Letters from America

The ACM Communications in February carries an article by Andy Oram extolling the virtues of the new peer to patent experiment that looks to ameliorate the problems in the patent process.

Snag is I'm not sure it is helping at all for those IT and software related patents.

The basic problem is two fold.  First there really is nothing new being invented in computing - instead all the early inventions in the field dating back to the 40's through to 
the 60's are merely being applied in interesting and useful new ways that are simply applications or refinements of the technology - most all of which are intuitively obvious to any practitioner in the field.  The only exception being new hardware fabrications pushing the boundaries of practical physics - but that is really the field of applied engineering and not computer software and IT.

The second part of the problem flows from the first in that the real inhibitor to implementers is not having the "invention". Quite the contrary - ideas are aplenty and cheap - whereas the resources, time, backing and support  to bring them to successful fruition are the inhibitors.  

Moreover to compound this computing has entered every facet of modern life 
so the scope for applications of computing is pretty much endless.

Enter a rag-tag army of patent-police dedicated to stopping frivolous patents by reviewing them via Peer-To-Patent's (PTP) website (http://peertopatent.org).  Why are we wasting our time?  I'd wager $10 that 99.9% of patents are not inventions at all - but simply applications of existing infrastructure and capabilities.
Certainly from the selection I saw under review at PTP's website today - they all fit that category - and 
clearly PTP thought so too - so they'd selected them for attention.

I saw today this gem - "Method for generating mnemonic random passcodes" - I wrote something along these lines for my undergraduate work on a PDP11 30 years ago.  These types of patents are submitted by eager patent attorneys who egg on their clients - better to have it patented - should be possible to have the PTO award it...

The bottom line is that the patent office has to stop recognizing these things as inventions and worthy of patents.  They are quite clearly not.

Another example using GPS devices to track pets.  This is not an invention.  It's taking the same small format GPS device that athletes have been using for more than two years to track themselves and putting a doggie collar strap on it.

We have to go back to the original purpose behind patents. 

It was to protect the inventor who toiled in his laboratory 
to create some new breakthrough that had not been seen before
 that surmounted previous limitations and challenges and brought 
truly new capabilities and solutions to the field.

All those long hours of painstaking research, blind alleys and simply trail and error experimenting till you came up with the answers you needed.

Computing doesn't work that way.  We work on software and accompanying hardware and create a solution from the
 collection of preexisting "Lego bricks" or fabricate some new 
bricks of your own to add to the designers collections.

This may take you a few days, a few weeks or a few months - but not years - quite simply your funding would dry up long before that - in fact the bean-counters these days want tangible results in weeks only - otherwise they are generally not interested.

And worse - the current patent system has been completely subverted by large corporations and patent lawyers each responding to the other - so even if the inventor now tries to patent something - its lost in a tidal 
wave of filings from giant corporations - who can use their own phalanxes of patent portfolios to either attack of defend in the marketplace as they choose.

Then the patent office itself - that is self-funding - thanks to Ronald Reagan.  So they themselves have a huge vested interested in a torrent of endless trivial patents and awarding them so that corporations feel threatened and file yet more patents.  The last thing the executives at the PTO want is for people to stop filing trivial patents.

So whom or what is peer-to-patent helping?  Intriguingly it is sponsored by GE, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat!

Having looked at PTP's site and purpose I'm not at all enamoured of investing my valuable time in this.  Frankly the only way to solve the current patent chaos is to have the PTO continue to issue more and more increasingly stupid and worthless patents so that people can finally say "enough" and the whole rotten software patent edifice collapse under its own heaving morass.

Besides the marketplace is largely consigning all this nonsense to history
through new open source and open resource collaborative solutions
and by using new licensing techniques.  The competitive landscape has
for ever been changed by the internet and services and solutions that
are replacing traditional 1980's delivery methods that foster and attempt
to continue the "let's patent it" mindset.  The more products that are
rejected by the marketplace because they are patented and hence place
restrictions on how they can be adopted and purposed the sooner
people stop this disruptive and arcane practice that serves a tiny few
and restricts the many.

The software industry touches every facet of our lives because computers are present in everything from your refrigerator to your car to cellphone services, health, safety, finances and of course government.

It's difficult therefore to estimate the impacts of individual areas of work
in the bigger scheme of things, but we can definitely look at specific areas
of work and point to seminal events in time and space.

One such is the founding of the XML/edi Group (http://xmledi-group.com/) back ten years ago now.

This work was the precursor to first the ebXML initiative (http://ebxml.xml.org) and now the whole area of work that is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the concepts such as those enshrined in the OASIS BCM (Business-Centric Methodology) specification.

It's nice when some small recognition is possible - and the ACM is now 
recognizing senior members who have made contributions in their specific areas of interest - a total of 98 for 2007.

While not quite the Emmy's at least this is satisfying and much cheaper and "green" to organize!

The field of election audits is one that is attracting a lot of academic attention. It's a good field for academia where learned papers, funding, thesis topics and studies are aplenty.

It seems though that the academics involved are squabbling over the honey pot instead of focusing on the bigger social goals and picture.

The public view is centered on the need to have election auditing that is above reproach and using mathematically sound and agreed methods to give people a high level of confidence in the outcomes.

Of course exacerbating the situation in the US is the counting software and records available for auditing that are woeful at best. Work has begun - such as by the California SOS - to use open public recording standards for publishing election results. In the meantime statisticians have only bare information to work with. Nevertheless good strides have been made in the past couple of years in the area of election audit mathematics.

Enter the Brennan Center and Verified Voting who together sponsored an October event in Minnesota to showcase election auditing techniques and capabilities.

The first hint that this may be problematic for them is that they wished to keep this somewhat exclusive and to pick and choose who came and who presented. Lesson #1 - if you are espousing open public election auditing its a pretty bad idea to restrict attendance to only those people you think should be there.

Next up Lesson #2 - this is a field that demands peer-review and ideas that can be universally verified as sound and in-line with the latest state-of-the-art and consensus around that (see here). It looks really bad if you exclude people who are critical of your central ideas and finding flaws that you appear not to be able to counter or otherwise refute except by heavy handedness.

Lesson #3 - hiding does not get the job done. Using hotel staff to harass would be participants and exploiting arcane local legal bye-laws to circumvent basic free-speech rights looks downright nasty and mean spirited. It also puts you in jeopardy for future events where government attendees may see your prior actions as falling foul of OMB restrictions on their event attendance. In short if your ideas cannot stand up to public scrutiny and fair 
open comment there is no way you can have any credibility in this field.  It's also not reality in the age of the Internet 
and collaborative communities online that demand openness. Using 
face-to-face opportunities to drive consensus building is the perfect opportunity - nothing like the lobby of a hotel or 
the bar to really allow people to align their ideas and have frank and open talks.

Lesson #4 - just because you have a wall of PhD's does not mean you can brow beat people into submission - your ideas must be credible and work in the real world and stand up to formal peer review and public debate. You will not win contracts from election authorities to do auditing through exclusion of potential critics or competitors. You must demonstrate both that you have a solid team, and also that the ideas and techniques have passed open public peer review. Obviously it looks really bad if you deliberately exclude certain people to avoid such open debate occurring, for whatever reasons or justifications you may pro-offer up after the fact.   

Lesson #5 - it not about your own personal Nobel Prize Award stupid!  Academics will squabble over who's paper did what in the 
field, and who first developed what algorithms.  No place for this in a field that demands open frank and fair collaboration.  Do your citations, do your attributing, and just get the job done here please.  Just check your egos in with the cloakroom attendant at the door; you can collect those later.

Lesson #6 - can we PLEASE get back to solving the real needs in society here? A formal road-map involving combining good practices in building audit records, audit support techniques and then a suite of mathematical tools to operate on and verify the election outcomes are what is needed urgently. Showing how these align with EAC VVSG what steps vendors should be taking also will help build the case. Showing how using open public standards such as OASIS Election Markup Language (EML) can fundamentally empower election auditing is also essential.

Unfortunately instead the Brennan Center and Verified Voting seem to want to instead engage in a "three monkeys" exercise putting out statements like this one.

Hopefully the lessons learned are that they need to be fully inclusive at their future events; that they need an open road map that everyone in the field can objectively and fully contribute to; and then need open public standards and methods to be embraced at the core of that, not just a handpicked inner elite from academia circles.

I had the pleasure of working recently with Kim Berry on implementing an XML project for the State of California.

During the course of that I found that the bond was not just around a passion for good software development but also for the industry itself and its health.

Kim leads up the Programmers Guild organization championing rights and conditions in the industry.

His article in BusinessWeek today - sums up the situation facing employees in the industry and being able to maintain a career and job security for their families.

The .COM era following by the bust led to seminal changes in the hiring practices and pay scales. The .COM boom brought with it the advent of offshore development, and temporary on-shoring staff who learned and then took their knowledge back offshore.

The result has been a radical shift in the makeup of software teams across the USA with a preponderance of Indian and now Asian developers. Older American staff have been pushed into niche areas; government where citizenship is a prerequisite and management or specialized support and collaborative or support roles.

And the Indian staff themselves have to contend with sharp practice from employers who can exploit their fragile existence on expiring visas, and lawyers who demand payments for INS filing work.

The upshot has been to create a sea change in the industry and the long term prospects for younger home-grown staff coming up to replace the aging work force look particularly bleak.

The collusion of all decision makers in this has been tacit. Notice that contract awards have been driven by lowest price regardless of solution approach, even in government contracting. Noone stopped to think of the longer term consequences. Congress was led into thinking their measures on visas were abating a shortage of skills, instead of driving down costs and sending jobs overseas. And now Microsoft and IBM are building new universities and research campuses in India and China so they have offshored those resource opportunities away from Americans too.

It is all to clear to see how quickly this unfolded. The Genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. Where it becomes really interesting though is to note this initial round has focused on the software industry where high salaries drove the overseas engines thirst for market penetration. Once the software industry reaches saturation and the salaries bottom out, where to next?

The legal industry is the next on the block, where so many administrative legal actions can be moved via technology. Notice all New York City parking tickets are processed by workers in Sierra Leone keying in the details! The tickets are then sent electronically back to New York for printing and mailing.

It's only a matter of time before whole other areas of legal process are targetted. It's going to be interesting to see how lawyers react when they see plunging rates and demand forcing them to compete against each other for dwindling pool of prestige work. Then we may actually see some different legislation in front of Congress?

Since December when I posted my original linkage of the 22 patents referencing my original two - there are now 4 more - making a total of 26. Not bad in 5 months of elapsed time.

However there is now some ray of hope that there may be a halt called to this continuing "Alice through the Looking Glass" world of software patents.

A recent ruling by the Supreme Court has raised the bar on what is to be accepted as "obvious". eWeek reports here more details -

== Lawrence Rosen, a partner in the law firm Rosenlaw & Einschlag and well-known open-source law expert, is inclined to agree. "As of April 30, many fewer patents will be valid under the Supreme Court's newly articulated obviousness standard for patentability. Software developers and distributors are at much less risk of being sued over obvious patents."

Another result, according to Rosen, should be that "[t]he quality of issued software patents will rise, but there will be far fewer of them." ==

Then eWeeks Jim Rapoza's column on the case notes -

== In the case, which dealt with a patent for adjustable gas pedals in cars, the Supreme Court said the previous tests for non-obviousness were too weak and easily circumvented by unoriginal ideas. With their ruling they have set a much higher bar for showing that an idea isn't obvious and have made it easier to use prior art to prove the obviousness of an idea.

Even better, rather than sending the case back to a lower court, the Supreme Court ruled on the gas pedal case immediately using their new benchmark for obviousness. ==

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith interviewed with Fortune Magazine stated that many established and familiar open source tools violate up to 235 of its existing patents.

One immediately wonders just how many of those erstwhile Microsoft patents can stand up to the new measures of "obviousness"?

Brad did layout the areas - all of which sound extremely full of "obviousness" here.

== He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68". ==

Not that any one single entity can afford to take on Microsofts lawyers to find out. However the article further notes that there are also open source groups aligned together to protect themselves - such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Invention Network.

Come to think of it - the software I just typed this with, and that you are reading this with - also probably infringes on lots of patents too!?!

Time to jump back into the Looking Glass...

Forrester Research have published a paper (here) that they are asking $279 for. Their authoritative sounding title belays what is really transpiring: "How ebXML Compares With Web Services Specifications In Structure And Support. This is the tenth document in the "Status Of SOA And Web Services Specifications" series.

Obviously they are not expecting anyone to purchase this, because frankly - not only does their excerpt tell readers all they want them to know - it also reveals that the report is dubious research - and since readers are not required to pay for it to find out its message - clearly the sponsor is more likely a corporate spoiler who is intent on discrediting ebXML - yet again.

The list here is short but familiar - and the pattern reminiscent of those reports flung at LINUX by its frantic detractors while saavy users were forging ahead installing LINUX on their servers (hint - detractors include companies with an 'M' in their name).

Why? Because now that ebXML has legitimately gained real momentum in key industry sectors in 2006 - including healthcare, automotive, electrical utilities and eGovernment - the nay sayers once again need someone to rain on the parade. Congratulations Forrester Research - you receive the "Most Obviously Sycophantic Research 2006" award.

Forrester proudly reports - "According to data from recent Forrester surveys, there is very little vendor or user support for ebXML".

And then they note - "Along the way, the industry has created confusion around and between ebXML specifications and the emerging Web services specifications". Really? I wonder if the confusion could have been created by reseachers providing misleading reports and surveys?

One wonders who they mailed their surveys out to? And if they even bothered to enter "ebXML" into Google - and note and investigate the over 1,540,000 hits?

Let's see now - I just wonder who those hits could be? Obviously not developers working for Oracle, BEA, Fujitsu, IBM, Tibco, and Sun - all of whom have ebXML implementations.

Forrester does note very cagely - "unless they have a targeted reason for using it and
good support from their vendors" - such as Oracle perhaps - the worlds' largest application software providing company?

Continuing on - the users surveyed clearly are also not in Norway and the UK - where their national healthcare systems are being run by ebXML, or in Austria where electrical power is distributed using ebXML.

Likewise - Forrester failed to realize that the DHS and CDC/PHIN national alerting system that links critical care centers across the USA is underpinned by ebXML message exchanges.

Then Forrester overlooked the work by GM and VM who are installing ebXML systems to deliver spare parts to their dealerships here in the US and worldwide - Forrester employees obviously do not drive cars that require such servicing.

Meanwhile the Agricultural Chemical industry was strangely missed off the list - despite its members underpinning America's food industry - and the entire industry is now using ebXML messaging for their supply chain getting critical chemicals to farmers across the country for the vital farming cycles in the year. Oracle recently implemented an exemplar project for Helena Chemicals (as reported in SOA Web Services Journal) using ebXML B2B and BPEL and the industry RAPID standards for ebXML.

Also Forrester researchers clearly do not read InfoWorld - who awarded Xenos Inc the prestigious "Top 10 Healthcare Projects in 2006" - for their ebXML implementation.

And what about the relationship between ebXML and web services? Forrester notes "... and even though ebXML is incorporating some of the Web services specifications, a clear relationship between the two has yet to emerge". A quick inspection of Forrester's prior reporting in this area reveals a trend of such disinformation starting in 2003 and continuing to today's latest critique.

Let's spell this out so you do not have to waste $279 - the relationship has always been very clear - if you want proven and tried internationally approved standards based B2B interchanges for secure reliable eBusiness via the internet - then you have ebXML.

The ebXML technology itself can be viewed as a custom specialization of web services technology for use in formal B2B configurations. They both co-exist easily as Oracle's implementation of ebXML messaging and BPEL apply proves.

The foundation between web services and ebXML are identical - http, SSL, SOAP, digital certificates, internet server (Apache), and XML. The only differences are in the XML syntax itself overlaid on top. The ISO 15000 specifications detail these for ebXML, while the W3C and WS-I and OASIS have made numerous components for web services use.

1 - You use web services when you want quick DIY (Do-It-Yourself) simple point-to-point query/response exchanges using WSDL and SOAP or REST messaging and your applications handle resend and delivery status logic for you (loosey exchanges are not an issue). You also do not care about the information control policy - you send it and everyone can see it. And you have a very limited set of message types.

2 - You use ebXML when you need formal push and pull delivery asynchronously that is reliable and guaranteed. With ebXML you also get formal partner agreements and collaboration methods including versioning and message type control. You can restrict who can send and receive what from and to your systems.

3 - You use the web service WS-I stack with all its components when you need DOD levels of information control and security down to the byte level. Your customers are likely large corporations or governments who already have extended IT infrastructure.

Too bad that Forrester is advising its clients to not follow the success enjoyed by those industries and users and vendors already using ebXML.

Well at least those Forrester clients will not be bidding on or launching B2B projects this year - while that leaves the field wide open for everyone else.

Congratulations Forrester Research!

Randy Heffner, Gene Leganza, and Jacqueline Stone - take a bow - I hope you are enjoying eating your stone soup paid for by your sponsors' research money.

Related links:

Adoption of ebXML - Hiding in Plain Sight - Feb 2007

Comparing the Features of ebXML, WS-I, EDIINT and more - Mar 2007

There's obviously several things high on people's list - mine would include -

• a speedy amicable end to the Iraq conflict that is tearing the country apart - Bush needs to admit he is part of the problem and not the solution - and remove himself personally
• end to the attrocities in Darfur and US complicity in that
• more real focus on causes of global warming - especially cars, wasting power and laziness / profit making
• local sustainable power options for solar, wind and high efficiency wood - but NOT giant flawed wind farms
• healthcare systems that are not owned by insurance companies and plagued by ill people who eat tampered food to excess that makes large profits but results in chronic sickness
• voting systems that are based on open public standards, open source and paper verification and then last but not least
• the end to the scharade of software patents.

This last item is what I want to talk about here. My work includes much that is in the front line of software patents and public open standards and open source. The OASIS standards group is currently implementing new IPR modes for all its technical committees - one of which I chair.

The bottom line is that the apocolypse is when it has become impossible for software developers to write code for ANY reason - that someone else cannot claim is infringing on a patent they already have.

Folks - I now have concrete evidence we are there already and beyond - and what is more the "Big 5" - Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun and BEA know we are already there - and have been acting accordingly for the past 3 or more years. One such manifestation of this admission is the new OASIS IPR policies and especially the non-assertion covenants adopted by Sun and IBM (also while these seem very philanthropic there is an under current of implied threat to transgressors).

I have two US software patents - that took me much hard effort to get awarded - because I believe they represent true inventions - and the USPTO had a hard time even understanding the ideas in them - because they are used to an entirely different patent style - written by patent attourneys - not programmers.

This is all just like playing chess - assuming you could get chess playing patents. Imagine that an invention is a chess opening - and sound new openings - well those are really tough to do - even Kasparov with all his genius has only improved on existing opening theory - not created entirely new branches. But what if you could get a software patent merely by moving just one pawn one square over and claiming you just invented something entirely new?

That is exactly the situation today. But its even worse - imagine - since obviously "pawn shifting" by itself may be fairly limited and the PTO could reject on the basis of someone else having already logged that move - but wait it gets better - what if you could reference someone elses' patent and simply switch the "move order" of the sequence of play and claim an entirely new patent?! Guess what? You can!! The PTO also employs people to review your applications who are not actually real "chess players" - so the protection afforded by the constraint - "that the claimed invention cannot be anything that is self-evident to 'average practitioners in the field'" is minimal at best.

Let's look at my specific two patents - USPTO 5,909,570 and 6,418,400 - and see this in practice. There are now 22 new patents that reference my originals. Now this is quiet flattering in one sense - until you start to examine what is really going on. I'll come back to those actual 22 in a moment. Let's look at why there are 22 references first.

The PTO finds my patents regularly during their 16 hour review process of new patents - because they search for similar and existing work - and mine happens to be extensive in scope and applicability in their particular area. So you would think this would mean the reverse - that other people would have a tough time getting awarded patents that really do not offer anything new. Presto - all you have to do is REFER to my patent - and then suggest something extra - and now you have invented it! This is like there being a patent on doors - and you being able to get new patents by just attaching different handles in different positions on the door and claiming a new invention!

This does keep patent attorneys in work - but it is having the REVERSE EFFECT of what patents are supposed to do in the first place - foster an environment where business is encouraged to innovate and develop new products and services. Unfortunately writing code is now OUT - first you have to write a patent to defend your code - and then write your code. And worse - what about developing open public standards and open source that does not infringe somewhere? Frankly this has now become impossible - hence Sun and IBM's resorting to the threat of non-assertion covenants.

Let's go back and look at some of those 22 patents referencing mine - to see just how knowledgable the USPTO is about "playing chess" or developing new software?

Would I have awarded any of these 22 additional patents referencing 5,909,570 and 6,418,400?

7,120,663 Method and apparatus for updating XML data - This is incredulous "pawn shifting" that is entirely common practice in everyones XML code - well done NEC for getting this award!
7,114,123 User controllable data grouping in structural document translation - this is even more incredulous - IBM I tip my hat - practically every XML editor uses this obvious technique.
6,915,312 Data processing environment with methods providing contemporaneous synchronization of two or more clients - Starfish Software - you guys ever owned a Palm PDA? Yeah - I thought that is where this idea came from.
6,871,187 Translator for use in an automated order entry system - Dell - you guys are amazing - you've never heard of catalogues and order processing before? I'm stunned the USPTO have not either - because they gave you this patent.
6,757,739 Method and apparatus for automatically converting the format of an electronic message - Contivo Inc - when I first met these folks I realized their product infringed on my patent - and further more - that they did not understand how to do it better - because their method is weaker. Clearly the USPTO also did not get it either - because they allowed them a patent for something mine already does.
6,457,003 Methods, systems and computer program products for logical access of data sources utilizing standard relational database management systems - this is just IBM protecting itself from patent trolls - of course logical name resolution (aliases) is a standard industry wide technique - better get a patent on it before USPTO gives it out to someone who just wants to use it to blackmail large corporations.
6,601,071 Method and system for business to business data interchange using XML - Oracle take a bow - yours is the most outrageous and laughable of the bunch - how could the USPTO have given you a patent for processing data in and out of XML?!?

I've not covered off all 22 here - but safe to say most all of these exhibit the same sad litigany of the USPTO abject incompetence in the face of manipulation by slick abusers of the process.

What is truely disturbing is that this is just 22 patents here - while there are tens of thousands of software patents issued each year!

Can we all just admit that software patents have degraded to nothing more than just sets of "chess moves" that have no real bearing on what practitioners are doing in the field - quite the reverse - just threaten this vital sector of industry and make it impossible for small inventors, standards bodies, and those truely seeking to advance the field especially to do so without threat of poverty and ruin.

Congress and the EU between them should immediately disband the issuing and practice of software patents.

At least this seems a relatively easy decision to implement compared to the other items on my 2007 wish list - so maybe I'm not dreaming when I think this might just be attainable if enough people make enough protest?

References - ACM article - The patent holder's dilemma: Buy, Sell or Troll?

ABSTRACT
"The current patent process in many ways works against IT innovation by making the road to realization too dispiriting for today's independent inventors".

Many times we see ideas and products around us and intuitively see the simplicity, elegance and value - and that age old reaction - "why did I not think of that?".

Naturally there is also the reverse. Where something is so obviously ugly and a grubby attempt to mostly disenfrancise customers. The music / entertainment industry driven by Disney is a point in case - and its promotion of digital rights management (DRM) technology.

It is a sad state when we see quotes such as "If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed" - Disney Executive.

While the mainstream thrust of the software industry is towards open standards, open platform and open collaborative projects with open source, the message does not seem to have penetrated to people who are still trying to operate in a pre-dot-com mode of patent-own-monopoly as their business model. Collaborate-share-enable and the freedoms its provides through greater wealth creation does not seem to be getting through.

Many of these issues cut to the heart of what is a healthy democracy and who controls the means of distribution of information and content? The Defective by Design group have taken up the challenge of educating the public at large about the issues. They have a wealth of materials, videos and more online.

Meanwhile I foresee many more similar challenges and conflicts coming. One such example is the grubby attempt to extort dane-geld from hybrid car manufacturers based on pending patents issued. Again the old model and thinking applies - when people innovate and provide real solutions to burgeoning problems in society then their reward is become a target for the less well intentioned. Notice that the fundamental ideas behind hybrid gas-electric powerplants were first applied on railways to trains in the 1950's - so how can anyone realistic claim to have invented a whole new ground breaking idea here? Unfortunately the notion of what is a patentable or unique idea has been trivialized to the point of the absurd.

I prefer the notion of - Successful by Design.

I did a presentation recently to the PESC 3rd Annual Conference (Postsecondary-education Electronic Standards Council) on XML and its application to education systems needs.

XML is now entering its 3rd phase. Phase 1 was evanglism, Phase 2 was build-out by technology vendors, the 3rd phase is seamless usage by the general public in their daily lives. Pretty much like sending a FAX - people do that - but they do not have to know about Class3 protocols and device handshaking - all that technology stuff just "happens" for them. They put the paper on the scanner platter, enter the "address" and press "send".

So my focus was showing people how to learn to use freely available tools from sites such as Google combined with open source software tools to automate your business and life tasks.

The first example uses Google's Blogger site and shows how the RSS XML underneath peoples Blogs can power group collaboration tools and then turns simple email into a group knowledge base/coordination system. I'm using this right now for a soccer team resource center. The live demonstration site shown in the presentation gives details on how to do this yourself.

Similarly you can develop sophisticated photography slideshows using XML-enabled scripts. In an education context this is great for making teaching slideshows and learning/tutorial systems with graphics and photographs. And the students themselves can build these and learn too.

On to more examples of common place tools today - like seeing how XML scripts run voice response menu systems such as 1-800-555-8355 (TELLME) street navigation directions for anywhere in the USA.

The last segment is more technology geek focused and shows how to automate information integration systems using open source XML scripting to load data to/from database systems and the associated importance of understanding context and roles to keep processes simple and clear.

The PESC presentation can be found here.