Translation: "We exercised common sense in taking a video and have patented this." Prior art, I would have hoped, amounts to framing and take a video of anything and capturing essential attributes to deliver a valuable online experience. I'm a subscriber to yogoglo, and I'm ashamed. Any alternatives without scummy patent tactics you can recommend?
Good blog post, we have a similar one we're posting shortly about our experience with App of the Week. And sharks. :)
We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.
For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT (about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.
I appreciate that, but as far as incentives go, if you knew the chance you had of being caught was minimal and that even being caught and charged as criminal you'd have walked away with good amount of change - it's not much of a deterrent. And we're I a shareholder, I'm honest enough to say I (and I suspect many others) would probably turn a blind eye to it.
As to fining the banks into being rescued, totally agree that defeats the point. Think of it more as giving them a long term mortgage penalty. Say LIBOR + x basis points paid back over 20 years. :)
I say this as an outsider to the industry, but the 'large' £290m penalty appears to be a joke and the media are either complicit or too thick to realise. Annual profits for Barclays were £5.9 billion to Q1 this year. May not be appropriate for comparison purposes, but if over a year the financial penalty Barclay's paid was the same basis as the penalty for dodging a £2 tube fare in central london - the fine for being caught would be just south of a whopping 10 pence! Simple incentive theory here. At that rate I'd dodge the fare every. single. day. The fine (reputation damage be damned as I'm not sure there is a honest broker to take my business to) is off by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
Really thankful Apple increased the OTA limit in iOS 5.1. Universal apps with Retina iPad images bump up the size dramatically. But it does look gorgeous.
More info on http://blog.opuss.com/. This falls into a genre known as Freemium Fiction - which is huge in Asia. The publishing concept is simple: Just. Start. Writing.
You get popular and amass a following. Lots of apps to share thoughts and statuses, but we think this is a niche area: Your favourite quotes, stories etc. Would love to know your thoughts.
Great idea. If this gets wide adoption, which I hope it does, you'll want to ensure that your Javascript code is on a fast CDN or hosted locally, otherwise the sites will stall loading it.