Patently mad.

I meet up with Suw Charman, Open Rights Group, at EuroFoo, and discussed briefly with her about patents and fabrication.

One of the gags in my presentation was about how easy it would be to produce individual antennas and IDs by printing and how that would make some labour people very happy :-(

Naturally, not being an ID card supporter and believing that "those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security are deserving of neither", I'm not going to blog how to do it.

However, it does raise questions on who owns what in a fabrication world where hardware is more malleable.

Hence, I'm more horrified by the latest wheeze of the EPO and the attempt to create enforceable software patents across Europe.

There goes innovation, creativity and competitiveness - at the least the lawyers and vested interests will be happy.

How about "balancing the interests of patent holders and the broader public interest in innovation and competitive markets"?

It's about time that patent duration was changed to a variable amount - based upon how quickly could society be reasonably expected to independently discover such invention.

Giving the increasing pace of innovation, the current limits are too long.

Just back and planning to go again

Back to the hurly burly of the office. I've just received an invite to Web 2.0, so it's off to San Francisco in November.

Lost? No we didn't but yes we are.

Been catching up with the football - Chelsea is top, no surprise!

Also been catching up with Lost. At EuroFoo, Mark (from the BBC) ran a session on predicting the future and how it affects you today. After much discussion about matter compilers and things of that like, we eventually came up with a new format TV show.

It was Lost.

But this time Dharma was the audience and decided what the contestants got to live with on the island.

Could this be the real ending?

EuroFoo and all that Jazz

It's been a long, long time since I last blogged at length - basically life has been hectic.

Anyway, I've just got back from EuroFoo and EuroOSCON - which were both outstanding events.

I ran one session at EuroFoo - on commoditisation of manufacturing. I gave one talk at EuroOSCON - on commoditisation of manufacturing - and then spent the rest of the time talking about commoditisation of software and our new product Zimki.

This was Zimki's second outing, and we seemed to get a positive response - not just to the product itself, a JavaScript application platform, but also to the ideas behind it and the plans to create an international grid of operating environments.

Nicholas Carr has written another excellent article on this, and the end of corporate computing environments, this is exactly what we have been talking about.

Most evenings I spent in the company of Greg Stein, Ben Laurie, Andrew Kelly, Denise Kalos and Piers Crawley which was wonderful. There were so many interesting people at the conference and it was a truly fantastic experience.

Damian Conway spent some time with helping to get my presentation in shape - something I'm extremely grateful for.

The Maker faire was as usual wild, with some very crazy stuff indeed - including stem cell harvesting! Visions of scary biological manufacturing stuff appearing around the corner.

Anyway, I'm back home now, and there is lots of work to be done and ducks to feed!

I am not a number, and if I am - I own it.

Just read James Duncan's article on hijacking the ID cards process, by producing a identity commons of our own.

I like this idea, simply because if the government is going to insist on these daft cards - I'd rather they were not in control of it.

On the road.

On Friday, Zimki was announced at dConstruct.

A team from Fotango organised and manned a booth and overall it seems to have been well received and a great success.

The journey starts here.

Fuzzy cute mobile phones - as if.

Read a fantastic article in the economist about biomanufacturing.

This is Drew Endy's niche area and promises a future where our spimes become fuzzy cute things.

As an ex-geneticist, this is such cool stuff.

Whoosh, twenty years gone.

Off on holiday today - to sunny Majorca!

The last time I was there was twenty years ago - how time goes by so quickly!

It's a shocker.