I’ve written about it before, how the patent process is fast approaching spam levels. We now have offensive patents (offensive in more ways than intended), defensive patents, speculative patents, frivolous patents, even downright fraudulent ones.

The New Scientist informed me that:

100 patents are issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office every working hour, overstretching staff there, Congress heard last week

So I thought I’d check on precisely what the USPTO guys told Congress. Here’s a quote:

Patent examiners completed 332,000 patent applications in 2006, the largest number ever, while achieving the lowest patent allowance error rate — 3.5% — in over 20 years. At 54%, the patent allowance rate also was the lowest on record. Patent allowance rate is the percentage of applications reviewed by examiners that are approved. The agency also processed a record number of trademark applications in 2006. USPTO trademark examining attorneys took final action on 378,111 trademark applications, a 36% increase over the previous year, and achieved a record low final action error rate, with mistakes found in only 3.6% of the trademark applications reviewed in FY 2006.

Link.

Maybe it’s time to publish lists of the top 10 patent applicants by volume; we publish car emissions and gas consumption, so why not do this?

You’ve probably seen a number of these at one time or the other. But this one is special, it is really worth watching. Check out this link.

There will come a time when nobody watches ads any more, except the ones they choose to. Which may be time- and place- shifted anyway.

What they will watch is stuff like this. I for one am looking forward to it.

Those of you who’ve made the time to read the kernel for this blog will be familiar with the phrase “connected not channelled”….. that’s what came to mind when I read John Battelle’s fascinating interview of Michael Wesch of That Video fame.

Here are the quotes I really identified with:

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.

My friends [……..] are experts in relationships and grasp the ways that we are all connected in much more profound ways than we do. They go so far as to suggest that their own health is dependent on strong relations with others. When they get sick they carefully examine their relations with others and try to heal those relations in order to heal their bodies. In contrast, we tend to emphasize our independence and individuality, failing to realize just how interconnected we are with each other and the rest of the world, and disregarding the health of our relationships with others.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

That’s why our battles on identity, intellectual property rights, digital rights and the use of the internet are so crucial. If we get the battles right, we can really make an impact. But only if we get them right.

James McGovern asks How Come Enterprise Architects Don’t Embrace Agilism?

It’s a question that’s troubled me for many years now; it belongs to the same class of question as How Come Everyone Hates Architecture Groups But Wants To Hire The Architects and How Come Enterprise Architects Hate Bus Architectures?

Five reasons:

• The dinosaur power of the silo, be it departmental or functional
• The continuing fear, across the enterprise, that standardisation somehow leads to lack of flexibility
• The lack of expertise in process design and management, again across the enterprise
• Executive-level unwillingness to consider enterprise architecture as strategic, and the consequent fossilisation of architecture groups
• Incapacity of current enterprise IT funding models to reflect the creation, consumption and operation of reusable components accurately

Applications by themselves aren’t agile. Architectures by themselves aren’t agile. But they can enable business agility. [Note: For those who are interested, I would recommend the Ross/Weill/Robertson book on Enterprise Architecture as Strategy].

A business can be agile. If its people, processes and partners are themselves agile.

Right now, enterprise agility is hard to come by anywhere you look. The battle between professions is set to continue, we are not yet at that point of consilience. As a result, we have less-than-perfect models of partnering and outsourcing, with political intent often foreshadowing pragmatic value. The consequence of this is that processes are broken dried-up spaghetti, which suits the silo troglodyte.

Generation M will change all that. Tomorrow’s employees will not put up with the organisational treacle that is seen as normal today.

To be continued.