Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Ever wondered what’s the right way to contact that friend or relative or colleague of yours? Do you message them? Or do you call them? What if he is driving? Is she at home or outdoors? Is it too late to call your colleague about that urgent issue that just came up? Guess what? Apple just might have the answer for you. How, you wonder. Apple’s recent patent might give us some hints. There’s GPS on your phone using which the software could identify where you are: at office, at home, some place else. So you could set rules like “If at massage, no phone calls at all” or “If at pub, no calls from office colleagues”. The receiver could also set rules based on that ancient feature of the phone: the good old clock. I mean rules like “If beyond 10 PM, no calls from office colleagues”. Well, those are some explicit rules set by the potential receiver. If that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be such a big thing. But wait, there’s a whole lot of decisions the phone could ...

Teddy Wayne described one of the attractions of a physical book over an e-book : “there’s something irreplaceable about a printed book: the heft of it in your hands, the striking cover, and, most important to me, its  smell .” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, agreed with that sentiment. Which is why he said: “…we have to look for things that we can do that you can never do with a paper book.” Features like the ability to write reviews for everyone else to see and to search for information as you read your e-book. Now contrast all of those Amazon features with a patent the same Amazon filed some time back about resale of e-books. See, e-books don’t degrade over time unlike their “dead-tree brethren”. So unlike physical books that can’t be sold an infinite number of times because of all the wear and tear, an e-book could be resold forever. Not very good news if your business is selling e-books, is it? So here’s the gist of Amazon’s patent: add a (digital) counter in the e-bo...

Ever wondered if not being cool can work to your advantage? Sounds nonsensical, right? After all, as teenagers, weren’t most of us dieing to be cool? Aren’t most brands willing to give their soul to be perceived to be cool? And yet, Samsung found itself in the bitter-sweet situation of being exonerated from the charge of violating Apple’s iPad patents because the judge felt that, hold your breath, “(Samsung’s tablets) are not as cool”! I wonder if Samsung is celebrating its lack of coolness, er, the verdict? Or would it rather been seen as cool, and by association to have infringed the patents? I guess you really can’t win them all!