Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
File this one under: they have patented what now? The official title of US Patent 7,428,496 is 'Creating an incentive to author useful item reviews' but the reality is that is concerns giving busy reviewers on the Amazon website a silly virtual badge of honour...
Not long ago I was reporting on how Microsoft had been granted US
Patent 7,415,666 which was for the "Method and system for navigating
paginated content in page-based increments" or the Page Up Page Down
Patent as it has become
known.
Now, just 12,830 patents later comes another
example of just how crazy the whole system is when companies start
'protecting' just about anything.
Let's examine the abstract for this particular Amazon patent shall we?
"A facility for rewarding the provision of useful item reviews is
described. The facility receives a plurality of item reviews, each from
a source. The facility publishes each of the plurality of received item
reviews, and assesses the usefulness of the published item reviews."
OK, so it is for a system of calculating how useful reviews written by
a registered user of Amazon are based upon the thumbs up thumbs down
voting of other members, and applies this across all the reviews they
have written to arrive at some kind of 'top reviewer' chart.
The abstract concludes with "Based upon this assessment of usefulness,
the facility selects one or more of the published item reviews, and
provides rewards to the sources of these selected item reviews."
The reward in question turns out to be, are you ready for this, a
virtual badge
of honour no less.
Despite the fact that Amazon filed the original patent application way
back in April 2001 it has only just now been granted. Which suggests a
certain amount of investigation by the USPO.
The fact that other sites have review rewards programs does not seem to
have mattered, as this patent would appear to apply only to the precise
mathematical formula used to calculate the rewards process on Amazon.
I still cannot help think that it is just another example of how the
whole patent process has gone so astray over the years, and provides
more evidence that it needs a damn good kick up the arse to get back on
a sensible track!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
