Beware Apple Fanboys Interpreting Apple Lawsuits

The news this morning of Apple filing suit against HTC for allegedly infringing on 20 patents related to the iPhone is making its rounds through the Web, as Cupertino fights back against what it perceives to be unfair copying of its intellectual property. The suit, related to specific functionality of the phone, as well as user interface issues, is largely seen as Apple trying to slow the growth of Google's Android mobile OS, without suing Mountain View directly. And while precious few of us carry law degrees, and can offer deep analysis of why this suit has more merit than any other, the gut feeling is one I recognize from my decades as an Apple fanboy - Steve must be right and Go Apple!

John Paczkowski of All Things Digital explains the suit's array of patents, and which HTC phones, namely the HTC Hero, the Droid Eris, T-Mobile G1 and Google's vaunted Nexus One, are impacted by the suit.

Regardless of which mobile handset camp you sit in, the question that the iPhone dramatically changed the marketplace cannot be debated. From Apple's position, the many smartphones that have followed have increasingly approached the iPhone's previously unique capabilities, and no doubt, one must respect Apple's innovation in the space, which had previously one of compromise and mediocrity - with the possible exception of BlackBerry's product line. That Apple is allowed to protect their intellectual property is serious business, and if they truly find their work was infringed upon, then serious business says lawsuits can be required.

But that exact same voice that tells us Apple fanboys to root on Cupertino is the same one that laughed in the face of Nokia's lawsuits, which similarly claimed the iPhone infringed on ten patents of their own last fall. In that case, one can smirk and look at Nokia as a has-been handset maker who fell behind the times to a more nimble Silicon Valley legend.

Could it possibly be that Nokia's lawsuit is every bit as valid as Apple's against HTC? Ask any Mac fanboy, and the answer should be no - regardless of the visible data. In an Apple fanboy's mind, there are two eras of phone: Before the iPhone and After the iPhone. All phones prior to the iPhone are irrelevant, and all smartphones after it are mere copies.

In Silicon Valley, and many parts of the world, there is a saying: "Small companies innovate and large companies litigate." So what to make of a large company like Apple who somehow manages to innovate but plays the courtroom as well as Perry Mason? And how would the Web react if Steve Jobs and team had gone all in and filed suit against Google? Relationships and families would be torn asunder as people scrambled to choose sides. So while this morning's news makes us all raise our eyebrows, and think again about the world of innovation, patents, and business, don't expect those of us who have been drinking the holy water of Cupertino to see things on a level playing field - because when Apple is involved, they're on another field altogether.

Intuit's Mint and TurboTax Have Your Finances Summed Up

It may only be the beginning of March, but our home's taxes are already done. It's a yearly tradition of sorts to head online, capture all relevant data, and trick Uncle Sam into giving us a refund in time to blow it all on the Final Four (not really). That's due to my leveraging TurboTax online, which gets easier every year, considering how it comes pre-linked to the prior year's data. Now, with Intuit also owning the personal finance site (and awesome iPhone app) Mint.com, the same company keeps my data organized all year round - and with tax time being a good opportunity to look backwards, I thought I would highlight some of Mint's more interesting options.

While much of Mint.com's focus has been on trying to find ways for you to save money, for example, by switching from one credit card to another, or finding a new brokerage firm, I have been watching my Mint activity to help see whether we have been breaking even this month, if our family is within budget, or through getting alerts on high expenditures and deposits. Mint has become one of my most frequently-used iPhone applications and Web sites, especially as I've managed starting the new consultancy in the middle of last year, transitioning from my full-time role with a more stable income.

Mint.com Shows Half My Spend Was from 10 Merchants in 2009

As you know, doing one's taxes helps to bring clarity into the last twelve months. It gives you a sum total of what you earned, what you took home, what you were able to deduct, and how much you gave to the government. But it doesn't show you details on your spending. Mint does.

If you are a Mint user, you can walk through your spending history, and if organized well, you can see where your money is going - to your house, to your groceries, utilities, car, or entertainment, to name a few categories. After logging into Mint, click Trends, and choose Spending By Merchant.

Clicking Mint's "Other" Category Shows Me Merchants 11-20

I selected the 2009 period, and found, unsurprisingly, that 5% of our home's expenditures went to Safeway. What was a surprise is that we had more than 100 transactions at Safeway, which meant either my wife or I was going to the grocery store every 3 or 4 days (some days had multiple charges). The most we ever spent at Safeway was $208.32, and the least was a mere $5.49. In contrast, expenditures at Apple just exceeded 1% of all spending last year, less than 2 percent overall. Meanwhile, no doubt the result of having twin toddlers, and their being invited to other baby showers and friends' birthdays, there were more than 20 expenditures at Toys R Us, good enough to have gotten me a brand new MacBook Pro with all the fixings.

Just like you no doubt do when you look backward at your previous year's investments, there are purchases on my Mint.com history that make me cringe - as I look at air travel to events that proved less than useful, or wonder about whether I should have given so much money to Adobe, or raise my eyebrows at the more than $1,100 spent at Chevron in 32 separate transactions. But the more I look at the data, the smarter a consumer I become, as I use the information to change my behavior, and constantly look at Mint to see if I am on track.

Everything I have heard from my occasional talks with people at Intuit is that Mint.com's being set to replace Quicken Online is that Quicken was seen as a tool for the last generation - the one who balanced their checkbooks to the penny. Mint.com isn't yet integrated with TurboTax, but I would assume having the two properties under the same roof offers plenty of potential. The question is, can you take advantage?

The Followers Game Is So 2008. Time for New Metrics.

Any time one's statistics can be counted and ranked against peers online, the inevitable next steps include leaderboards and gaming. Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics. While it is said by some that there is real value to having an open, random, network, we have all seen bot-driven impersonal behavior on many networks as people try to game the system for maximum follower counts. It would be harmless were it not for many third parties using these inflated follower counts as one element of assigning value to an individual.

For the many of us who roll our eyes at Twitter accounts with followers well beyond 20,000 or 50,000, who seemingly spout nonsense interspersed with advertisements, or those of us who recognize million-plus accounts were the product of the recently semi-retired suggested user list, there are the frequent media swoons over people's following numbers, used to verify one's credibility.

I Stopped Growing My Followers. Am I Less Relevant?

It's this seeming need to count and extend one's network further and further in a never-ending for self-validation that might have Facebook deciding to never open up beyond 5,000 connections, avoiding the faux arms race, and why you now see complete unknowns gaming Google Buzz by following tens of thousands of accounts in hopes that a fraction of the number follow back, pushing them up the rudimentary leaderboards that exist today.

Ask any active social media user or blogger their follower statistics or RSS subscribers, or even their usual page views per day or month, and they will know within 3-5%. Anybody who says they don't know or don't check is probably lying. They might modestly tell you that one number is "too high" because of one service or another, or they aren't chasing numbers, but they know because it's one way to measure success.

Of These "Top" Buzzers, Which Belongs? All of Them?

Breaking through 1,000 subscribers on this blog was a big deal for me. So was rapidly getting to 2,000 and eventually 5,000. Now, I glance and note any wide variance in the number as being due to one service or another missing each other on the back end. On Twitter, my numbers don't go up or down much, especially after I stopped using autofollow, slowing growth dramatically. So watching the newest network, Buzz, has been interesting - the first real valuable network to come along in a while.

Even though the Google team considered not displaying followers and following counts in Buzz, they eventually opted to display. Now, sites like Buzz Top not only show the same top tech enthusiasts you have seen on other networks, but scores of unknowns who could be following as many as 10,000 to more than 36,000 different accounts, hoping their message can reach more people.

I promise you that even the 250 I follow in Buzz is enough, just like I've decided following about 1,400 in Twitter is enough for how I want to use the service today. There is no question that anybody following more than a few thousand in Buzz is missing out on most of the updates, yet the allure still exists.

We have got to achieve more accurate ratings of influence that determine value. There is no question that value of an individual varies widely from one person's point of view to another, but I've just about had it with follower numbers. How would social networks be improved if we just hid them away entirely, and stopped looking at growth or relative sizes? My value is still the same, in terms of quality, whether I have an audience of 2,000 or 20,000, especially if I have the right people. Buzz had a chance to take a high road with putting the numbers game aside, but we're seeing the games begin already. I wonder what new network will be the first to start focusing on quality and less on quantity.

Twitter Unleashes the Firehose to Seven New Partners

As Twitter promised back in December at LeWeb, the company has now extended access to the firehose, the full feed of public tweets, to a full array of partners - going beyond the initial deals with search leaders Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft. The partners announced today include personal favorites Twazzup, Collecta and Kosmix, taking Twitter more into the realm of platform rather than destination.

Twitter, through its continued rise in traffic, use and the public consciousness, has seen the data flowing through its system grow increasingly valuable, as the company aims to live up to its lofty goal as the pulse of the planet. This rich data set, now open for partners to tap into, can potentially rival traditional search engines in terms of value, especially where real-time reaction and sentiment analysis comes into play.

Kosmix, behind the personalized newspaper service, Meehive, and extended topic pages on its own search tool, wrote to say, "Having full access to the entire tweet streams will give us the chance to surface all relevant and interesting information on what is buzzing on the Web for any given topic."

Financial deals were not disclosed by Twitter, or by its partners, but the company looks to have found a way to recognize revenue and gain income off of the public stream. In this age of real-time data, the faster and more relevant, the better. That Twitter is letting more of its secret sauce spread across the Web will make it harder for other sites, namely Facebook, to look as nimble.

Disclosure: Kosmix has previously done business with Paladin Advisors Group, where I am managing director of new media.