Disqus - Latest Comments for evanhr

Re: SoundCloud Go

Evan Hill-Ries — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 09:51:33 -0000

Absolutely agree that an upload button makes all the difference. TBF, Google Play Music is another bottom-up service by that definition; it's always allowed you to upload your own existing music collection. I can see how SoundCloud's approach might end up being better, but I've been doing offline playlists of originals, remixes, and underground stuff together for years, and indeed, I wouldn't give it up for all the Spotify friends in the world.

Re: Feature Friday: The Swarm Widget

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 12:26:16 -0000

Off-topic, but I was most interested to see the Settings icon as one of your four dock choices. I find Android's quick settings pull-down mostly sufficient; would be really curious to hear why you give the full Settings that pride of place.

Re: The Best Cable Modem

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 10:45:58 -0000

One nit to pick: Cablevision/Optimum is definitely charging at least me a $5/mo modem rental fee.

Re: Battery Sharing

Evan Hill-Ries — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 11:56:21 -0000

actually just bought one that's designed for this; $150 for a 5000mAh battery (with a KitKat phone attached :P) http://www.amazon.com/BLU-S...
Does seem to need a USB OTG cable like the rest, though.

Re: Discovering Ingress

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 10:58:26 -0000

Really thought this was going to be about your newfound love of neoclassical portraiture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: I'm Gonna Be On The TV

Evan Hill-Ries — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 13:57:34 -0000

Such good news! Glad that new ep finally showed up on Amazon. I will say "every other Friday" sounds to me like it's gonna air only on alternate Fridays—which admittedly would be odd, but this is future television we're talking about…

Re: Doing Business On A Handshake

Evan Hill-Ries — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:12:28 -0000

Totally agree that trust is the ballgame in these deals, but just because you rip up the docs when things go pear-shaped doesn't mean they didn't come into play; they're still the backdrop for that decision, showing both sides what's gonna govern if you don't renegotiate (there's always a BATNA…)

Re: Apparent issue with Facebook Connect is dragging people from around the web to a moot error page

Evan Hill-Ries — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:27:31 -0000

Getting it on Etsy and weather.com

Re: A Pinterest Counterpoint

Evan Hill-Ries — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:43:59 -0000

But see the cases that have held Google Image Search and other thumbnail-browsing tools to be fair use, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik....
I think they're a far better analogy for Pinterest than Megaupload, Napster, etc.

The no-organized-hostility argument is interesting, but it's not because there aren't trade groups that represent photographers; I think it's partly because photographers already have a wide variety of business models (like writers do), so new uses don't uniformly threaten the existing industry players

Re: http://dripdrop.tumblr.com/post/15046084547

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:05:31 -0000

I was kind of shocked, but the data copies and pastes cleanly from the playlist in iTunes. No fuss!

Re: http://bryce.vc/post/14312640396

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:39:25 -0000

Basic tech literacy may not cut it, though. Outside of professional developers, I'm one of the more tech literate people I know, and I still can't say I understand DNSSEC and why SOPA will be bad for it. All I really know is that many people I trust tell me that.

I think the internet is inherently technical and complex, and we may have to rely on "technocrats" to regulate the details in the same way we rely on engineers to tell us what kind of buildings we can build.

The real disheartening thing is the implication behind the "I'm no nerd/tech expert/etc." line, which I hear to be "and I don't need to be, because I have this neat analogy and/or boogeyman to point to that resolves the argument if we just don't concern ourselves with the details".

Re: Convertible Debt – Other Terms

Evan Hill-Ries — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:57:52 -0000

Great series, but there's one point I'm not sure I'm clear on above: which round are you talking about as the "next round"? If it's the round that the debt converts in, then a straight pro-rata wouldn't be a separate right, but instead the operation of the conversion mechanism, no? And in that case, isn't the investor's protection against a high conversion round a valuation cap, or are you seeing super pro-rata rights on top of that?

If we're talking about the next financing after the conversion round, then wouldn't the straight pro-rata right be determined by what % that $500K bought in the conversion round?

Re: GREAT New Blog – IP Law for Startups

Evan Hill-Ries — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:53:34 -0000

While I've read the blog and like a number of the posts, and I realize this is an old post that just popped up new for a bunch of us due to some RSS quirk, I'm wondering if you guys might temper your recommendation if there's more posts like this one:
"Why A Strong Patent Application Should Be Your Startup’s First Investment" http://www.iplawforstartups...

You guys don't seem to agree (and I wholeheartedly agree with you here): http://www.askthevc.com/wp/...

The post I'm complaining about doesn't really make the distinction as to what kind of startups should file patent applications, but given the demographics of the readership you're sending their way, I think that's the problem.

Re: http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/7117754133

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:53:00 -0000

This may have to do with the ability of GApps admins to use custom logos. My logo is bigger than the stock Google logo, and I have 0px padding on the bottom and maybe 5px on the top

Re: Finding And Buying A Domain Name

Evan Hill-Ries — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:29:43 -0000

Great post, and really great comments. I'm certainly late to the game with a response post, but we did have some ideas based on our experience with a large number of domain name transactions:

http://www.lewishand.com/ge...

Short version is mostly agreement, with a couple of additional thoughts:
-Descriptive domains can be a problem from a trademark perspective, but marks like Kickstarter are really more suggestive, and great because of it.
-Equity is a good currency, and if you need to, you can provide a reversion clause to give the domain back if you fail, but be careful with those; talk to a lawyer.

Re: Lockers vs Streaming Services

Evan Hill-Ries — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:37:31 -0000

Another consideration here is licensing. Michael Robertson (who's fought this battle on few different fronts) points out that it makes a difference whether you have to get a separate set of streaming licenses for the content you want to play for your users vs. piggybacking on the user's own implied license from having purchased the music. The law here is a bit unsettled and there's certainly risks to the latter approach, but that road is clearly one of less resistance operationally. It also solves the problem around amateur/indie content in a way I don't think SoundCloud can.

Re: Software patents are the problem not the answer

Evan Hill-Ries — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:52:46 -0000

I agree that a patent is similar to a No Trespassing sign (though the former provides far worse notice) but that doesn't make the overall analogy to real property a good one. Innovation, if we should even think of it as a discrete thing, might not be best treated as parcels of territory to be fenced off by homesteaders.

Since we'd like the patent system to be one of well- functioning incentives, I wonder if you'd say that, without the above-referenced patent, you would not have brought the underlying invention to market. If so, I think that's a better argument than the innovate-around-the-prior-art claim, which I think Pam Samuelson has best termed as "overheated innovation".

Re: The Balance Sheet

Evan Hill-Ries — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:30:50 -0000

Another great entry in the series. Best thing since Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson's Term Sheet posts, IMHO.

One small question: is the Net Tangible Assets number at the very bottom the Total Stockholder Equity minus the Goodwill and Intangible Assets (and something else, since that doesn't add up)? In your experience, is that number present/important on a startup's balance sheet?

Re: Annual Escalating Patent Fee Proposal

Evan Hill-Ries — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:39:29 -0000

One minor issue I could imagine cropping up is that because the initial years are going to be the cheapest, there's a disincentive to actually file the patent; you'd want to wait until you're ready to seize the market. This wouldn't be a problem if we did priority by first-to-file, but we use first-to-invent, so you could feasibly wait.

Basically a system like this would resurrect the "submarine" patent problem that we largely did away with by changing the patent term start from issuance date to filing date. Now we'd have secret things invented by not yet filed, so as to milk the early years best and then abandon the patent when the fees got too high.

I'm not convinced the benefits wouldn't still outweigh the costs, but it's a wrinkle, fwiw.

Re: Why Albums?

Evan Hill-Ries — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:05:12 -0000

I bet you're right that labels don't think they can afford to promote a single as much as an album, but like you say, they almost invariably promote albums with their singles, and right now the single is generally available on its own from most download stores, so it's a good question how many album sales that method actually drives these days, and whether they still see an acceptable ROI.

More importantly, I think the marketing costs for a single are a problem that technology is going to solve very soon if it hasn't already, because the consumers are meeting the producers halfway. The music recommendation functions of radio services like Last.fm and Pandora along with blog aggregators like The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws are providing really good discovery tools for us to find new music that we like, without any particular marketing efforts by the artists involved. And with the marketing money they do spend, artists have a lot of really good options for growing and engaging with their fan base that don't have anything to do with spending thousands of dollars for a cardboard endcap at FYE (or a button on the iTunes Store homepage).

Re: Why Albums?

Evan Hill-Ries — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:53:28 -0000

Yeah, I think it's fair to believe we can't lower transaction costs
enough to make the sequential path less hard, but it may still have
more benefits. Also, countering the activation energy, I think there's
some kind of aggregate decision burden, where you have to keep your
appraisal of all the goods in the transaction straight in your head,
which I think is really only a factor in the album sale.

Re: Software patents are the problem not the answer

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:11:15 -0000

I'm curious, what do you feel is lacking in trademark and copyright protections such that you don't consider them "real IP"? Obviously they don't confer all the same rights as patents, but they do provide ways to combat true rip-offs of your software. And there's always trade secrets for things you just don't want anyone else to know about, e.g. Google's PageRank algorithm.

Re: Software patents are the problem not the answer

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:37:58 -0000

Are those thousands of pages of journal papers all published by computer scientists employed by corporations? Patents are only one innovation-production system; direct funding of basic research (mostly in universities) is another, with an entirely different set of incentives and responsibilities. If most of that R&D is done with direct (possibly public) funding, then patents may at best only be providing an incentive for the "last mile" of investment at the tipping point of commercial exploitation, with the cost of excluding everyone else from that invention for 20 years. Maybe that's still worth it, but regardless, I don't think all the R&D can be credited to the patent incentive.

Re: Software patents are the problem not the answer

Evan Hill-Ries — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:33:29 -0000

I think the entrepreneur was trying to say that his lawyer advised him not to do the patent search, precisely because if he does, he could be shown to have the requisite knowledge for willful infringement. I don't think it would make any sense to advise him to do it to avoid willful infringement; AFAIK, there's no "safe harbor" provision that would provide a shield in that situation. It's a bit of a perverse incentive in the law, but I think it's unfortunately a common feature of willfulness damage enhancements in any law; if you pay less when you're ignorant, it pays to stay ignorant.

As for your hypothetical innovative iphone app, I think the problem with patent protection there and in software generally is the lack of an independent invention defense. The drag on innovation that Brad and others are identifying here is the uncertainty of potential infringement that *can't* be resolved by taking care not to actually copy the work of others in one's own work. You *can* avoid copyright infringement that way, which is why copyright protection of code and GUI elements seems much less problematic to most developers; hell, even the FSF and friends couldn't do without it.

David really nails it below to call out prior art as a major problem, and by extension the obviousness bar that's judged in light of that prior art. I'd like to add the 20-year term of patents to that. Even if there are completely non-obvious innovations to be made in software that we simply can't get without giving out patents on them, I can't see how it requires 20 years of exclusivity to provide the necessary incentive. If it's software that's good enough to matter, it ought be useful and profitable within a much shorter time than that.

I think it's worth emphasizing Bradley's point below that the Constitution empowers Congress to create IP laws to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." That means the laws are there to provide inventors and creators with an incentive to produce; once we get the work, we're done. The natural rights, property-esque notion that every man is owed all the potential profits from every idea that issues forth from his head is just not there, and indeed it was vehemently argued against by Jefferson and other founders.

Re: SF 2 NYC

Evan Hill-Ries — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:18:29 -0000

Yeah, efficient routes aside, it'll still be a bad plan for us in this
beastie. We're rockin' single-digit MPGs here :)