From the Editors: Sailing the winds of mobile change

Kik Launches an Open API to Enable Mobile Developers to Bake Instant Content Sharing Into Any App API-powered developers like Rude Boy Games, DrinkOwl and FlyScreen can promote their apps to millions of Kik Messenger users.

Zeichick’s Take: Apple, and computing, after Jobs The mission for Jobs' successor now is to make the company his own, not endlessly second-guess what to do going forward

Zeichick’s Take: Google I/O and Apple WWDC are hot, Univ. of Florida is not Why is the University of Florida shuttering its computer science program when mobile developers are in greater demand?

Comments

03/01/2012 12:47:00 AM EST

Your entry seems amolst as if it's an attack on patents in general. All patents, in any field, are in fact to protect intellectual property (i.e. thoughts) and thus provide commercial incentives to innovate. (Well, in theory anyway.) It's also not a problem that software patents incorporate prior ideas as long as they don't duplicate them; most advancements are evolutionary not revolutionary.However, patents are not supposed to be granted to obvious ideas such as online catalogs or O/R mapping and this is where the system seems to be failing lately. A particularly clever and original implementation of either of these may be patentable, but it would only narrowly protect that solution and not the whole problem it addresses.The situation isn't quite as bad as it seems though: Getting a patent and actually enforcing it are two different things entirely. Right or wrong it seems that when the patent office is in over their heads, they tend to err on the side of approval and let the courts sort it out.

SamoaLokman

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