LIVEdigitally

I saw my first Vista demo last summer during a partners briefing/demo day.  It looked awesome.  Sure it’s “inspired” by OS X, but the two have gone back and forth “sharing” for years anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.  Vista looked like a much-improved XP, with a focus on better security, better networking, and an overall better experience. 

I had absolutely no intention of doing an upgrade from XP, but figured I’d sooner-or-later get a new laptop with Vista pre-installed.  That’d make the perfect solution – I would get the best of both worlds. I figured, hey, when’s the next time I’ll be in Haiti?

My brand new laptop, as in the one that came with Vista pre-installed, shipped with out-of-date drivers.  Let me see if that point is clear enough here.  I bought a laptop, in the store, took it home, turned it on.  Wrong drivers.  Imagine buying a car, at a dealer, and they left the wrong tires on it. 

It’s taken me a couple of weeks, but now I can proudly say that my brand-spanking-new laptop no longer crashes when I close the lid, nor do I lose the right-mouse button for hours on end.  Anymore.

Clearly my productivity is at an all-time high.

Over the past few years I’ve landed onto more and more PR firms’ press lists, which generally means I get a lot of press releases I don’t really care much about. Frankly, a lot of those releases just aren’t intended for me, but it’s all a numbers game (for both sides, really, and I’m still waiting for more PR firms to act upon my blogger pr tips). Rarely do I receive releases from the government that grab my attention. Today was one of those grabs.

Headline:

United States Patent and Trademark Office Begins Pilot Program to Open Patent Examination Process for Online Public Participation

Key details:

the USPTO announced that this pilot program to test the value of public participation in the patent examination process will run for one year.

The custom-designed Web site facilitates:

• review and discussion of posted patent applications
• sharing of research to locate references to relevant earlier publications
• submission of these prior art references with an explanation of relevance
• annotating and evaluating submitted prior art
• winnowing of top ten prior art references, which, together with commentary, will be forwarded to the USPTO
• patent education to inform public participation
• forwarding of public submissions directly to the USPTO for consideration

The goal of opening up the examination process for public participation is to enable better decision making by the patent examiner and improve patent quality.

Kudos to the USPTO for taking some cues from the burgeoning citizen journalism industry.  Hm, “industry” is probably the wrong word, but that’s not important right now.

The site is fairly impressive. Lots of community features, well beyond just forums (ah yes, another online profile). After reading through a few patents and their discussions, I certainly hope that this process might help “Englishize” patents a bit more, as they are still as abstract as ever. I fear this’ll be the big obstacle to prevent more communal participation. I wonder if they too will make a Facebok plug-in? I certainly think that’s more useful than their integration with SecondLife!

There’s a ton of griping these days about how much reform is needed in the patent process. Here’s a chance for all the gripers to show their character. Get involved. Click here to share your voice in a new kind of P2P, they call it Peer to Patent (more about them here).