Former FBI Agent Joins IT Startup

Story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
The FBI’s former top cyber cop is joining an upstart computer security firm that aims to guard firms targeted by foreign intelligence services.

The cyber cop, who garnered attention last month when he said the U.S. is not winning the battle against hackers, has joined CrowdStrike, Inc., to lead a unit that will provide instant response for hacking incidents, and identify those trying to compromise computer systems.

The formation of Irvine, Calif.-based CrowdStrike was announced earlier this year by the CEO, a former McAfee executive.

A start-up is an unusual choice for someone coming from a senior FBI position. His last three predecessors all took security jobs with Fortune 500 firms.

The former cyber cop states that he wants to stay in the fight against hackers, but in the private sector, which he has long argued does not do enough to protect sensitive corporate data and intellectual property from cyber intruders.

Ideally, CrowdStrike will service all types of corporations, both private sector and government sector, and any entities with wide-ranging networks. The company will focus on security solutions within a network to curb computer hacking.

He will be president of CrowdStrike Services, one of three divisions of the new company. In a statement, the CEO said he and the cyber cop share a belief that industry can’t rely on the government alone to address the problem of targeted intrusions.

The other two parts of the company are an Intelligence team, and a Technology office.


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Apple Patents Cause A Stir

Story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Customers shopping for Apple Inc.'s iPhone might pay little attention to the gadget's "slide to unlock" feature, but you would never know that from a quick glance at Apple's current roster of patent lawsuits.

The technology giant has secured two key U.S. patents on slide-to-unlock—a technology that lets users wake a dormant phone with a finger-swipe across the screen. And it is wielding those patents like swords against rivals around the world.

In recent months, Apple has sued HTC Corp. in Delaware and Germany over one of those patents and others. It has used the patents to fight back against suits Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.  filed against it in Miami and Germany. And it has invoked them in lawsuits against Samsung Electronics Co. in Australia, the Netherlands, and San Jose, Calif.

As competition in the more than $200 billion global smartphone industry becomes more cutthroat, Apple and its competitors argue that even the most minor unique features are crucial to getting an edge.

They are engaged in a lawsuit-filing frenzy, asserting their rights to dozens of patents to block rival products.  Their goal: to find a patent that sticks, and to force competitors to work around it or strike a licensing deal.  Slide-to-unlock is one of those patents, though it hardly seems central to a smartphone. Its history—and future—show how today's battles are being waged.

About five years ago, the computer and mobile-phone industries collided. Technological advances turned phones into minicomputers, complete with email, Web access and other features.

Companies from different corners of industry saw opportunity—and pounced. Among them: phone makers like Nokia Corp.  and Motorola; computer-hardware makers like Apple; software giants such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.; and others, including South Korean electronics giant Samsung.

From the get-go, companies fought fiercely for consumer dollars with huge marketing blitzes.

Behind the scenes, another battle was brewing over intellectual property. Almost overnight, every player had developed a gripe. The traditional phone makers claimed, for instance, that Apple was abusing their long-held rights to data-transmission designs. Apple complained others were ripping off its designs.

In the past two years, legal disputes have erupted over digital-image storage methods, camera designs, Wi-Fi technologies and well-known software applications like email and calendars, as well as secondary features most consumers barely notice.

The stakes are rising for Apple. Despite the iPhone's popularity, its market share has been eclipsed by phones that run Android, Google's mobile operating software.

Fueling the fire at Apple: a sense among executives there that rivals are blatantly stealing its designs. Apple co-founder and CEO, who died in October, said in an authorized biography that he would "spend every penny" to fight copycats.

The current Apple CEO told investors in October that Apple spends a lot of time and money and resource in coming up with incredible innovations. And they don't like it when someone else takes those.

Through litigation—or the threat of it—Apple has prompted companies to install time-consuming and, in some instances, costly "workarounds" to avoid infringing its patents.
But Apple has yet to permanently knock any of its competitors' products out of the market.

Several rivals, meanwhile, have struck back against Apple, accusing the company of using their own patented designs.

At the center of the war is slide-to-unlock. It dates to late 2005, more than a year before Apple announced a product with a touchscreen.

Three diagrams from a patent awarded in 2012 to Swedish company Neonode that surprised both Apple and Samsung. Neonode first made its patent claim in 2002, three years before Apple's application.

The first iPhone was in the works at the time, and Apple's software engineers, including one of its current senior vice presidents, felt the need for a feature that would prevent the phone from accidentally making a call or sending a text message when pulled from a pocket or jostled in a purse.

Apple's engineers regarded slide-to-unlock as important because it flavored a user's first experience with the device, according to a person familiar with the matter. The team tried many iterations, this person said, from different finger-swiping speeds to different-shaped motions.

Two days before Christmas 2005, Apple filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office containing a handful of rudimentary drawings with ovals and circles.

The diagrams showed an early version of the design that current iPhone models use: a white rectangle with rounded edges that, when touched and dragged to the right, slides alongside a horizontal channel until the device "unlocks" and opens to the home screen.

The patent office granted Apple the patent four years later, in early 2010. That March, Apple sued HTC in Delaware for allegedly infringing slide-to-unlock and other features.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Apple felt that it would be a good starter case because the company thought it was particularly easy to see that HTC had imitated the iPhone interface—by using similar rows of icons, for example.

A spokesman for HTC declined to comment.

Several months later, Apple asserted claims against Motorola in Florida, where Motorola was already suing Apple, alleging that over a dozen Motorola products violated Apple's slide-to-unlock patent.

The slide-to-unlock used on many Motorola phones resembles Apple's in many ways. Users open the phone by dragging a finger from left to right across the bottom of the phone's screen. But the visual representations of the sliding motion are somewhat different.

Apple users see a white rectangle move across the screen while, with the Motorola phones, the slide of a finger extends a bar across the screen. Partly for this reason, Motorola claims its so-called "stretch to unlock" doesn't infringe Apple's patent.

Samsung, however, posed a unique challenge for Apple on slide-to-unlock. While Apple was waiting for its patent to be issued, Samsung unveiled phones that opened when a user touched the center of a circle on the screen, and dragged a finger to any point outside the circle.

Samsung's design was different, but in the mind of Apple executives, not different enough. So, in 2009 Apple went back to the patent office, according to a person familiar with the matter, and asked for a patent that would cover a wider variety of slide-to-unlock designs.

Apple got such a patent last October, and in February the company filed suit in San Jose against Samsung, alleging Samsung violated an array of patents, including slide-to-unlock.

Earlier this year, the combatants all got a surprise: an obscure Swedish touchscreen maker called Neonode Inc. disclosed that it had received a patent for a version of slide-to-unlock. Its technology let a mobile-device user switch from one application to another by swiping a finger across a screen.

The company, which briefly made a line of phones prior to a 2008 bankruptcy, had used the mechanism in one of its models.

Neonode declined to comment. But in a recent Apple-Samsung battle over slide-to-unlock in the Netherlands, Samsung held up Neonode designs as examples of "prior art," or evidence that Apple's patents on slide-to-unlock should never have been granted in the first place because someone else had actually beaten Apple to the idea.

A person close to Samsung said the company is likely to use Neonode's patent to try to knock out Apple in the San Jose case. Samsung has other arguments as well: Sliding locks have been around since the Middle Ages, and Apple didn't invent touchscreens. The combination of the two fits the definition of obvious.

In Apple's only win so far on slide-to-unlock, a judge in Munich ruled in February that two of Motorola's designs violated a European version of Apple's slide-to-unlock patent.

Motorola, however, quickly "designed around" Apple's patent, and its phones remained on the German market.

Many intellectual-property experts think that the smartphone war will end in a flurry of licensing and cross-licensing agreements, but that it's taking way too much time and money to get there.

When you have companies spending hundreds of millions in litigation, something is seriously wrong with the patent system.

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Former Intel Employee Stealing Top Secret Documents

Story first appeared on CIO

A former Intel employee has pleaded guilty to stealing confidential documents from the company, according to court records.

The employee has pleaded guilty to five counts relating to the illegal download of confidential documents from Intel's servers, according to a plea agreement entered last week between the employee and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.  An Intellectual Property Lawyer in Boston has been following the case.

An employee of Intel's Massachusetts Microprocessor Development Center, working on the design of Itanium processors, is said to have resigned from Intel on May 29, 2008, and took leave from Intel up to June 11, purportedly to use accrued vacation time.

The employee, however joined Intel's rival Advanced Micro Devices on June 2, while still on Intel's payroll, and continuing to have access to Intel's servers. He returned to Intel on June 11 for an exit interview on what was to be his last day at Intel, according to his indictment in 2008.

From June 8 through June 11, the employee downloaded 13 "top secret" Intel design documents from the company's servers in California, according to the indictment. He copied them from his Intel-issued laptop to an external drive to have access to the documents after he returned the laptop to Intel. He is said to have tried to access the servers again around June 13 after he found that he could not access the documents offline because he had not completed the procedure required for viewing the encrypted documents offline.

AMD neither requested the information that had been downloaded and kept from Intel, nor knew that the employee had taken or would take the information, according to the indictment. The employee is said to have downloaded the documents to further his career at AMD or someplace else when the opportunity arose.  A Boston Copyright Lawyer states that this not only falls under Intellectual Property Law but could also be violating Copyright Laws.

In the filing before the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts last week, the U.S. Attorney recommended six years of incarceration to the court, instead of the maximum of 20 years on each count, because among other things the government has no evidence that he used, sold, transferred, or offered the proprietary information, or any direct evidence of specifically how he intended to use the information.

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Do Employees Own Their Ideas?

First appeared in NY Times
This interview with Katherine Hays, chief executive of GenArts, a visual effects technology company.

Q. When was the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. The first time I had a real leadership position was at Massive, a video-game advertising company that I co-founded. We started that from an idea, and built it into a company with international offices before selling it to Microsoft. You wear every hat at the beginning, and then you gradually hire a team and you begin handing off some of those specific hats. A Wash DC Intellectual Property Lawyer is curious about the progression.

Q. Was that a natural transition for you into a leadership position?

A. I would say some things were natural, and others were not. One of the core things that is important to leadership is passion for the vision. I’m not sure I could sell anything I didn’t believe in. And honesty and fairness are also key. Someone was doing a reference check on me at some point a few years back, and people said that I’m extremely honest and fair, and that was one of the greatest compliments somebody could give me, because those are really core to being a great leader.

Q. What else have you learned about leadership?

A. It’s important to keep things in context, whether it’s good news or bad news. Either can be very distracting to the team. I’m pretty good at keeping those in context and focusing on the task at hand. Some of the boards I’ve worked with are really good at that as well. They just don’t overreact, no matter what the news is. A Boston Intellectual Property Lawyer agrees.
Those things came naturally to me. That being said, I think being a great leader is like being a great athlete. You can start with some natural abilities, but what a shame if you’re not continuing to build on them very deliberately, and continuing to kind of push yourself out of your comfort zone, trying to understand what you’re missing, and what you can learn from other people.

Q. Any other lessons?

A. Being very good at hiring people is key. And I would say I made two mistakes in hiring. Both times they had all the right answers to the questions, amazing backgrounds, really strong résumés, but my gut just said, hmm, this doesn’t feel right. And I didn’t listen to myself, and I hired them, and it was a mistake. I couldn’t articulate what it was that didn’t feel right, which is why I think I convinced myself to hire them. But something felt less than genuine about them.
So the lesson there was, at the end of the day, even if everything seems to check out, you listen to your gut. And I’ve given that guidance to a lot of my team. If they come in and they say, “You know, something doesn’t feel right,” I say, “Don’t hire them.” Far better to pass on someone than to bring the wrong person into the team.

Q. What about lessons when you were younger?

A. I learned as an athlete — I rowed for four years in college — that you have to be present in the moment, and you can’t be distracted by something you just did that was really good, or by the fact that you’re a little bit behind in a race. You can’t focus on what’s just happened because you can’t change it. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pause and congratulate ourselves, but you have to balance that with maintaining focus on what the next steps are. You learn as an athlete to say: “Great, we won that race, but what are the things we could have done better? Because we have a race next week.” A Wash DC Intellectual Property Lawyer is ready to help.

Q. What about your parents? What kind of influence did they have?

A. Both my parents started their own businesses and built them from scratch. My father runs a pest control company, and my mom bought apartments, restored them and sold them. So a lot of our discussions around the dinner table were about solving business problems. It was just something that seemed very natural to me. It wasn’t just a job for them — they were building something that they were excited about.

Q. What are some specific business lessons you learned from your parents?

A. Probably the biggest thing I learned from my father was to focus on the customer. Talk to the customer, and if you ask them in the right way and you really listen, you will find out what you need to be successful in your business. They can give you a huge amount of guidance in pointing you to the right answer, and helping you realize something that you might have been missing. In his business, he realized that it wasn’t just about controlling the bugs. It was really about happy residents. You’re going into their apartment or home, and they wanted a technician who had a tucked-in monogrammed shirt, and a reminder the day before that they were going to be there. All of those elements were actually more important, or certainly as important, as the pest control itself. And that allowed him to build a business that has sent all of his kids to Ivy League colleges. A Frankfurt Intellectual Property Lawyer mentions similar things.

Q. Other mentors?

A. One of the next leadership lessons I learned was from the person I worked for at Goldman Sachs. I went there right out of undergrad to work in equity research, and he really taught me to think about the ultimate outcome you want. This is one of the interview questions that I ask people. Where do you ultimately want to be? Envision the ideal in five years or 10 years, and then work back to what that means in terms of what you’re doing right now. It gives me a good window into how they think.
This approach applies in a business context, as well. You’re negotiating a deal with a key partner. What would be ideal? And often people don’t think through negotiations that way. But when you do, then you can back into an agreement by simplifying what your priorities are as part of the negotiation.

Q. What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned more recently?

A. I’d say I’m learning more about being quiet, stepping back and having my team really direct more of it. And to help them think about things as owners. I joke with them that what I think doesn’t matter. But to some extent it doesn’t. If I like the logo, for example, but the logo’s not accomplishing the outcome we want, then it’s kind of irrelevant what I think. Because if it doesn’t work with customers, we’ve lost. If you’re an owner, you’re fine with being wrong if someone’s helping you get to a better answer. And you’re just focused on that outcome — what’s going to make us a better company?

Q. Talk more about the culture you’re trying to create.

A. I think it comes back to the ownership thing. If you’re really the owner of a piece of work, you’re actually excited about the feedback because it’s going to help you improve what you’re doing. I think you have to have a culture where being wrong is O.K. — at least during the process — so that people can say, O.K., I got this piece wrong, but now I’ve corrected it and we’re moving forward to a better answer.
And then I think it also goes back to hiring. You want to hire people who are really strong at what they do, and very confident — not overly confident, but I’ve found that the more talented people are, the more comfortable they are if they find out they are wrong. They have a lot more humility. So they’re much more receptive to correcting things when someone else points out a way to improve. Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Lawyer advocates agree.

Q. You’ve talked about wanting to hire people who think like owners. How do you get at that in an interview?

A. I might ask about experiences that you had where you really owned the outcome. And how did you think about what would happen if it failed, and how did you define success? How did you get buy-in from others for that? To me that would demonstrate that you had an idea, and you kind of went out on a limb and it was going to be yours if it was a home run, and it was going to be yours if it was a flop, and you were comfortable with that. That’s the kind of person you want — someone who really is ready to be an owner, even if it doesn’t always mean success. A Wash DC Intellectual Property Lawyer likes this idea.

Q. But they’re not actually owners of the company, so can you explain this distinction a bit more for me about the mind-set you’re looking for?

A. You want people who are more interested in the outcome, not the process. So you might have done all the right tasks, but if they didn’t get you to the right outcome, it’s kind of irrelevant. Usually people who’ve started something themselves or started a project within a bigger company themselves have to be really outcome-focused versus task-focused.

And they talk more about the outcome in an interview. They’ll say, “Here are the outcomes I was looking for, so I tried this and it didn’t work, so then I tried these other two things and those didn’t work, and finally I went down this path and that was the successful one.” There are usually a lot of roadblocks before you hit the right one. A Salt Lake City Intellectual Property Lawyer can answer similar questions.

People sometimes ask me for advice about being an entrepreneur. Typically, I say you need to feel really comfortable with your vision, because if you’re onto something and you’re onto something innovative, no one else is going to see it for a long time. So do your homework. Make sure it’s the right opportunity. But for a long time, people you try to raise money from, your first partners, your first customers, your first hires, they’re not necessarily going to see the vision, so you have to really believe in the vision.

And you have to get very comfortable about hearing the word “no.” You’ll hear “no” so often it starts to have the emotional impact of “hello.” But you have to not let that stop you. You have to ask people: “How can we make this work? What could help us get to a yes?”

Co-Founder Of Microsoft Drives Patent Dispute

They make up the common features of the Internet experience: instant NYSE updates, recommended news stories, supplemental videos along the side of your navigation bar.

Now taking a claim on these popular tech widgets is Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen. He says he owns the intellectual property behind all these innovations, and he's demanding that some of the world's top Web companies pay it forward to use them.

Allen, a 57-year-old software mastermind, sued a sea of Silicon Valley companies on Friday. He targeted Internet giants such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and eBay Inc. based on having created their businesses around what he claims is his technology.

Paul Allen's legal action asserts that those three companies as well as eight others are utilizing patented technology developed over 10 years ago at his former Silicon Valley development center. The computer software pioneer did not actually develop any of the technology himself however owns the patents.

His Silicon Valley targets do not plan to go down so lightly. "This lawsuit against some of America's most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace," a Google spokesman said.

Patent litigation as a whole is on the rise, in what is evolving into a lucrative endeavor. Ocean Tomo, a merchantile bank in Chicago that monitors the intellectual-property market, values the licensing market at up to $500 billion.

Allen's lawsuit comes at the heels of firms such as NTP Inc., which regulates and enforces non-tangible patents, and by many critics, have been coined "patent trolls". Courts have tried to make a presence in patent litigation, however with mixed results.

The four intellectual property patents addressed in the suit were created at Interval Research Corporation of Palo Alto, California. Allen financed the tech lab during the Internet bubble with roughly $100 million, however since a decade ago, the lab no longer exists.

Mr. Allen was unavailable for comment, according to spokesman David Postman, who said Mr. Allen's facility developed the technology that he claims to be his own. "We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are the way to protect that," said Postman.

Mr. Postman also commented that the timing of the lawsuit was in no way related to the status of Allen's health or personal finance. Mr. Allen recently offered to donate the majority of his fortune. Last year, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but has successfully completed treatments and has no current problems.

"It sounds like the classic patent-troll case," said a Stanford Law School professor, who also has experience as a Nashville intellectual property. He mentioned that claims filed by owners of aged patents over technology, especially tech patents that are used so widespread, can be difficult to win.

Paul Allen's attorneys said a group has been reviewing his patent portfolio for years, evaluating what is relevant to the market while tightening the loose ends to complete the patent process. During that time, some of Mr. Allen's patents were sold or licensed.

Ron Laurie, a former intellectual property lawyer who now counsels businesses on patent licensing strategy, claimed Mr. Allen and the companies he owns have typically avoided the litigation process. "He's not been thought of as being in the troll community at all," said Mr. Laurie, who in the past has represented Mr. Allen in other concerns.

Legal professionals claim that an emergence in large settlements for patent holders in recent years have motivated owners to file infringement suits, rather than sell intellectual property, even when patents are several years old.

A perfect example occurred in July when NTP sued Microsoft, Apple Inc. and four other organizations over intellectual property patents involving the wireless transmission of email to PDAs and cellphones. Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of BlackBerry, paid NTP $612.5 million to settle the claim.

Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft, has put a stamp on thousands of patents valued at over hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Myhrvold patents some of his inventions through his firm Intellectual Ventures in Seattle, but also invests in patents to license. A critical ingredient to successful patenting requires consulting with an experienced Nashville intellectual property law firm who can manage the legal complexities.

The companies named in Paul Allen's lawsuit are Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., Netflix, Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc. and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.

Noteworthy organizations not present in the defendants' list are Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc. Both companies Mr. Allen has personal and financial ties to. Mr. Postman denied comment on the list of defendants.

EBay said it was currently analyzing the claim and is planning an aggressive defense. "We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously." a Facebook spokesman added.

Mr. Allen's lawsuit outlines violations of four IP patents for technology that are considered to be essential components of e-commerce and Internet search companies, in addition to being critical to the operations of the companies that use them.

One patent's technology enables a website to provide relevant suggestions to consumers for items related to what they currently have on their screen. The same technology allows social-networking websites to relate online activities and interests of its users.

A second key component involved in the dispute allows news readers to quickly pinpoint related stories to a particular topic. The other two patents enable ads, news updates or video images to flash on a user's computer screen, aside from their main activity.

Mr. Allen was the primary source of funds for Interval Research. During the companies prime, the facility employed over 110 professionals, "and was at the forefront in designing next-generation science and technology," the suit says. David Liddle, Interval Research's co-founder and a former Xerox Corp. researcher, could not be reached for comment.

The research pioneer was invested in a number of projects, with objectives to develop technology applicable to Mr. Allen's ventures in cable television and telecommunications. The company also focused on creating technology that could be licensed to investors and other companies.

According to Mr. Allen's lawsuit, in 1998 Interval Research was found listed in Google's "credits" site as an external collaborator and one of many sources of research funding for the founder's research that resulted in Google.com.

The creations of Interval Research extended from motion-detection technology used in video games to technology used for cellular voice-processing. The company dissolved shortly after its plans to commercialize its technology failed to resolve out as planned.