Pearltrees: A Great New Tool for Bloggers and Journalists

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Oliver

PearltreesRecently, I’ve been working with a new tool that I think anyone that uses the web regularly is really going to appreciate: Pearltrees.

The company – which is based in France – has been developing this tool for a few years but in the last few days they have released their latest version and in my opinion it is now ready for prime time.

In a nutshell, Pearltrees allows you to very quickly and easily discover, organize and share the things you find on the web. This tool, which is truly a social web curation and collaboration tool, will enable you to quickly see a whole constellation of content specifically related to a post. More importantly, as additional links (or Pearls) are added to the original Pearltree, the tree in the post is updated in realtime making each Pearltree on a given topic a living reference to that topic. Furthermore, if you sign up for Pearltrees yourself, you can “pick” any specific Pearl or Pearltree you like from anyone else and then add it to your own personal Pearltrees content. Then, when the original creator of any Pearltree you picked adds content to that Pearltree, your own Pearltree is automatically updated with this new content. It’s a great way to drill down on a topic, to find people that share your interests and it’s also one of the fastest and easiest ways you’ll ever find to quickly and conveniently organize and share all the interesting stuff you discover while browsing the web.

For many, the most difficult thing about Pearltrees is understanding what it is and how it works without actually seeing it in action. Luckily, the new release has a feature that not only solves this problem it also makes this tool a new, and possibly indispensable new addition to any blogger’s arsenal.

Rather than try to explain in any more detail than I already have above, I thought that actually showing you a Pearltree that I’ve created would be one of the best ways for you to get familiar with what Pearltrees is and more importantly how it can help you organize content you have found, discover new content related to your interests, and finally share that content in a variety of ways.

Here’s what a Pearltree looks like:

As you can see, this is a Pearltree on Biofuel. When you look at it initially you are seeing a central structure with “Pearls” radiating off from it. Each of these individual Pearls is a URL (link) that the creator of the original tree has already placed within this tree – hopefully because it bears relation to the rest of the content in the tree.

By clicking any of these Pearls you’ll see an overlay appear on the site at which you are viewing the content. This overlay has the same controls as the actual Pearltrees site itself. These controls allow you to browse through the links one-by-one, to comment on the links or to “pick” a single Pearl or even the entire tree. This latter functionality requires that you create your own Pearltrees account (which is free).

When you pick someone else’s Pearltree you can choose where in your own Pearltrees account you’d like to place it. Once you do this a couple of cool things happens. First, the creator of the original Pearltree is notified that someone has picked one of his or her Pearls and secondly, as the original creator modifies that particular Pearltree (and most interestingly adds new Pearls to it), those updates appear simultaneously on the Pearltree you’ve added to your own account. In many respects “Picking a Pearltree” is like subscribing to an RSS feed only it’s visual – and providing that the creator is curating the content in a logical fashion – it is likely to be highly relevant to the primary topic of the tree.

There are a bunch of other really cool features associated with this new release. These include immediate notifications (both within Pearltrees itself and via email and eventually other modalities) as to when someone else picked one of your Pearltrees or commented on something in your account.

Beyond this, the new release features much improved navigation a short but very informative video on how you can get started using Pearltrees yourself and a much improved search algorithm. This last is really cool. When you enter a search term in the search box you’ll immediately see that lots of other Pearls congregate on your screen. The closer a Pearl is to the center of the screen the more closely related it is to your search.

The other way you can search is even more interesting. When you are browsing within your own account and you select an individual Pearltree you’ll see a small black “Pearl” right next to the Pearl you’ve selected. Clicking this will cause Pearltrees to perform a search that relates specifically to the content that you’ve already “Pearled”. This is the “discovery” part of the tool that I think people will find really interesting and useful. That’s because the search results this type of activity yields will give you a look at other people’s Pearltrees that are likely closely related to exactly what you find interesting.

One way to think of Pearltrees is like a very sophisticated, visually driven version of Delicio.us but with a much more socially oriented and collaborative way of discovering content and sharing new stuff you’ve found.

For content creators, embedding a Pearltree in your blog post or article will allow you to provide much more information, better context and a very interesting user experience to your readers while at the same time keeping them on your site.

As an example of how this could be used, think about websites that track celebrities. The owner of the site could create a Pearltree for each celeb they cover on that celebrity’s profile page. Then as things related to that celebrity are posted on the web the site-owner could add those links to that celebrity’s Pearltree. Not only will this provide a lot more information about the person, but people interested in news about that celebrity will be able to get that news all in one place. By maintaining the tree and keeping it current you will give people a reason to come back to your site over and over as new information is added.

There’s even more to Pearltrees than I’ve covered here but the best way to really understand what it does and how you can use it for browsing, blogging, research and more is simply to create your own account and get started using it.

As someone with a focus on social media I think this is a development that pushes social media in a new and exciting direction, one that has tremendous value to just about anyone that spends time browsing the web but especially for people that deal with lots of information and most particularly for people that want to share that information in a new, collaborative and highly effective way.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

[Most] Companies Don’t Get Social Media

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Oliver

smbandwagonAs someone that actively works in social media I’ve become progressively more convinced that the majority of companies don’t have a clue about social media or the importance it can play in the way a company presents itself.  Granted, there are some companies that do understand the potential benefits that they can derive from a properly conceived social media effort but far more not only fail to grasp just how valuable this new form or marketing and customer contact can be they also seem to be totally unaware of the pitfalls that a badly executed campaign can have.

My evidence for this is the people most companies are hiring for their social media efforts as well as the incredibly low pay they offer when they are hiring people to execute their social media strategies.

Check this out:

Social_Media_Jobs

Check out the pay offered for this group of social media listings.  Just what kind of people do these companies think they’ll get for $3.50 an hour?  This is less than half of the minimum wage here in California.  Not to be disrespectful of people that work for minimum wage but does it really make sense to trust the public facing aspects of your company to a person that would be willing to work for less than they’d be able to pull in doing ANY OTHER PAYING WORK?

These are the people on the front lines of your company.  They’re the first ones that are going to be communicating with your customers, getting your corporate message out there to the world, dealing with complaints, moderating disputes and hopefully building your online community.

To put it another way, would you trust your automobile to a mechanic that charged you $3.50 per hour to repair it?  And if you did, would you honestly be surprised if things went drastically wrong shortly after you picked the vehicle up from the garage?

I don’t think this issue is due to the fact that companies don’t have the money to spend, rather I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that senior management doesn’t really have a clue what a social media campaign is, how to execute one or whom they should bring on board to do the heavy lifting.

A company that really understands social media realizes just how crucial these people on the front lines can be and it hires (and pays) accordingly.  In fact the companies that really get it generally have a senior executive charged with the execution of their social media efforts and in turn, this individual either acts as the forward facing evangelist, community manager, corporate blogger, etc. on behalf of the company or he or she hires experienced, talented, educated people that themselves already have significant social media experience to execute the strategy that the executive has conceived.
What they don’t do is offer a few bucks an hour to whomever they can find to do the work.

The results can be correlated directly to which approach a company chooses to take – either they have a social media strategy that benefits the company in numerous ways or they have a social media disaster that results in a cobbled together and ineffective social media campaign that at best does nothing to bolster the company’s image and at worst can have disastrous results that give the company a black eye.

In the former case the company realizes the value of their efforts which reaffirms their decision to put real money and qualified personnel in community facing positions while in the latter it reaffirms their executive’s views that social media is not a viable arena in which to invest.

For those companies that fall into the latter group I have some advice: either make a real commitment to social media, invest in quality people (by paying a reasonable amount for qualified individuals that can show you how to execute a campaign) or simply abandon your efforts entirely.  This is not a playground for the fainthearted or uncommitted.  You’d be better off doing nothing then doing something half-baked and discovering too late that a bad social media strategy is much worse for your company than no strategy at all.

Posted in web2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Here’s a Great List of Free Open Source Software for Mac

Posted on August 16, 2009 by Oliver

You may have seen this list already, but I hadn’t come across it before just now and it was good enough I thought it was worth sharing in case anyone besides me had somehow missed this before. Enjoy.

Posted in Apple, Free Stuff, Mac Software, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Soap Suds for Kids

Posted on June 10, 2009 by admin
Help Me Bring Smiles to these Faces

Help Me Bring Smiles to these Faces

If you’re anything like me you spend a lot of time traveling for work.  Among other things, this means a lot of nights away from home in hotel rooms.  I’ll bet I’m not the only one whom, as a result of all these hotel-nights, has managed to accumulate quite a supply of personally-sized soaps, shampoos, lotions, conditioners, etc.

In fact many fellow travelers probably have a drawer or a basket under a sink someplace that contains many dozens of these aforementioned supplies.  Perhaps you even thoughtfully put a sampling of these out as a courtesy to house-guests from time to time.  I know I have.

Or really, I should say “used to”.

About three years ago it was brought to my attention by my girlfriend’s family that all these individually wrapped personal care products were perfect for a group of people that needed them far more than either I or my house-guests; underprivileged kids in developing countries all over the world.

When this came up it occurred to me that what for me amounted to a sacrifice of a totally inconsequential nature had the potential to be a gift with great – dare I even say profound significance for others.

In my case the products I was bringing home ended up being carried to Thailand where they were given to an orphanage in a small town in the southern part of Thailand.  To you and I these personal care products are at most a trivial convenience – we don’t experience any direct cost associated with the acquisition or use of these products and aside from making you look like the thoughtful host when your in-laws visit they mainly just take up space under a sink or in a drawer someplace, most likely gathering dust and ultimately destined for the rubbish bin when you do a spring cleaning or need to reclaim their space for something of greater tangible value.

Conversely, to the kids in the orphanage – and in every other place on the planet where there are kids that do not, on a daily basis, have access to things we take for granted – like soap, a toothbrush, shampoo or even a proper bath towel- these items can bring far more than cleaner teeth and skin.

I don’t see how anyone could consider this and not be impacted by the idea that something so basic could be so important.

When I was told that my “care package” had been delivered and that for these kids, many of whom have never had a birthday present or a single item of new clothing or really anything at all that they could consider their own, it was not only a source of improved hygiene, but much more important in my mind, a source of happiness, and a means to some improved self esteem, it became a mission for me to increase my impact in this simple but positive way – to take this same care package idea and extend it beyond a single orphanage and expand it to include many more kids in many more places.

You see, having a little pride in oneself, experiencing  the transformation from being unkempt to smelling nice and having clean teeth is something that all humans from all cultures can understand.  Everyone has experienced the difference in mental climate a hot shower and a warm bed can provide even on the worst day.

For me, the idea that some of these kids – through no fault of their own – have simply never had even a glimmer of these simple pleasures affects me deeply.  It also motivates me that it is possible through my own small efforts that one child at a time, I can actually make a difference.

These days I’m a bit more aggressive in my efforts to collect the individual soaps and shampoos and other supplies that the hotels I stay at provide for me.  For my own use I either bring my own products or at most open and reuse a single soap during my travel.  I make sure to pack up whatever products are provided each day so that I get a fresh supply each time my room is made up and I frequently ask the housekeeper for additional product.

When I tell them why I want extra stuff they all, without exception, are only too happy to load me up with whatever I can fit in my bag.  Hotel management might not like this practice too much, but for what they charge per night in a decent hotel they can afford a few cents extra so I can bring smiles to a few more faces.

Anyway, this got me thinking – if I could have the impact that I do all by myself, what would happen if I enlisted the efforts of my fellow tech-industry travelers?  That’s the real point of this post.  I want your help.

You don’t have to be as aggressive as I am about it, but if you like the idea of happy smiling kids – of providing something to the underprivileged at no real cost to you and if you want to quietly feel good about something you’re doing every time you’re on the road here’s what you can do:

Don’t waste the product you get in hotels each day.  Open just one or at most two items – use them until they are gone but be sure to put them away each day when you leave the room so the housekeeper gives you fresh products.  Don’t open these new ones.  Just toss them in your toiletries bag or in their own plastic bag (the small plastic bag in your ice bucket will work nicely).  Bring them home and put them in a box.

When the box is full send it to me and I’ll see that it’s delivered to someone who can really appreciate these products.  In many cases the kids will say prayers on your behalf so if you appreciate those sentiments make sure your name is associated with what you’ve sent.

It’s a bonus if you travel business class and can bring back the small toiletries kits you get for the flight – these have even better items including new toothbrushes, combs, socks, etc. that these children need desperately.

Once you have a shoebox worth of stuff, post it to me as follows:

Soap Suds for Kids c/o Oliver Starr
411 West 5th Street #240
Los Angeles CA 90013

Your help will not only make my day, but much more importantly you’ll make the days of many other small people who need and deserve a good day far more than I do.

Please pass this message on and feel free to repost.  The more folks that participate the more smiles we can create, the more self esteem we can foster and the better we can demonstrate that sometimes the smallest of kindnesses can also have the most profound impact upon all concerned.

Posted in Blog Power, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Singularity is Here: Google Launches CADIE

Posted on April 1, 2009 by admin

Considering that it may be the end of life as we know it, Google’s announcement of CADIE is surprisingly low key.  The world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE), according to Google, has done what many thought was impossible and what even the most optimistic among us predicted would take twenty years or more: passed the Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil was unavailable for comment, however anyone that has read his seminal work,
The Singularity is Near”, has an appreciation for both the significance and the peril that this event portends.

Long the fear of certain scientists, among them Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, the birth of true AI will have massive ramifications for every human on the planet.  In a nutshell the concern is that the incredible speed with which an autonomous AI can learn will virtually instantly render such a creation the most intelligent “being” on the planet and frighteningly, one that may be able to defend itself from attack (such as being shut down) and which may not necessarily determine that humans are either friendly to itself or (more likely) friendly to the environment.

It is plausible, perhaps even predictable that such a state of affairs will cause a device like CADIE to determine that the best course of action is the systematic elimination of humans from either positions in which decisions impacting the planet can be made or potentially even elimination of humans altogether.

In fact, CADIE has already created a YouTube Video that has some disturbing suggestions that this thought process has already begun.

I can’t help but wonder, given that the Google Engineers believe that CADIE has bugs but CADIE herself (it prefers to be thought of as female) believes that she is already flawless and incapable of making mistakes.

A reference on CADIE’s own home page that “all our webpages belong to CADIE” may be a prelude of things to come.  This may just be the all time Darwin Award Winner, however no one is likely to be around to collect the prize if CADIE gets out of control a situation that may have already occurred.

Posted in End of Days, google, Singularity | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A Personal Invitation to the GTD Global Summit: a conference you can’t afford to miss

Posted on January 29, 2009 by admin

As you may know if you’ve read this site previously, I work for the David Allen Company as the Editor of GTDtimes, the community hub for all things GTD.  David, the author of both “Getting Things Done: the art of stress free productivity” and “Making it All Work: winning at the game of work and the business of life” and the rest of the David Allen Company team have been hard at work putting together what may well be one of the most important and valuable conferences you could possibly attend, particularly given the current economic environment and the resulting need to take your productivity and capabilities to a new level not merely to excel but possibly simply to survive.

Here’s why David thinks people should attend the conference in his own words:

[YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU5rfamXaww&autoplay=0, 460]

Incidentally, much of the original impetus for this even was generated by my late friend Marc Orchant who had spoken passionately of the need for a convocation of GTD practitioners where we could meet, exchange ideas, share stories, educate one another, learn, develop new best practices and help ourselves get closer to that effortless state of truly having a mind like water. I will be there and hope to see many of you there too.

Posted in Blog Power, GTD/Getting Things Done, Marc Orchant, Personal, Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

iPhone Phones Home, Tells Everything

Posted on December 20, 2008 by admin

Caveat: I am not a developer so what I am about to reveal may or may not be news to the developer community.  Nevertheless, this is not something that I was aware of previously and I have not seen any mention of this in the media that I subscribe to (which is a fairly broad cross section of the online press).

Further, to my knowledge this is not something that has been specifically authorized by me in the course of my use of either my computer or the software on it or my iPhone and the software running there.  I did not grant permission for this information to be transferred anywhere and I did not ever to my knowledge see any request to allow this information to be collected much less shared and shared without my knowledge.

Here’s the deal.  Today I was going through the console on my Mac Book Pro trying to see if I can figure out why it suddenly won’t display anything on the screen (I was doing this using LogMeIn since I could not work on the computer locally since the display has apparently died.

During the process of digging through the console to see if there was any obvious cause for the completely unexpected display failure I came across something that I found as unexpected as the aforementioned problem and which I (and possibly other iPhone owners) will find very disturbing.

As you can see, this is a snapshot of my console log file.  It shows some surprising information – at least from my perspective.  Unless I am completely misinterpreting this information it looks as if the iPhone is logging everything that happens to it and I mean everything, from usage stats on the baseband to which applications are installed, when they are used and when they malfunction, and then, when you connect your iPhone to iTunes the phone downloads all this information to your console where it is logged.  Further, judging from the text adjacent to the baseband logging details this information has been “submitted”.

This begs the question: SUBMITTED WHERE???

Again, I wasn’t asked if I wanted this information collected and I sure as hell wasn’t asked if I wanted it submitted either.  If I am correct and what is going on here is that without my prior knowledge let alone my consent this data is being transmitted back to Apple for their own purposes (after all with literally hundreds of crashes of the mobile Safari browser on this iPhone alone, if the data were being used for my benefit someone would have contacted me don’t you think?) using my computer to collect the data and my Internet connection to transport it.

When a Microsoft application crashes and the crash reporter wants to send information back to Microsoft they have the courtesy to ask your permission.  They also take time to explain in writing what is being sent to them and what is being done with it.  They make certain guarantees at this time as well about personally identifying information and how that data is to be used.

I fail to see where such courtesies are being extended to me by Apple.  I fail to see an explanation as to what is being collected, whether or not it is personally identifying or what Apple intends to do with this information once they’ve managed to snoop it from my phone and computer.

Frankly I think this is outrageous.  The fact that this data is being collected at all without requesting permission to do so is bad enough.  The fact that it appears to be sent via clandestine transmission to Apple without any prior disclosure seems to be a criminal trespass based upon my understanding of the privacy laws in this country.

This strikes me as a grotesque abuse of my trust.  What if I had personal medical information stored on my phone?  At this point how would i know who at Apple had accessed this information or with whom it had been shared – again all without my knowledge or consent.

Since when did owning a mobile phone void one’s right to privacy or exempt a company from the need to disclose their data collection policy?  When did Apple wake up and decide that it was okay to spy on their customers in this truly repulsive fashion?

Now, as I said at the outset of this post, I am not a developer so it is possible that either this is something that has previously been discussed and I am late to the party – it is also possible that I am misunderstanding something about these console log statements and that what I think is going on really isn’t.

However, on the off chance that I am neither late to the party nor misunderstanding these log files then this is a real issue that deserves some real attention.  I sincerely doubt that I am alone in feeling completely raped by Apple’s data collection policies and the fact that I don’t appear to have been included in the decision making process about which data will be logged, collected and reported regarding my use of a device that I bought and paid for and for which I have not in any obvious way been notified of zero privacy nor authorized anyone to keep tabs on my beyond my approval for AT$T to track my usage of their network for billing purposes.

Is this grounds for a class action?  I’ll let the lawyers tell me the answer.  Is this grounds for a consumer-company smackdown.  I think it is.  If what I think is going on is really going on then it’s time to put Apple in its place.  The back door was bad enough but this latest is simply egregious.

Posted in Apple, big brother, Blog Power, iPhone, mobile | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Remembering Marc Orchant – gone one year today, very much in my thoughts…

Posted on December 8, 2008 by admin
marc_and_sue_by_scoble

marc_and_sue_by_scoble

I can hardly believe that it’s been a year since the world lost the irreplacable soul, friend, father, coach, mentor, husband and so much more wrapped up in the being of a man I knew as Marc Orchant.

My time knowing Marc was much too brief – barely two years, yet in that short time he had a profound influence on my life- an influence that carries on without him in so many ways both big and small.

Marc and I had a regular routine consisting of Skype, phone, twitter and email that carried on throughout the say comprising multiple cross threaded dialogs – we were very present in one anothers lives even though I lived in California while Marc had no intention of moving from his beloved New Mexico.

Anyone that knew Marc, even a little, knows that he was the consummate educator/geek.  He loved technology and he loved helping people discover how useful it was for themselves.  He was very much the Zen Master of technology – giving people just enough help that they could sort things out themselves and thus own the knowledge rather than fixing whatever it was and creating another dependent tech user.

Marc had an almost childlike love of things shiny – much like my own – however while one might see me as a person who refuses to grow up Marc’s delight was more sage – wiser somehow – he was wiser in so many ways.

A short time after meeting Marc and beginning to work with him at Foldera I knew that we’d be friends for life.  I had no idea that in this case that meant such a short, short time.

In any case I am rambling incoherently because I’m still not ready to accept that he’s gone and that in this lifetime I won’t have the gift of his friendship, the benefit of his counsel or the pleasure of his intellect in my own life. The world seemed darker the day Marc left us and there are still so many shadows were he used to light things up.

Later today I’ll be flying back from London to LA and hopefully will be able to share a few of my experiences with Marc from the prior couple of years.  If anyone reading this has anything they’d like to share please comment or send me an email (oliver at owstarr dot com) and I will post it for you.  If you are interested in sharing anything productivity or GTD related that originated with or relates to Marc, including content he published previously – I’ll be posting that sort of material to GTDtimes.

Posted in Marc Orchant, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Lance Armstrong’s Second Comeback: stuff of legends or death of one?

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Oliver

Well, it appears it is official, Lance Armstrong, the uncontested best Tour de France rider ever with 7 tour victories has announced his intention to return to the sport with the goal of competing in the 2009 Tour de France.

According to Armstrong spokesman, Mark Higgins, Lance isn’t racing to “win second”.    I know Lance and I don’t think he would race for second.  Lance hates losing more than any person I have ever known.  And as someone that has spent the better part of my life in very competitive environments from the pressure cooker of the Olympic Training Center for four years to the world of venture capital funded high-tech start-ups I have been around some of the toughest competitors you can imagine.

Some pundits are already suggesting that Lance can’t win and that it is possible that he won’t even be the protected leader of his likely team, Astana – I suggest that these pundits need to brush up on their Lance history.  He won the tour just a year after nearly dying of cancer.  Hardly the sort of preparation that one would call ideal for optimal performance.

They say that 37 is an impossible age at which to win the tour citing the statistic that the oldest winner in tour history was 34 and he won the race before the second world war.  They forget that Joop Zoetemelk, a Dutch rider, finished 2nd in the tour during his 38th year and that in this same year Joop also won the Amstel Gold Race and the World Professional Road Championships – not too bad for a guy that would have been eligible to race in the “Master’s” category here in the states!

Frankly I don’t think that Lance would make this decision in a cavalier fashion.  Most likely he did so in consultation with his coach, Chris Carmichael and maybe his doctors (whomever they are at this time).  My guess would be that it wasn’t just talking either that yielded the decision.  Lance probably did some pretty heavy duty physiological testing and found that his own biological capabilities are still better than any other current cyclist.

I can’t imagine that Lance would put his record on the block so casually.  After all, the athlete that retires at the top of his game (and stays out of the sport from then on) is vanishingly rare.  I’m sure there are many folks like me out there who hope that if Lance is going to be in the TDF starthouse in July of 09 that he has every reason to expect to do what he has done in every one of his last  tours; dominate from start to finish.

In many respects the tour may well be easier than in prior years.  Depending upon the riders still serving out suspensions for doping violations Lance may face a field as compromised as the one that we watched in the most recent edition, a race I’d characterize as a shadow of the races Lance had won in years past.  In fact I could hardly reconcile this past year’s tour with a professional event at all.  The caliber of the top riders has been so reduced due to the doping penalties doled out seemingly en mass.

At least I hope that Lance has been so careful in his decision-making.  Nothing is sadder than to watch a great champion come back to the sport that made him famous and see the same individual humbled by age, by younger athletes, and by the human weakness of wanting just once more to stand in the limelight of that white shining moment and know what it feels like to be number one at something just one last time.

Good Luck, Lance, and God Speed.  If you’re going to go for it please let us see the Lance we remember and not one we wish we could forget.

Posted in Personal, Sport | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Controversy at TC50, Who Owns the Technology IP: Swype or Shapewriter?

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Oliver

TC50: Swype a company that claims to be at the leading edge of fundamentally altering the way we input data into tablet and touchscreen devices has just demonstrated their technology – an interesting new way of tracing the letters in a word without lifting your stylus or finger and the word appears along with a selection of alternate words in case you perhaps didn’t get the exact word you wanted.

What’s strange about this is the fact that another application, WordPad by a company called Shapewriter appears to have the exact same type of technology already deployed as an iPhone application.

So the question becomes who owns the intellectual property?  Does one – Swype or the other –  Shapewriter have the key patent claims and is the other infringing?  Tough to say.  What I can say is that having downloaded WordPad on my iPhone it is a pretty interesting new means of entering text and it is fairly evident that with use one could become quite proficient at entering even large amounts of text this way.

When asked if they have any competition, Swype founders at TC50 replied that their was one application which they acknowledged was very similar; Wordpad, however they said that they were confident that in a side by side comparison that WordPad wouldn’t compare favorably to Swype.  More specifically they stated that they believed their algorithm was more sophisticated that it offered more functionality and better ease of use than WordPad. 

Having not had the chance to try Swype yet I can’t say how it compares to WordPad.  Wordpad is pretty sophisticated and I have found it to be fairly usable.  My main complaint is simply that you can’t use WordPad across the entire iPhone interface and this limitation severaly limits the utility of the application.  Building this functionality into the interface in general would be a much better approach and one that I’m certain would be welcomed by smartphone users everywhere.

As for the brewing controversy – I’ll be checking in with both companies to see what the real situation is and if something breaks in this regard I’ll post an update.

Posted in Blog Power, iPhone, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments