Google and Microsoft, tech giants embroiled in a competitive battle that has spanned many years and will continue to rage for many years to come, have teamed up to take down a Texas-based patent troll’s geotagging patent that they claim has been used in lawsuits against more than 300 companies, many of which are their customers or partners.
The news was first reported yesterday by The Times Of India as far as I can tell.
The defendant in the case, geo-location technology provider GeoTag, is trying to make coin from its US Patent, No. 5,930,474, entitled “Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information”.
The patent was originally applied for in 1996 and granted in 1999. Microsoft and Google, who fear for their respective online mapping services to get targeted as well, claim there was prior art at the time of filing that the USPTO did not care to take into account.
GeoTag reportedly paid a whopping $119 million to obtain the patent.
The patent has, however, “changed ownership at least five times,” with the current owner headed by one of the patent inventors, according to the complaint. GeoTag, meanwhile, is plotting an IPO and has filed documents with the SEC to sell shares at $6.25 each.
Microsoft and Google seek to invalidate the applicable patent, prove that the technology is not used in Google Maps or Bing Maps, but also pleaded for a judge to order GeoTag to stop suing so many of its customers and partners over their store locator services.
Let’s hope the patent troll loses, big time.
Patents should be used to protect companies that produce actual, innovative products and services, not to make greedy people behind non-practicing entities enormously wealthy without them ever producing anything, let alone selling a product or service to anyone.
This guest post is by Regina Scharf of Deep Brazil.
Have you ever considered blogging in a language other than your own? You definitely should.
One year ago, when I started Deep Brazil, a blog that shows aspects of my country that are seldom in the media, I had a problem: there was no point in publishing it in my native language, Portuguese. A foreigner who can read Portuguese has access to millions of websites, magazines, and books about the country, right? So, it had to be in English.
Why not French, my other native language? Or Spanish, a language I’m fluent in? Because half a billion internet users—one in every 14 people in the planet—utilize English to surf the Web. It would be silly not target the biggest crowd.
The logic was good, but writing in English was a drag. Portuguese is my main professional tool, since I have been a journalist for over 25 years. I could do a killer job in Portuguese. Now, even if I am proficient in English, I definitely cannot write with the same spark in this language.
Despite this challenge, my decision proved right: exchanging Portuguese for English allowed me to stand out from the crowd and occupy a niche that was under-explored.
Should you considered blogging in any other language than English? Why would you even bother to talk to those who don’t read in your own language? I will give you four good reasons:
They will rule: English is the dominant language of the Internet, but it will be beaten by Chinese in the next few years. Today, around 537 million people have English as their primary language for web navigation and 444 million internet users prefer Chinese. But, according to recent forecasts by The Next Web, the Internet is growing so fast in China that that country’s users will soon overtake the English-speaking community.
It is less crowded: There is an overwhelming volume of information published in English. Because of that, several blogging niches are close to saturation. If you decide to start a blog on technology or food, for instance, your chances of succeeding are fairly small. Now, this is not true for most of the other languages of the wide, wide Web. Take my native Portuguese as an example. It is the fifth most popular language on the web, ahead of German, Arab, French, and Russian. It is the language favored by over 82 million Internet users. Despite being so widespread, its presence in the Web is somewhat shy. Let’s analyze, for instance, the websites listed on Google for the hottest keyword of last year: iPad. There are 767 million websites in English that mention the tablet computer—and only 9 million sites in Portuguese. See my point?
It is easier to find a good domain: All the good domains in English seem to be already taken, while lots of good domains in other languages and countries are still waiting for some clever blogger to acquire them.
It is challenging: Blogging is about testing your own limits, your capacity for uncovering amazing facts or feelings, creating beautiful style, and captivating the masses. What’s more challenging than trying to seduce an audience with different language, background, and values than yours?
Now, the key word here is challenge. Don’t let me fool you: blogging in a foreign language is not piece of cake. But it is definitely worth the effort.
Here I gathered a few tips and tactics that can help you succeed when writing for foreigners:
Know yourself: Do some serious self-examination to evaluate your knowledge of the language you are going to write in. Remember: you can go a long way with translation software, but the final product will still be imperfect. You don’t have to be a native speaker, but you have to be fluent to deliver a decent content. If that’s not the case…
Consider hiring a translator or proofreader: If your budget allows it, hire professional help. If that’s not possible…
Consider having a native partner: Building an alliance with someone from the group you want to speak to can be a clever move. Suppose you are building a blog about Japan-Britain relations. It would be considerably enriched if a Japanese counterpart could write replica posts from the Japanese point of view of the matters. Your partner could also polish your writing, to make it more palatable to native Japanese speakers.
Know your public: Who’s the audience you intend to reach? If you are building a high-quality news blog targeting Arabs, you should know that it might be a good idea to use green in your design, because the color is widely associated with Islam. On the other hand, you might want to avoid an all-white design in a blog that targets Chinese, Koreans, and other Eastern communities that see this color as a reminder of death.
Be respectful: Humans are prone to defend their own clans.It is easy to fall in the trap of favoring your own culture and values and disrespecting those of your audience. Remember: readers won’t respect you if you don’t respect them first.
Be universal: Spanish is spoken by some 500 million people in 20 countries where it is the official language, and in dozens of other countries where there are considerable Hispanic populations. If you want to dialog with this crowd you will have to choose carefully your vocabulary and your topics in order to make your blog as universal as possible. After all, some words that are totally innocent in Spain can be very offensive in Mexico. And vice-versa.
Anybody out there have a similar experience to share? Do you have any tips to add?
Regina Scharf is a Brazilian journalist who blogs about her country at Deep Brazil. You can follow her on Twitter.
Collections — even the mention of that word puts a sad look on any freelancer’s face. We’ve all wound up with a client who simply failed to pay up. The simple truth is that we’ll probably see more down the road, as well.
There’s no set signals that we can look for that will tell us if a given client will pay or not. There are certainly plenty of jerks out there, but there are also plenty of people who just find that their own cash flow didn’t work out the way they expected. You’ve got to be willing to act on the problem, either way, rather than sitting around hoping that they’ll cut you a check some day. Here are concrete options that you can take.
Keep contacting your client: It’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you keep calling, sending notices of unpaid invoices and generally staying in close contact, you may get money just to make you go away. Provided that you’re polite about it, feel free to make a nuisance of yourself — such as by calling their office every day until you get paid.
Offer new payment terms: If the situation is such that you know your client is willing to pay but just can’t right now, offer new payment terms. Tell the client that you’ll take payments spread out over time or some other arrangement. Don’t make it a habit, though.
Ask a lawyer to write a letter: While you have to be able to back up a lawyer’s letter to make it truly effective, just hearing that you’re willing to get a lawyer involved can be very motivating to clients who need to send you money.
Visit your client’s office: It’s much harder to tell someone that they’re not going to get their money in a fact-to-face situation and, if you’re willing to sit down and refuse to move until you receive payment, you may be able to get it. Be careful how you handle such situations, however — depending on the circumstances, the owner of the office you’re visiting can call the cops and report you for trespassing or causing a disturbance.
Take them to small claims court: Provided that your client is located fairly near to you, it may make sense to simply take the matter to court. If it’s a sizable project, it may be worth traveling in order to bring the matter in front of a judge.
Ask the client to return the work: If the client hasn’t paid for the work, he shouldn’t be using it. Some clients will continuing using work anyhow, but that opens them up to questions of copyright infringement since they haven’t properly licensed the work. I wouldn’t do it except in extreme cases, but that means that you can send a take down notice to their ISP if they’re using your work online.
No matter how frustrated you are about an unpaid invoice, you never want to open yourself up for legal action. You absolutely have to take the high road: don’t bad mouth your client, take any of their property or even make a scene at their offices. All those situations open you up to legal action — you may get your payment, but it could get eaten up by your own legal fees. The trick is to be persistent but polite, no matter what.
A stripped back yet gorgeous site for royalty-free vector icons for designers. I love that the background is kept simple in order to give the icon design centre stage!
I particularly like the typefaces used and choice of colours for the icon sets.
This design was featured on the Thursday 3rd of March 2011. It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of One Column.
As a designer, especially one without a lot of experience, it’s normal to look at the designs of others and think how great their work is compared to our own.
It’s a frustrating experience for many, especially when we can’t quite put our finger on why their design is so great when ours is merely good.
The thing about design, though, is that greatness is usually quantifiable.
Unlike with more abstract and interpretable creative pursuits, there are definite elements that go into “great” designs.
The best part is that anyone who can create a good design can go on to create great designs with a bit of practice. Here’s what goes into great design and what you can do to improve your own designs.
Details
If you compare a number of website designs, side-by-side, it’s likely you’ll notice a huge difference in attention to detail among them.
In all likelihood, the ones with more focus on the little details will stand out as being more polished and professional-looking than the others.
It’s obvious a lot of attention went into the details of The Mid-Century Modernist’s design.
Detail often equals effort. A designer who takes the time to focus on the small details of a project, the things that 90% of people won’t notice outright but result in a more polished-looking design, has an edge over those who don’t take the extra hour or two to add those final touches that make a huge difference in how a design is perceived.
Pay Attention to Small Details
The small details—an icon here, a border there—are the things that make a design great, instead of just good.
Take almost any “good” design and you can likely see where making tiny adjustments could make it a “great” design. Those are the things that great designers see immediately and incorporate into their original work.
There are so many tiny details in this design that really set it apart, from the banner headers to the subtle textures in both the background and header.
Once you have your basic design finished, think about the small things you can do to make certain elements of the design stand out a bit more. Look at other websites for inspiration and pay attention to the little things they do in their designs that improve the overall look.
Imitate until you learn to incorporate these things on your own.
Be a Perfectionist
Great designers are often perfectionists. They want things to be “just so” and will work on a project until they’ve got it just the way they want it. Very rarely do they look at a project and think “good enough”.
Unless you run into real technical limitations, stick to the idea of how you really want a particular site to look. Putting in the extra hours to get it just right is almost always worth it when you look back.
Skipping that extra effort will likely bug you any time you look at the site and it doesn’t quite live up to the mental image you had when you started.
Small Things Set a Design Apart
It’s the little things that set a design apart from others like it.
Every single element on the page has an impact on how the design looks overall. So pay attention to the borders, the icons, the minutiae of the typography, and all the other little details we have a tendency to rush through in an effort to reach the project’s completion.
The care obviously spent on the typography on this site really shows, and moves it into the realm of great.
Creativity
The best designs out there are often more creative than the majority of other designs in their industry.
They often take a different approach to a common problem and do something unique. Other times it’s just stepping outside the norm when it comes to layout, color scheme, typography, or graphics.
While creativity can’t be taught, per se, it can be improved and refined. You can train yourself to think more creatively, and to look at situations with a more creative eye.
Look at Things From a Different Angle
This is akin to “thinking outside the box”. Great designers approach projects from different angles than their good counterparts.
They know how to think through all the different possibilities on a project and then choose one that’s different but will still work to achieve the project goals.
This portfolio design is strikingly different from most others, especially in the fact that the actual work isn’t shown, just sketches of the work.
There are ways you can teach yourself to think in this manner. One way is to force yourself to brainstorm a certain number of solutions to a given problem. Instead of listing out only the three “best” solutions, make yourself come up with twenty possible solutions.
You’ll likely struggle with it at first, but eventually you’ll start coming up with other options (most of which will be ridiculous, just to reach the number), one or two of which might actually work for the project.
Thinking Around Corners
Thinking around corners is sort of like taking looking at things from a different angle to the extreme. You’re thinking not just one step ahead, but three. All while looking at things in a very abstract way.
AOL’s corporate site uses a very unconventional layout for displaying important information about the company. It breaks away from what a typical corporate “About” page usually looks like.
Corners are like blind spots in our creative vision. We have to learn to think past those blind spots and think abstractly (and sometimes illogically) about what we’re trying to do.
Thinking around corners is often associated with riddles. Because of that, riddling can be a good way to improve your ability to think around corners.
Train Yourself to Think Differently
Training yourself to think differently is more about practice than anything else. Whenever you’re faced with an obstacle, think through more than just the obvious ways of getting around it. Make yourself come up with more solutions than are necessary.
This is one of the more unique layouts I’ve seen, and it’s obvious the designer put effort into coming up with something really different.
Constantly stretching your mind and your creative thinking abilities is the only way to become more creative. It’s not something you can learn from a tutorial. Instead, you have to engage your creative mind every day, and stretch it beyond your normal comfort zone.
This is best done by stepping outside the creative realm you normally inhabit and finding new creative outlets.
Paying Attention to Your End User
In design, the end user’s experience is probably the single-most important element to great design. Regardless of how pretty something is, if it’s not usable, it’s a failure in terms of design. A hard-to-use design will never be great.
You have to learn how to anticipate what your end-users will want. Usability studies help with this, but they’re not always an option. In the end the most effective method will be to place yourself in your user’s shoes and empathize with what they want.
Usability is Key to Great Design
A design that is attractive and highly usable is the epitome of great design. There’s nothing better than finding a beautiful site with an intuitive user interface.
Taking the time to learn good usability patterns is key to becoming a great designer. Don’t just look at what works, look at why it works. Look at the psychological patterns behind why a certain design works better than another.
This allows you to tap into that psychological knowledge base and create a user-friendly site that doesn’t necessarily conform to how things are “normally” done.
A design like this shows that not only do the designers understand that tabbed design is more intuitive, but also where the psychological attachments people have to tabs are there.
What Do Your End-Users Really Want?
Whenever you start a new project, the first thing you should be asking yourself is what your end-users want from the site. This may or may not be in line with what your client wants, so balancing the two can get tricky.
For example, on an e-commerce site, your client’s goal is to get visitors to buy products. The end user’s goal, though, is likely to make an informed purchasing decision. You have to balance those two goals and figure out how to give your users the information they need while still encouraging them to purchase.
A website that can meet the goals of all stakeholders while still being attractive and unique is the pinnacle of great design.
Learning to Be Great
Learning to become a great designer isn’t impossible, especially if you’re already a good designer. One tip: learn to be good before attempting to be great. There’s no shortcut to go from competent to great. You have to be good first.
While a lot of learning to be a great designer is just practicing your craft, there are some specific things in addition to those mentioned above that you can do to improve your chances.
Study and Deconstruct
It’s not enough to just look at great designs. You need to learn to study and deconstruct them. Look at them with a critical eye and pick out what it is about them that’s different from what other designers are doing. Look at what they did that didn’t quite work (and what you would have done instead). Look at all the little details.
If it helps, use a program like Firebug to look at the code for a site so you can see exactly what another designer did. Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly why a site looks so polished without looking at the code.
In a lot of cases, it’s simply a matter of a little extra padding or slightly higher line spacing than normal.
Challenge Yourself
Challenging yourself on a daily basis is a great way to open up your mind. Don’t just focus on design, though.
Challenge yourself in any creative or intellectual pursuits you engage in. The results from one will likely carry over into the others as you become more accustomed to challenging your mind.
Challenge yourself to create newer, more complicated designs, too. Don’t just take the easy way out when creating something new. Figure out what you really want the end result to be, regardless of your current abilities, and then work toward that goal.
Learn New Things
If you hope to become a great designer, you should constantly be learning new techniques and approaches to design.
If you allow your skills to stagnate, you’ll find that what passed for great this year will look amateur and hackneyed next year. Constantly updating your skill-set also gives you more options, as you have a larger knowledge base to draw from to solve design problems.
You don’t need to take formal classes to learn new things. Just read everything you can get your hands on in your field. Read design blogs and books, read or watch tutorials, and try out the things you learn.
Follow Other Creative Pursuits
A lot of designers already have other creative pursuits. You find designers who are also painters, musicians, crafters, writers, and everything in between. These other creative outlets and skills can feed back into our design work. We can take concepts we learn in one artistic field and apply them in another.
Pursue creative activities outside of the design field. Find something else that’s creative that you’re passionate about and spend some time on that. Then take what you learn there and apply it to your design work and you’ll almost certainly see big improvements.
As a designer, especially one without a lot of experience, it’s normal to look at the designs of others and think how great their work is compared to our own.
