own “Metaweb” - initially on their servers, but later on your own - which I suppose acts like some knowledge intranet for all your communications, but as you use them it captures the information using semantic web technologies (RDF, OWL, etc).
The main revenue will come from selling premium services and features to enterprises, and to sell the entire backend to enterprises that want to run their own nodes in the network or to run it in-house or for their private communities.
They are going to start by providing the “most powerful hosted blogging and wiki service” on their platform, as well as a portal for their community of users. They will provide semantic blogging, website and wiki services to individuals, groups, communities and organisations.
They describe themselves as the semantic equivalent of the Wikipedia. And they even say they might acquire a company called “Everything2” - which obviously has influenced their design, just looking at the terminology both share. Users will get a basic blog and wiki for free, without ads. Advanced features start from $9.95/month.
They claim their main competitors are SixApart (Typepad and Moveable Type), Google (Blogger), Userland, and LiveJournal.
Other things they are going to do:
- “create a Internet Explorer toolbar plug-in that is designed to replace both the browser’s regular address bar (for typing in URLs) and things like the Google toolbar”
- They will have phases of releasing their product
- “Phase 1 we will create a Web-based Metaweb Portal running on the Radar Platform. The portal will be designed to become the ‘Hub of the Semantic Web.’”
- “In Phase 2 we will provide a free, low-end, open-source Metaweb Server, that enables anyone to host their own Metawebs on their own machine.”
- “In Phase 3 we will sell a commercial Metaweb Server that enables any group or enterprise to run their own industrial-strength Metaweb service on the network.”
- They describe the entire navigational menu. Like, there is going to be a “what’s new” button and “Ads (like on Google, along the side)”.
They basically want you to live on their servers, doing all your to-do lists, e-mailing, blogging, classified advertising, and let you cook your breakfast if the technology permits. And as you are quietly working away storing your life, they are creating tuples out of your data - so that a few years down the track they have the gazillion megabyte-sized database that will form the backbone of the semantic web.
Conclusion
By writing this, I am not trying to make a mockery out of Applied Networks (it’s a good idea if they put a good front-end to it). But if the reason they are being so hush-hush is so they could have a competitive advantage, why bother posting a patent application that quite frankly don’t introduce anything completely novel (capturing information in a certain format using existing collaboration technologies isn’t something ground-breaking), and yet it goes into so much detail that it’s like I know just as much as their investors now.
Patent applications: require lots of time to create; plenty of money to make an application; and in the case of Radar Networks - might just have cost them any competitive advantage they would have (which is secrecy) without anything in return.
You have summed up the issues eloquently, and probably without any malice, made Radar Networks look ridiculous. Chris Shipley said in her ‘Guidewire Report, (Volume 1, Issue 1) in Jan 2007 that (Radar Networks) “…is working to build the infrastructure for Web 3.0″ - It seems to me they are just another Web(me)too. - But back to the ‘patents’ or no ‘patents’ issue… I think there’s a lot to be said for the good ol’ ‘Trade Secret’. I was advised recently in relation to a development project that “Investors love patents”… But maybe this advice is too easy to give, and to take, but wiser to ignore. (or at least be prepared to mount a really compelling counter-argument which doesn’t seem a difficult prospect.
If I made them look ridiculous because they wrote more information than they needed, that’s evident on it’s own. They didn’t need to tell me they see Six Apart as their main competitor, for example.
But I didn’t mean to make them look ridiculous for the application they are building - e-mail, blogs and wikis are a smart way of getting people to “semanticise” information without them having them think they are.
The sad thing is how quickly it took me to find this information and which is available for the world to see. I couldn’t believe it, considering how much I have read concerning their secrecy.
Elias, I agree… amazing that this kind of detail is publicly available, and seems to be so at odds with their commercial strategy.
While I’m skeptical of the value (and ethics) of software patents in the age of open source, I’m equally skeptical of the competitive advantage of secrecy for Internet startups. On the other hand, withholding the specific embodiment of an idea until launch can have a noticeable marketing benefit.
Case in point: everyone knew that Apple would be unveiling the iPhone at this year’s Macworld, even if we didn’t know everything about it. But the dramatic unveiling of the striking device transcended the collection of ideas (some novel, some not) that makes it up.
Apple, and their launch of the iPhone are in a class of their own. (so respectfully, not really a “case in point”) The value of going down the patent track or not for startups (if contained as a distinct issue) is worthy of discussion.
@Simon,
Touche on Apple. However, my point is that there are precious few examples of secrecy providing any competitive advantage for Internet startups. It may be a liability for many, in this era of rapid iteration around user feedback and market response.
As for patents, we’ve debated this in our company a lot. There is real doubt about how much enterprise value patents create for social Web apps. Consequently, some of the most compelling arguments for pursuing at least a provisional patent revolve around planning for the defense against unintended patent violations.
On the other hand, they broadcast a proprietary attitude towards ideas themselves, and this is not a good thing IMHO. Many of us are uncomfortable with the notion that we should make claims on pure ideas that are really incremental variations of widespread ones. To the bean counters we’d argue that the value of giving away our ideas often trumps the marginal value of holding on to their deed of trust. Just ask the inventors of Sudoku, who have benefited hugely from the spread of their invention, helped along in no small part by the game’s lack of proprietariness [http://www.psfk.com/2007/03/soduku_creators.html].
Yep… but IMHO “Internet startups” and “social Web apps” although obviously seen as generically part of the same ‘class’ of entrepreneurial projects, can in fact, not be. The internet is one thing, the Web is quite another. In the Web space, patenting may be largely nonsensical, however the other space is more like an open frontier, and therefore may require a distinct set of criteria re a decision re patenting.
One thing you don’t realize about the patent process is that old filings generally get updated over time. It looks like those filings are pretty old. In many cases the claims have not been included. The novelty is usually in the claims. So my guess is that they threw a bunch of notes together and filed them, with a plan to use those as priority dates for claims that would be drafted in the future.
In short, I wouldn’t read too much into those patents at this point — I would wait for the claims which probably will come in a year or so.
By the way did you look up the Metaweb patents too? They are interesting. They went to the other extreme — they added so much micro-level detail that they aren’t general enough IMHO.
Thanks S.G. - but yeah, I don’t think they are pursuring that strategy of a smoke screen. Two bits of evidence suggesting this is what they are doing:
1) Semanticising information requires people, not machines (my opinion - at least for the early days). The Wikipedia model is the most obvious way of doing this, but that’s not easily replicated. They’ve actually put some thought into this, and creating a combined e-mail/blog/wiki app is a smart way of getting users to semanticise information without users realising. It’s a good idea, and I can’t think of other (very different) ways you could do this - and that’s the challenge with semantic web technologies. So based on the fact it’s an idea that works, is why it’s real.
2) At the Radar Networks blog, they said Scobles posting was “revealing”. The only examples Scoble gives to describe, are “Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.”
That suggests he saw a blog app that did what Zoe can do for e-mail.
I thought all the patents had a similar level of detail, alhough I haven’t read them in detail - only a quick skim.