It’s an inflationary simile but I’ve taken to saying that patents are like nuclear fission. In a corporate or startup scenario you get some very smart people working on solving a problem for a while, then you create this fascinatingly ephemeral thing, and suddenly the cat’s out of the bag and your creation is valuable enough for people to fight over. You’ll have no idea where it may end up or who will use it against whom.

I’ve got patents on the brain: I just finished authoring one for my latest startup, one I authored at Higher Function is under examination, and the US Supreme Court just issued their ruling on Bilski [PDF], probably the only case on the fundamentals of Patentability that they’ll hear for a decade.

I think of a patentable invention this way: A novel means of accomplishing a specific transformation in the world. Maybe it’s barbed wire — a means of transforming steel into a hundred acres of fenced pasture. Maybe it’s one-click — a means of reducing the friction between selecting a product and finalizing a commercial transaction on a web site.

Whatever the details, you, the inventor, spend time and energy figuring out how to accomplish some new way of transforming the world. It may be obvious in hindsight, it may even have been obvious IN THEORY before you did it. But by actually doing it you have moved the world forward in some tangible and (ostensibly) beneficial way.

The US federal government recognized that once you’ve let the cat out of the bag it is often very easy for others to duplicate what you’ve done. That leaves the first mover at a huge disadvantage economically (something anyone who has worked in most any aspect of business innovation can relate to, I’m sure). So they created a system and method wherein the government may grant “ownership” over certain creative works, Copyright, and inventions, Patent. The goal of a Patent is to reward those who speculatively create improvements to the human condition by conjuring “property” from thin air — a government-granted limited monopoly on a means of transforming the world. That’s a big responsibility and certainly one that is bound to suffer the ebbs and flows of opinion on what is patentable, line we draw in thin air.

Patents give, and patents take away. For every tech startup that spends a precious 10% of their angel round patenting the heart and soul of their business there are a hundred Fortune 1000s with ranks of Intellectual Property lawyers writing up everything their engineers reduce to practice, whether they intend to commercialize it or not. For every emerging business that buys a 3 month head start on the incumbents with their IP, there is one being sued for infringing on the status quo. And, to be fair, there are big companies that spend millions of dollars in R&D only to see a small, nimble business team run with the technology and beat them in the market.

Is there a take-home message here? Be careful what you do, because a government-granted monopoly is a powerful thing. With enough money and legal footwork the courts can be made to do your bidding; but it’s the kind of mutually assured destruction that more often than not puts you at an impasse. And remember that if you can prevent others from doing what you do they can surely return the compliment.

I was just challenged to justify ordering a 14″ deep dish pizza from our local pizzeria rather than the smaller, more reasonable 12″ version. It all comes down to volume in the end. I’m a fan of volume (more a fan of leverage, but volume is important too).

So I started by establishing that we could agree that the pizza was sufficiently circular and the depth of the toppings was, more or less, constant across the entire pie. In exchange for these kindnesses my challenger eliminated pencil, paper, and computing device from my available tools.

The volume of a cylinder can be calculated as a function of it’s radius and height. Pi * R^2 * H where R is the radius of the pizza and H the depth of toppings (height, in other words). Now, since multiplying by H is a linear function and we’re comparing two pies with differing radii but equal depth we can eliminate the term entirely to simplify the in-my-head-math and just compare surface area. We can do the same for Pi, transforming our calculation of surface area into a simple “size factor”.

So the size factor of a 12″ pie is 12 squared, or 144. The size factor of a 14″ pie is 196. The difference is 52, an increase of somewhere around 30%. If you want to know the actual difference in surface area, multiply by Pi to get approximately 161 square inches. To calculate the actual volume of food gained multiply by the average depth, .75, to get 120 cubic inches of food.

[callout title=But Wait!]“But wait! The outside two inches of the pizza is just crust! That’s not viable volume, that’s like selling a thousand hogs heads of soda at a loss.“[/callout]

Ok, totally fair. Luckily both 12 and 14 inch pizzas appear to have an equal crust-radius, approximately 2 inches. So we can subtract 2 inches from R and try again.

12″ pie = (12 – 2) ^2 = 100
14″ pie = (14 – 2) ^2 = 144

A difference of 44 units, which is an increase of 44%. Even more reason to order the larger size!

For those who can’t leave these things half-done, that’s a net gain of 44 * Pi * .75 = 105 cubic inches of the good stuff.

To generalize, reduce, and recap, we have established that the difference in topping-value between two sizes of deep dish pizza, A and B, may be calculated as a function of the radii Ra and Rb of said pizzas with this formula:

Vd = ((Rb-2) ^ 2 – (Ra-2) ^ 2) / ( (Ra-2) ^ 2)

If Vd exceeds the relative increase in price between pizzas A and B [Pd = (Pb - Pa) / Pa], it’s a good deal. (But like EBITDA we have not accounted for painful overindulgence in CapEx.)

And they asked what good geometry was in high school.

I’m playing with some mobile geo-location services and needed to test out the W3C Geolocation API. This supposedly works in Firefox 3.5 and Mobile Safari. Do let me know if you see something interesting in another browser.

This page is a work in progress…

Results

And the Codez…

<p id='loc_p'>Your current location reports as:
<em id='loc'>loading...</em>;<br />
OpenStreetMap translates that to: <em id='addr'>loading...</em>.</p>

<script language='javascript'>
var locWatchId = false;
window.onload=function() {
  if (navigator.geolocation) {
    locWatchId = navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(updateLocation);
  }
  else {
    document.getElementById('loc_p').innerText =
      "Sorry, your browser doesn't appear to support location services.";
  }
}

function updateLocation(position) {
  var text = '@['+position.coords.latitude+', '+
      position.coords.longitude+']';
  document.getElementById('loc').innerText = text;
  var revGeocodeUrl =
        "http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?lat=" +
        position.coords.latitude + "&lng=" +
        position.coords.longitude +
        "&zoom=18&format=json&json_callback=showAddr";

  var scriptNode = document.createElement('script');
  scriptNode.type = 'text/javascript';
  scriptNode.src = revGeocodeUrl;
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(scriptNode);
}

function showAddr(addrData) {
  if ( addrData && addrData.display_name ) {
    document.getElementById('addr').innerText = addrData.display_name;
  }
  else {
    document.getElementById('addr').innerText = 'unknown';
  }
}
</script>

While developing WeetWoo! for iPhone we spent an extraordinary amount of time putting ourselves into the shoes of our children. Of course, since they are OUR children, we didn’t hesitate to ask them what they thought at every turn. And being children, they didn’t hesitate to tell it like it was. In fact, some of the most valuable lessons we learned came from plopping an iPod Touch down in front of 3 and 9 year olds and letting them go.

It’s amazing how tricky it is to make something truly usable by a broad range of kids. One of my favorite details is something you’d probably never notice. In the “Album Art” view where you scroll through all of the videos in a playlist, younger kids were having problems because they couldn’t get to the video they wanted to see. It turns a few of our testers’ fine motor skills just weren’t developed enough to drag and stop at a specific video — they kept overshooting and getting frustrated. So we tuned down the scrolling speed, but then the older kids complained that it was too slow and took too many swipes to get through a long list. After kicking around ideas for a while we came up with what should have been obvious all along — make it slow for the young kids and fast for the older kids.

Hang on! Were we talking about adding yet another item to our already crowded and complex settings panel? Bad idea.

Another brainstorm, another “Duh, that’s it, why did THAT take an entire 5K run to figure out?”

Weet Woo already classifies videos into age ranges and lets you pick an age range.
We’ll just piggyback off of that setting.

So we try a bunch of speed settings for the scrolling effect, settle on one for each target age range — 3-5, 6-8, and 9+ — and we’re off to the races. It’s not something you’d necessarily ever notice, but it is something that improves the experience for our entire spectrum of target users. And that makes me smile.

Attention to detail, removing frustrations that anyone would probably live with, also makes your users happy. This morning WeetWoo was reviewed in two blogs, The iPhone Mom and AppBoy. Both of them went out of their way to mention that the experience of using the app was above and beyond what they expected, and that’s something that made them smile.