The past few weeks have been very dark indeed. Rovio and others targeted by new lawsuits, Craig Hockenberry predicting doom, and Matt Gemmell’s morale falling like Stonewall Jackson. The only thing keeping me from joining my colleagues in abject depression is working for an 11th hour rally.
Rally time starts now.
Intellectual Ventures and their ilk are many tentacled beasts who use thousands of shell companies to do their dirty work. When they send blood-sucking tentacles like Lodsys into our community, we need to cut them off.
Eventually the head will figure out to stop losing tentacles. Eventually the patent trolls will learn to avoid indies the way dogs in East Texas learn to avoid anthills.
Of course patent trolls are more likely to be from California than from Texas, so they might not know about the anthills. I actually spent part of my childhood in Texas, and learned the hard way that if you step on an anthill you’ll soon be covered in swarming, biting ants. You could, in theory, crush them one by one, but it’s much easier to just avoid anthills.
Let App Makers be as the ants of East Texas, minding their business until someone invades their anthill. Then Swarm! Swarm! Swarm! We will let the patent trolls know: if you attack one indie, you attack all indies, and we will file every motion we can against you, we will attack your patents, and we will show you for the mafioso thugs you are.
Our general in this fight is Michael McCoy, a Longhorn Texas technology attorney who is also conveniently licensed in California. We’ve been meeting in Amsterdam to hammer out a strategy and form a plan for immediate action.
When he returns to work next week, Michael will assemble and lead the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team, establish the Appsterdam Legal Defense Fund, and start implementing our strategy, codenamed Operation Anthill.
Legal action and education will be the start. We will also consider other ways of protecting ourselves, such as pushing for legislative reform. Of course, our enemies are both wealthier and better connected than we are, so will have to take our story to the people, let the public know that small businesses, jobs, and the economy are being threatened by parasites—and pray that democracy can still prevail.
We must move the fight away from the story that has been conceived by our enemies. This isn’t a patent infringement issue. There’s nothing most of the affected App Makers could have done to avoid being targeted. This is extortion, plain and simple, with the familiar twist of misappropriating the law to harass the very innovators patents are meant to protect.
NPR primed the pump of public awareness with the latest episode of This American Life, “When Patents Attack!” Ready or not, the time to act is now. I propose a tongue-in-check brown ribbon campaign to raise awareness. Brown? Obviously.
Software patents are bullshit.
Steve “Scottie” Scott and John Fox of iDTV recorded an interview with Michael McCoy and me, Mike Lee. (8:15 audio file, MP3 format). If you are a member of the media and would like a high quality copy for your broadcast, or would like to schedule an interview, please contact bmf at le.mu.rs.
Although much of the world’s technology is produced in Silicon Valley, people outside the industry don’t directly benefit from that. The offices in the Valley don’t have better workflows. The municipalities don’t have better websites. It’s like living next to an oil refinery, but not getting cheaper gas.
This is less than ideal, and our community outreach initiatives are intended to make sure locals benefit from the technology being produced by Appsterdam. The first such initiative, launching this week, is called Meet the Makers, powered by IceMobile.
As opposed to Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lectures, which are likely to be technical talks of interest only to App Makers, Meet the Makers tells the story behind an app, and should be of general interest, understandable to anyone.
After hearing about the app, you are encouraged to literally meet the maker, to ask questions, and to give feedback. Not only should you get a good idea of what the app means for your life or your business, App Makers should get a good idea of how well they are serving you.
Here are the details of the upcoming event:
Meet the Makers of ABN AMRO Mobile Banking on Thursday, August 4, 2011, 1:30 PM at the offices of IceMobile, Mensinge 2, 1083 HA Amsterdam. RSVP
The Summer of Appsterdam was our plan for spending the summer building the world’s most advanced infrastructure for App Makers. With this we’ve launched all the infrastructure building initiatives we announced at the launch party, and a few more besides.
Open data is crude oil to an App Maker—money just sitting on the ground waiting for someone to suck it up. The Netherlands is the Saudi Arabia of the information age. Not only are there billions of barrels of data to be exploited, the government will pay you to do so.
The Netherlands has a truly open government, which means that you, as an App Maker, have the keys to the city, or, if you prefer, the API to the Matrix. This being home to the world’s most advanced infrastructure for App Makers, there are several organizations here to help you take advantage of that.
Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government) for example is working on documenting the Matrix in English and Dutch. That way, when you walk through town, you will see not problems, but opportunities to make a living by making things better.
The latest dataset to be opened for the plunder is that of the province of Noord-Holland, which is offering up €13.000,- in bounties via the Apps for Noord-Holland contest.
They’re also hosting an event this summer that sounds like a legend in the making. Imagine this: you’re transported by boat to an island fortress where you and your fellow App Makers will spend the day coding and collaborating, your every need met by your generous and mysterious host.
Doesn’t the whole experience just seem so cinematic? It’s hard not to imagine some oddball super-villain welcoming us to the island while stroking a cat. There’s no way I’m going to miss that, and it gets better.
This is just the latest in a series of contests where App Makers can win real money just for working on cool projects. Some places have poker circuits. Appsterdam has hackathons. There’s your angel funding right there, amirite?
More proof that Appsterdam is the best place in the world to be an App Maker.
On Thursday, July 28, we launch yet another piece of the World’s Most Advanced Infrastructure for App Makers: Appsterdam Guru Sessions. These in-depth, hands-on workshops are the best way to refresh your knowledge and master new concepts.
The four-hour workshop will teach the meta-topic of Test-Driven Development, illustrated in Objective-C and MacRuby. If you don’t have Objective-C experience, or don’t even have a Mac, no problem—you will be paired up with someone who does.
Doors open at 12:00, and you’ll have an hour to settle in with a light lunch. The workshop ends at 17:00, whereupon you, head crammed full of knowledge, will wind down with beer and pizza.
Admission is cheap as hell at €20 a seat, but spaces are limited, so you need to RSVP immediately.
Food and drinks are provided by Apps for Noord Holland, which is the latest contest awarding cash prizes for apps using open data. I still can’t wrap my head around that. Open data is crude oil, money just laying there waiting to be made. Then they pay you to use it. Haven for App Makers indeed.
One more thing: if there’s interest, there’s talk of doing the workshop again later, but from an Android perspective.
The summer weather in Amsterdam reminds me a lot of Hawaii, the mix of sun and rain. This was on display yesterday as 20 intrepid Appsterdammers set out on an urban safari across the marvel that is the Artis Zoo for our first Appsterdam Family Weekend.
We had a good mix of people: adults and children, expats and locals, stalwarts and newbies. We got together at the Artis gate of what is properly called Natura Artis Magistra (Nature the Teacher of Art), the 19th century garden in the heart of the Dutch capital.
Each of the three gates bears one part of the name, and the popularity of the Artis gate, and of the garden’s grand menagerie, led to the more common designation that we know it by today: the Artis Zoo.
Despite the naming confusion, Artis is more than just a zoo. It also hosts an aquarium, a planetarium, and two museums. There is a good mix of indoor and outdoor exhibits and attractions, which makes it perfect for mixed weather.
I’ve been to a lot of zoos. I’m a big fan of them. I got the VIP tour at the St. Louis Zoo for a fundraiser I did for the Madagascar Fauna Group. I got married at the Honolulu zoo. I have a good base of reference when I say the Artis may be my favorite zoo.
I also love lemurs. I’ve championed a bunch of lemur-related causes. I made a nice donation to the Lemur Conservation Foundation while I was in Florida so I could stop by and visit their lemurs. When I go to any zoo, I head straight for the lemurs. Sometimes that’s all I’ll see.
The two lemur exhibits at Artis are completely open, meaning the lemurs are just running around with you. They could jump on your head if they were so inclined. How awesome is that? When I’m hanging out with the lemurs at Artis, I think, as I so often do in Amsterdam, you can’t do this in the States.
What made this last visit to the Artis even better is that I was there with a bunch of other App Makers and their families. Most of us went for dinner and drinks afterwards. It’s fun to go to the zoo, and it’s fun to go out for dinner, but it’s even more fun with a bunch of your friends.
That is what we talk about when we talk about Appsterdam.
