This Week in IP Enforcement

Stolen Software: Piracy Hits More Than Movies and Music (PCMag)
SIIA’s anti-piracy program featured in article that recognizes the negative impact piracy has on the software industry.

Entertainment Lobby Claims Google, Bing Send Users to Illegal Music Files (paidContent)
Google and other search engines “overwhelmingly” direct music fans to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks online, a coalition of entertainment industry groups has told the government.


Ukraine Shuts Down Leading File-Sharing Site
(Associated Press)
Ukrainian authorities have shut down a popular file-sharing website saying it violates copyright laws, officials said Wednesday.

Next Frontier in Piracy: Downloading Physical Objects to Your 3D Printer (Time)
Pirate Bay has announced a new category called “Physibles” that houses digital files that can be downloaded and used in conjunction with 3D printers to print out actual, physical objects.


mophie Awarded Significant Judgment in Piracy Case
(PRNewswire)
Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Company and Against Counterfeit Seller

Interview with new SIIA member Alteva

We are delighted to welcome Alteva, a WVT Communications Group, to the SIIA community. I had a chance to speak with their Executive VP and Chief Sales Officer, Louis Hayner to discuss the value of cloud-based unified communications. Read my interview below.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little bit about Alteva.

Louis: Alteva, a WVT Communications Group company, is a cloud-based unified communications solution provider for companies with 35+ users. The highest priority at Alteva is providing every customer with all their communications needs including cloud-based Call Routing/Voice over IP Services (VoIP PBX), Messaging and Web-based Collaboration through Microsoft Communication Services, Fixed Mobile Convergence and Advanced Communications Applications for the desktop.

Rhianna: What are the advantages for companies to move their communication needs to the cloud?

Louis: There are many benefits for companies of all sizes to move to the cloud. The most advantageous include mobility/anywhere access; scalability; cost savings; and disaster recovery capabilities. Alteva’s hosted Unified Communications clients reduce their total cost of ownership by 20% with a 70% reduction in startup expenses and no ongoing maintenance fees, as compared to premise-based PBX systems.

Rhianna: You have partnerships with some of the leading technology companies. How important is the partner ecosystem? Do you have any advice for our members when it comes to building a successful partner program?

Louis: WVT Communications Group believes that a high tide raises all ships – something that Alteva has always held to. That’s why our philosophy has always been to seek co-marketing opportunities with not just partners, but even fellow cloud communications service providers. When any cloud communications company promotes hosted technology and educates the public about the benefits of the cloud, it serves the entire cloud industry. Alteva can tout its own solution as the best, but when its partners are touting Alteva it provides a much more credible and powerful third party validation. It’s important to have good relationships with your partners, and to have strategic discussions on ways to work together and help one another. If our partners names can help to validate our brand quality, then it is to their benefit to provide quotes for our press releases and put representatives in our trade show booths and attend our events.

Rhianna: Your customers cover a range of industries. Are certain industries more likely to adopt these cloud-based communication solutions? Are there any industries that have surprised you with their rate of adoption? Do you see any significant movement from the public sector?

Louis: Many industries can benefit from cloud communications, but there are some that can benefit even more so than others. For example, law firms benefit from the mobility features that enable user to communicate from any location, as well as hosted call recording and detailed phone reporting features. Law firms, health care facilities and other organizations that tend to have multiple locations or satellite offices will see notable cost savings. We are not surprised by any industries specifically, but we are thrilled by the increased adoption by the SMB space in recent years, as they see that solutions like Alteva Unified Communications are affordable for smaller companies.


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

 

Disruptors of the Next Internet Generation

Contributed by Susan Becker, Consultant

John Patrick, President of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet Technology at IBM, addressed the Information Industry Summit about progress on the Internet on Jan 25. In Patrick’s estimation, the Internet has finally reached adolescence, but we are only 5% – 10% down the road of total possible transformation. In fact, expectations are rising by the day and disintermediation is just beginning. The health care industry and we as individuals will greatly benefit.

2012 is about the pervasive Internet where everything is connected to everything. Patrick went on to describe eight defining points:
1) The Internet is fast.
2) The Internet is always on. Literally everything we use can be connected. 90% of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years, and “It presents tremendous opportunity.” Figuring out how to monetize this data will be the key.
3) The Internet is everywhere. No longer is the Internet “on the PC”.
Now it’s wherever we are. Almost 80% of the world has a cell phone.
With a market penetration rate far greater than the computer market, mobile presents a huge opportunity.
4) Social networking is not just social, it’s about connecting people.
It used to be that content was published by experts, but now more of it is published by us.
5) iPad Heaven – Why is the iPad a growing substitute for the PC? Most of the time users are not in the creation mode, they are in the consumption mode. There is new hope for magazines, papers and textbooks provided that new sustainable models can be created.
6) Intelligent – Putting big data to work represents huge potential.
Furthermore, HTML5 eliminates the need to write apps for each device.
7) Easy – IPads eliminate the set-up hassle that most of us remember about buying a new PC. It’s all there and it’s all in one box.
8 ) Trusted – Patrick’s last point was about security. “Can we trust the Internet?,” he asked. Yes, he says, but trust requires each and every one of us to be vigilant. He suggested hiring people to break into your computer systems in order to avoid exposure.

In his close, Patrick urged the audience to anticipate the evolution ahead and get moving: “Think Big, Act Bold, Start Simple, Iterate Fast”, he said.

SIIA Previews Interview with Narrative Science

At SIIA, identifying the next generation of game changers is as much our passion as it is our job. Join us as we take an inside look at six companies that are poised to make an impact on the content industry: BestVendor, Crowd Fusion, First Stop Health, Narrative Science, Praetorian Group and ReportLinker. Today we’ll be taking a look at PNarrative Science.

Narrative Science, a Chicago-based technology company, transforms data into stories and insights through its’ proprietary artificial intelligence authoring system. Narrative Science was recently among the top ten winners of the prestigious Chicago Innovation Awards, for which there were over 500 applicants. Narrative Science was founded by Stuart Frankel, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. Professors Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum are from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Studies at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and developed an early version of the Company’s core technology at Northwestern. INVO interviewed Stuart Frankel, the company’s CEO. Mr. Frankel, an experienced technology executive was a member of the senior management team at DoubleClick and is the former CEO of Performics, a performance marketing services agency that is now owned by Publicis. Mr. Frankel is a lawyer and a CPA.

What is Narrative Science? How did it get started?
Narrative Science is a technology company focused on the automated creation of narrative content. Our technology generates news stories, business reports, tweets, texts, snippets and other kinds of text content purely from the analysis of data. We work with media publishers and businesses in a variety of industries. The product can be used to create editorial content across a variety of media verticals including sports, finance, real estate, and politics. In addition, our system can be used by businesses to create narrative reports that communicate information and insights gleaned from large data sources such as sales, and marketing data, or operations data and market research

The genesis for the idea began when my two co-founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, taught a course at the Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. Kris and Larry worked with one of the project teams in the class to develop a prototype of a technology that automatically generated editorial content from data. The project team focused on creating baseball-related content and one of the first stories generated by the technology was a story about a Northwestern Wildcats baseball game. The story was generated entirely from the game’s box score and play-by-play information.

How did you first learn about the work of Kris and Larry?
John Lavine, the Dean of Medill introduced me to Kris and Larry and they exposed me to their research lab that they ran at McCormick. Following that introduction, I met regularly with Kris and Larry to help them evaluate some of their research projects for commercial viability.

What compelled you to continue to spend time evaluating the core technology?
I was really blown away when I first saw a demo of a prototype of the early technology (initially called Stats Monkey). In particular, I was struck by the quality of the initial output — it read shockingly well. I was also impressed with Kris and Larry as well as the two Medill students, Nick Allen and John Templon, who were on the original project team. Following some initial discussions with Kris and Larry, I spent several months doing diligence around the idea of building a company from the technology. Based on that work, it seemed pretty clear to me that if the technology could be developed beyond the prototype, there would be a very real opportunity to build a sizable business.

Can you share some important milestones?
The first significant steps were incorporating the company and negotiating and executing a license for the technology with Northwestern, both of which occurred in the early part of 2010. During April 2010, we raised a little more than $1M from angel investors. During this time, it became clear to us that the original application needed to be rewritten in order to create a horizontal platform that could be in used to write about any subject matter using just about any kind of data. This process took about six months and was a key inflection point for us because it really allowed the company to scale.

Another milestone was raising our first institutional round of $6M from Battery Ventures in January 2011.

We ended 2011 with about 25 customers and 24 employees, who are split between Chicago and New York.

Can you speak to the difficulty in transitioning the core application from what was initially research into something more commercial?
Like many technologies developed within a university, the initial version of our technology was not developed (and with good reason) with an eye towards things like scalability, reliability and security. When we decided to rewrite the core technology, we really made a significant investment in the future of the company, but this investment allowed us to move from a developmental stage to a commercial stage. I consider us fortunate in that it has primarily been customer demand that has required us to move rather quickly into an execution mode. We do not have time to think about the abstract very much. Every day it seems like we have more employees, customers and projects – we have to get things done.

Can you describe the company’s value proposition?
We create two broad types of content – media content and business reporting, although we use the same technology platform for each segment, For media publishers, our technology allows publishers to expand current content areas or enter new areas of coverage at a very reasonable cost. For instance, earlier this year, we partnered with GameChanger, a mobile scorekeeping application with a statistics management website for youth, high school and college baseball and softball. We have integrated our technology with GameChanger and now generate a story for every game scored through the GameChanger application. Our technology wrote 300,000 stories about youth baseball in 2011

In terms of business reporting, we’re essentially helping businesses deal with the problem of data overload. We’re finding that companies across a wide range of industries are inundated with too much data and would benefit tremendously from tools and applications that help them understand and communicate insights from data in a more efficient and understandable manner. The narrative form not only makes data more understandable but also more consumable. For example, we are helping some advertising agencies and advertising technology companies present online advertising campaign data to their customers and employees in a simple, easy to understand narrative format. This allows these companies to leverage the investment that they have made in data and to communicate much more effectively with their customers.

SIIA Names Kathy Greenler Sexton to Lead Content Division

Kathy Greenler SextonSIIA today named Kathy Greenler Sexton as Vice President and General Manager of the Content Division. Sexton will lead SIIA’s efforts to shape and support leading information and media companies by providing leadership, advocacy, critical market information, and business development opportunities.

“Kathy is a dynamic, strategic and hands-on executive with deep experience serving information, Internet and media companies,” said Ken Wasch, President of SIIA. “Using her deep digital content experience, Kathy will support our member companies—which provide the content, software and other enabling technologies that drive the content industry—helping them identify business and partnership opportunities, understand disruptive technologies, maximize their monetization models, connect emerging companies with capital, and educate them on the fast-changing policy initiatives in Washington that could impact their bottom-lines. I look forward to working with Kathy to enhance both the leading and emerging media and information companies that are part of our membership.”

“The information market is in the middle of a transformation unleashed by the internet, digital, mobile technology and the proliferation of data,” said Sexton. “These changes are impacting everything from business models to service delivery and operations, and they represent both disruptions and opportunities for our member companies. I am honored to lead the SIIA Content Division, and I look forward to helping our members successfully navigate these market challenges.”

Sexton has had a history of continued success in the digital content industry. After working in broadcast television and international marketing roles, Sexton was a founding member, lead marketer and publisher for the web-based search engine pioneer AltaVista. She established the company one of the top five globally trafficked sites. She also grew Individual.com into a top online news property, successfully selling to Office.com/Winstar, a leading brand and number one e-commerce site for small business. Sexton also launched HighBeam Research, dramatically growing revenue, traffic and subscribers and positioned it for sale to Gale/Cengage. She also successfully transitioned BLR from traditional publisher to a streamlined online information provider and re-launched ZoomInfo, establishing it as a leader in the competitive B2B information market. Sexton earned a BA in communications from Boston College.


Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA.

Interview with new SIIA member Socialize

I was delighted to recently welcome Socialize to the SIIA membership. I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Odio the CEO and Co-founder to learn more about the drop-in social platform. Read my interview with Daniel below.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Socialize and the benefits for making apps social.

Daniel: Making apps social boosts app discovery (downloads) and user engagement (impressions). It creates a viral loop where users share content with each other and their social networks, which leads to more downloads, which leads to more users, which leads to more social actions all over again.

Rhianna: This week you made an announcement about notifications. Why is this feature significant?

Daniel: SmartAlert notifications “Bring users back” to the app. For example, when a user makes a comment on a piece of content in an app, and subscribes to that thread, and then another user comments on the first user’s comment, the first user gets a SmartAlert notification inviting them back into the app to see what the second user wrote.

Rhianna: You recently moved your company to San Francisco. Obviously, the Bay Area is the home of many great technology companies. How important is it for technology start-ups to be local to the Bay Area? Or does it matter?

Daniel: It’s critical. There’s a great article on my move west at http://go.DanielOdio.com/west. The environment in the San Francisco bay area is world class and results in the ability to make connections, make key hires, and iterate on the business at a speed that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. As I like to say, San Francisco is “Mecca for Geeks.”

Rhianna: You recently participated in a panel led by the Department of Homeland Security at CES. What are some of the privacy and security issues you face versus the traditional software/hardware vendors? How do you address and ease these fears?

Daniel: Often times the least secure part of a device is the human using it. And that’s where we focus – in this realm security concerns are mixed with privacy concerns. Oftentimes, users don’t know the implications of their actions by design – we work hard to abstract a level of complexity into an easy-to-use service. This means we bear a responsibility to ensure the user doesn’t compromise themselves in ways they don’t even realize. A big chunk of the value we add with our social infrastructure offering is to give the user ways to navigate privacy issues in easy to understand and friendly ways.

Rhianna: Finally, look ahead for me 18 months, what will be the biggest trends in social?

Daniel: Two big trends are converging and we’ll see them in full force in the next 18 months: The explosion of interest-based social, and the power of the Open Graph. Interest-based social isn’t the same thing as the social graph we all know from Facebook. It’s way bigger and more powerful. It’s the connections we all share based on interests, regardless of ‘friend’ status. For example, interest-based groups include people of the same ethnicity, people who love zinfandel wine, co-workers, people who love to sail, and the list goes on. We are all comprised of a series of interests, and for the first time, technology (and mobile in particular) is enabling us to map all those interests and connections, and begin to monetize them.

The Open Graph is an initiative by Facebook to get everyone to share all of their actions – what songs they are listening to, what they are reading, etc. This confluence of mapping interests to people and sharing of all actions will mean the power and reach of social will be exploding in the next 18 months. More about this topic at http://go.danielodio.com/interestgraph and a screencast on why mobile is way bigger than most people realize is at http://go.DanielOdio.com/waybigger


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

 

Busy Policy Week Taking Shape, and Some Key Stuff You Might Have Missed

This week’s shaping up to be very busy. Particularly the calendar for Wednesday, featuring activity on issues ranging from mobile broadband, to cyber to digital learning (see full list in the calendar section).

Cybersecurity is headlining the week once again, as the Senate continues to move forward with all deliberate speed to finalize and introduce comprehensive cybersecurity legislation (still expected to be on the floor in the first half of February), while a key House Subcommittee will markup cybersecurity info. sharing legislation (H.R. 3674).

On the privacy front, the EC last week formally released its long-awaited proposal to comprehensively reform the EU’s 1995 data protection rules for online privacy. The proposal includes two legislative proposals setting out the Commission’s objectives: a Regulation setting out a general EU framework for data protection, and a Directive on protecting personal data processed for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offences and related judicial activities. SIIA released a statement in response, highlighting our deep concerns and expressing our commitment to seek revisions to ease administrative burdens and make it easier for global companies to demonstrate compliance with the EU privacy regime.

Also, in the “you might have missed it” column, here’s a list of recent developments we’re tracking over the last couple weeks that should be of interest to many SIIA members:

IP:
Earlier this month, the PTO submitted two reports to Congress mandated by the recently passed patent reform legislation the “America Invents Act”: (1) the Prior User Rights Defense Study, which concludes that the AIA provisions are consistent with similar rights of major trading partners and that there is no evidence of a negative impact on innovation, and (2) the International Patent Protection for Small Business Study, which concludes that many small businesses may benefit from extending patent rights internationally, but few small businesses are aware of the need, and how to do this.

Standards:
On January 19th, the White House released a memo announcing “Principles for Federal Engagement in Standards Activities to Address National Priorities.” The memo is the result of a lengthy assessment by the NSTC Subcommittee on Standards, led by officials at NIST, OSTP and USTR re: the Government’s role in standards, which included outreach to SIIA and many of our member companies, and it follows a broader set of proposed recommendations released in October 2011.

China:
In December, official Chinese Government website sources reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued its 12th Five Year Plan for the Software and Information Technology Services Industry, a document which describes the blueprint and goals for developing the software and IT services industry through direct funding mechanisms, 10 development ‘focus points,’ and 8 mega-engineering projects. Additionally, the plan calls for revenues from the domestic software and IT services sector to exceed 400B RMB, overall Y/Y growth of over 25%, and for exports to exceed 60B USD. MIIT has not released the plan to the public. For more information, please see SIIA Chinese partner USITO.


David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.

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