Korwe Blog

David will be speaking at the 76th meeting of the Cape Town SPIN, to take place on the 5th floor of the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town next Wednesday, 14 March 2012.   Here is the presentation.  

When is Intellectual Property worth something? In my view, IP is worth something when it is out there in the wild earning money. This is a naive (but useful) view, and I will elaborate on other dimensions of this debate later. This question is not to claim that Good Ideas need be made into Intellectual Property (they can be quietly built into a product) or that Value depends upon IP ("First Mover Advantage" is of considerable value).

It seems that the next generation of smartphone is ... the feature phone. It will have functionality including a battery life of more than 6 hours, a screen that does not break, it will not suffer "water damage" if you wear deodorant and its web browser will work.   The Mobile web is the gateway to the largest market in the world.

"defects introduced in early phases cost more to fix the later they are detected." Not. Here's a story [1] that reminds me of a chapter in one of the physicist Richard Feynman's biographies [2] - the story goes how he was flummoxed in his theory around Beta Decay by experimental work - but then, upon examination of the original experimental paper, he discovered that his theory was probably right and that an incorrect experimental analysis had been elevated to folk law. So it is with software. Hells bells - the implications are amazing: " The original claim was that "defects introduced in early phases cost more to fix the later they are detected". The misquoted chart says this instead: "defects detected in the operations phase (once software is in the field) cost more to fix the earlier they were introduced".