Posts tagged Passes
Startup’s Petition Raises $3M in 24 Hours if Senate Passes Crowdfunding Act
Jan 31st
“We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it’s illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense.”
That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the “Democratizing Access to Capital Act” (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowd fund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.
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Different From A Kickstarter Project
The notion of crowd funding a startup is fundamentally different than that of endorsing a project on Kickstarter. At Kickstarter, people fund projects and have no ownership over the project once it is completed. It becomes a lot more complicated when the notion of investing in actual companies is taken into account.
Right now, the only entities that can invest in startups are those that are accredited investors such as venture capital firms or venture banks. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act of 2011 would do would amend the Securities Act of 1933 that outlines when and how investments in companies can be made through the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is where a mess of SEC rules and regulations come into play. Much of the regulations that the SEC implements are designed to protect the investor. The Securities Act of 1933 was put in place in 1933, four years after the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression and caused many affluent American’s to lose their fortunes. It was a necessary act that helped protect people but also spur U.S. businesses. To a certain extent, the Democratizing Access to Capital Act fits in the same realm.
Sponsored by Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the bill comes three years after the market bust in 2008 that started what we now refer to as “The Great Recession.” Many political and business leaders in the U.S. are looking towards the technology sector to lead America back to the heights of economic prosperity. The Wall Street Journal today published an article saying that the next economy will be based on three pillars: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. It is clear that the U.S. has the technological prowess to create a dynamic new economy. Yet, with capital markets spread thin, the next big American company working on a technological advance could die for lack of funding before it even gets its feet off the ground.
Tremendous Impact
The impacts of the Democratizing Access to Capital Act could be tremendous. It would open up the flow of cash to startups from real people. The act would allow a single non-accredited investor to put money into a startup they has the power to create jobs.
“Think of it as Kickstarter for equity, where everyday non-accredited individuals can invest up to $1k in a startup they believe in,” said Daniel Sullivan, one of the founders of WeFunder and the founder of crowdsourcing startup Crowdly. “I think this is a really important issue that involves how the general tech consumer can help drive the economy.”
The other two founders of WeFunder are Nicholas Tommarello of Escapist and developer Nick Plante.
Some may think that startups like WeFunder are looking to disrupt the venture capital industry. That is far from the truth. Venture capitalists and bankers are not going anywhere. Startups still need guidance, mentors, legal support and infrastructure that VCs can offer them. They also have more money and better insider knowledge than the individual non-accredited investor. For example, just look to the $2.7 billion that VC firm Andreesen Horowitz has raised in the last three years. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act does is lower the bar for the transference of money for startups looking to build a great idea. The ability of money to flow freely across the ecosystem should be of great benefit to all involved.
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YouTube Passes 20 Billion Video Views In One Month
Nov 28th
Online video viewership reached record levels in October, with YouTube passing the 20 billion views mark for the first time. That number represents a little less than 50% of all videos watched in the U.S., according to the latest statistics shared by comScore. U.S. Internet users watched an…
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Zuckerberg Passes Brin & Page On Forbes’ Rich List
Sep 22nd
Scoreboard: Facebook guy – 1, Google guys – 0. Or, more accurately: Facebook guy – $17.5 billion, Google guys – $16.7 billion (each). Those are the estimated net worths of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as reported in the…
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Patent Reform Passes the Senate with Teeth, Heart Missing
Sep 9th
Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed the House’s version of the latest patent reform bill, H.R. 1249, the America Invents Act, by a vote of 89 to 9. During a speech to Congress yesterday, Pres. Obama praised the Senate for that action, and vowed to sign the bill. When he does, America’s patent system will shift to a standard used by much of the rest of the world: a “first-to-file” system intended to ease some of the burden on inventors to prove originality.
Also remaining in the final bill is a vastly expanded post-grant review system designed to move the process of challenging a patent’s legitimacy from litigation to administration – from the courtroom to a larger, more funded U.S. Patent Office that will include a new agency called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. But missing from the bill is the thing that launched it in the first place: an initiative to replace the system of determining damages and, in so doing, reduce the amount of huge jury awards.
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The system that the current bill has completely abandoned would have had courts determine the amount of damages in an infringement case based on an expert estimate of how much the uninfringed-upon patent would have generated in revenue in a healthy market. The original language looked like this:
The court shall conduct an analysis to ensure that a reasonable royalty… is applied only to that economic value properly attributable to the patentee’s specific improvement over the prior art. In a reasonable royalty analysis, the court shall identify all factors relevant to the determination of a reasonable royalty under this subsection, and the court or jury, as the case may be, shall consider only those factors in making the determination.
The extent of that change would have been enormous, with the brunt of the impact felt most keenly by technology portfolio holding companies. These are the companies that license intellectual property to other firms and (besides sue companies) do nothing else. If a party had no intention to produce or manufacturer actual products based on its technology portfolio, a complainant would have to demonstrate that it would have licensed that technology for a reasonable sum to someone else who would have. If that expert analysis prevailed upon the jury, then the most the portfolio company would have been able to reap in damages would be damages equal to lost licensing fees – unless the defendant was judged to have infringed upon that portfolio willingly, in which case the amount could be tripled.
Still, triple the market value would probably never have (in our lifetimes, at least) merited the use of the letter “B.” And that would have changed not just the patent system, but our lives.
Follow: The perceived value of a patent portfolio today is judged not by what legitimate licensing fees it would reap from a healthy market, but by what those patents might fetch in court. Corporations use infringement litigation as sources of alternate revenue, in technology industries where consumer purchases will never hope to repay for the enormous outlays that companies have invested in infrastructure. Had patent reform legislation turned this system completely upside down, mandating that the value of litigation is no more than the value of the market, entire multi-billion-dollar portfolios would have suddenly been perceived as worthless. It would have been as if someone had spray-painted all the poker chips on the table white.
Just yesterday, as Bloomberg News reported, HTC filed a new patent suit against Apple claiming infringement upon patents that Google had just purchased from Motorola Mobility, in the first stage of its takeover deal of that manufacturer. It would appear that Google sold HTC those same patents in order to launch a countersuit to protect Android’s stake in the game. If the value of patents were perceived as a function of the marketplace rather than of their possible jury award value, this deal might never have been made. And quite possibly, the whole Motorola buyout offer might never have happened.
And quite possibly, the whole establishment of this Android intellectual cartel against iOS might never have happened. Or the buyout of Nortel’s portfolio. Or Qualcomm promoting standards that rely on some of the technology in Nortel’s portfolio. The whole house of cards would have tumbled from there.
Which makes the passage of this particular bill a lost opportunity. Now that a patent reform bill has been passed, and the European Union effectively appeased, Congress will consider that the act of reform is effectively done for their lifetimes. In fairness, though, some of what the original bill intended has come to fruition anyway, by way of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2007, the high court ruled that source code itself is not a patentable thing (to infringe upon software, you have to copy the idea behind it); and separately that any marketed device that is found to be an improvement upon a patented concept cannot be said to infringe upon that concept. These were huge victories for open source developers who, as a result, could be allowed to see up close how commercial software is structured and create better software that supersedes the commercial concept. Rendering something obsolete is not copyright infringement.
And also in fairness, U.S. district court judges are invoking their own rights and privileges anyway, by utilizing the fair-market-value formula in limiting the damages juries may award. But that assumes that cases end up being tried by judges likely to use those formulas, rather than mysteriously in one particular district in Marshall, Texas. The current patent reform act’s language does state that cases will be tried in the district associated with the parties involved. It no longer states that parties cannot move to relocate the venue to anyplace of their choice, which means Marshall, Texas will probably remain the Las Vegas of patent trials.
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Google Passes on GooglePleaseHire.ME Guy’s WTF Marketing
Sep 8th
It’s official: the moustachioed, scotch-swilling GooglePleaseHire.ME guy has landed his dream job. But it’s not with Google.
After a month of self-described OMG PR stunts and WTF marketing for a job with the tech giant (or one o…
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Israel Passes Anti-Boycott Law: This Week in Online Tyranny
Jul 13th
Israel makes boycotts illegal. One of the time-tested, non-violent ways in which people have attempted to force grass-roots change is by boycotting the products or services of an entity whose actions they dislike. Now, Israel made such boycotts illegal.
Given how deeply social media is twined into contemporary political action, this makes certain types of online actions as illegal in Israel as they are in non-democratic countries.
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Here’s how Roi Maor explains it on +972 magazine.
“Simply put, the law seeks to penalize those who call for boycotting Israel, the settlements, or anyone related to the occupation. If a person, for example, calls for a boycott of academic institutions that participate in the occupation, he could be sued in civil court, and ordered to pay compensation. If a company agrees not to purchase products manufactured in the settlements, it could be barred from government contracts. If an NGO joins the global BDS call, it could be stripped of its non-profit status, and compelled to pay taxes as if it was a commercial firm.”
Although boycotts may be conceived of as a tool of those outside Israel to force a change in the country’s actions regarding Palestinians, it is, internally, considered a huge obstacle to freedom of speech. Given the increasing movement toward domestic protests against Palestinian policy in Israel, it seems much more likely to effect Israelis than anyone else. It is a huge wrong turn for Israel.
Belarus protestors arrested due to social media. Last week, Belorussian police arrested 200 people in the capital alone for protesting the neo-Stalinist regime. They were able to arrest so many so quickly because this protest is known as “Revolution Through Social Networks.” For five weeks, organizers have arranged flash mobs via social networking sites.
Now, those same organizers are faced with the challenge of a police force watching, and sometimes shutting down, the popular sites they have been using. The police have also engaged in disinformation on sites like Twitter, a common tactic of repressive regimes who’ve woken up to the use of social media by political opponents. They are hoping a combination of more distributed calls for physical protests, along with “older” tech (filming police brutality and distributing it via DVD) will help continue the momentum and attract less techie dissidents to the cause.
Egypt resurrects Information Ministry. In a scene from a mummy movie, Egypt, largely controlled by the military in the wake of Mubarak’s departure, has brought the notorious Information Ministry back to life. Though considered a force for change during the protests which chased the long-term president and his clique from power, the military is now regarded by many to be the primary obstacle to reform in the country. It has taken on a rigid and repressive posture it did not seem to have before. The military courts have sentenced a blogger to prison time and remanded many others for interrogation.
The Information Ministry was abolished in February. Now, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi has brought it back and appointed Osama Heikal, former editor-in-chief of the Al-Wafd newspaper, as its minister. Tantawi asked Heikal to “reorganize the Egyptian media and draw up a plan that addresses all the shortcomings that came from abolishing the post of minister of information.”
Another blow to the possibilities of change in Egypt. Not a terminal one, but far from trivial.
U.A.E. blogger’s trial to resume next week. Ahmed Mansour, a blogger who was arrested in April, went to his initial trial session on June 14. He returns next week. Mansour had created a petition calling for democratic reform in the autocratic emirates.
Tel Aviv photo by ZeHawk, Israel protest photo by Neta
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JavaScript Passes Java in Popularity in Open Source Knowledge Base
Apr 5th
Programming language adoption is tough to determine, but always of interest. We’ve looked at a couple attempts to measure it before: a Github language survey and the TIOBE Index. Now RedMonk has published some data from code management vendor Black Duck.
Black Duck has a knowledge base containing a huge amount of open source code. It gave RedMonk data regarding how many lines of each programming language can be found in its knowledge base. It’s not a perfect representation of language usage, but it provides some insight into what open source developers are doing.
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JavaScript saw big growth in 2010, unsurprisingly. In fact, it surpassed Java, which dropped off. C is still the most popular, and actually had a small bump between 2009 and 2010.
RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady concludes:
With the caveat, then, that the above data is simply what’s measurable by Black Duck and cannot therefore be considered representative in a strict statistical sense of developers worldwide, it may be time for you to look at JavaScript. And maybe node.js, while you’re at it.
You can find our collection of resources for learning JavaScript here and for learning Node.js here.
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