If you own a big tech firm, aren’t Microsoft, and weren’t named in the patent lawsuit filed this week by Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing, well… you’re probably looking deep into your soul today and asking where it all went wrong.
If you aren’t a defendant – a category that includes AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! – why not? After all, the technology in dispute is, according to Interval, “fundamental to the ways that leading e-commerce and search companies operate today.” Dammit, you say to yourself. Maybe you aren’t one of those leading e-commerce and search companies.
Wait: most of your work is with open-source software. Like Java! Maybe that’s why you aren’t being sued by anyone.
Aw, dammit.
Ah, well. Maybe it’s for the best. Not everyone can be on the A-list or in land of corporate jets, gargantuan mergers and stratospheric lawsuits. Hell, if it weren’t for those of us on the B-list (or, in my case, somewhere way down in the YYs), there wouldn’t be an A-list.
So chin up. With a little more work, a few game-changing innovations and – yes – a bit of luck, someday you, too, could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit big enough to alter global currency markets. Good luck with that!
Okay, folks, I need a quick bit of help.
The cartoon that ran yesterday on ReadWriteWeb actually originally had a different caption. And while I’m pretty pleased with the one it ran with, I can’t shake the question of which one is better.
I put this question to the Twitters, and the suggestion came back, “Crowdsource it!” Sounds like fun, thought I, and so here we all are.
Mind helping me out? Here are the nice people from SurveyMonkey to ask you to vote for your favourite.
If I’m sounding a little more breathless, a touch more excited, a wee bit more giddy than you usually find me, well, there’s a reason.
The heroic folks at Getting Things Done (why, yes, that Getting Things Done) just blogged my business-book-sequel cartoon on GTD Times. (I can well understand why they blogged that cartoon and not, say, this.)
If you haven’t heard of Getting Things Done – or, as author David Allen’s fans call it, GTD – and you’re hoping to raise your personal productivity, then definitely check out the blog and look into GTD.
I drew this on my iPhone - it’s the first cartoon I’ve drawn there (although I had to resort to the laptop to add the caption – graphic app developers, please consider adding text support, ‘kay?) and I did it with Autodesk SketchBook Mobile for the iPhone and the Logiix StylusPro, a worthy competitor to the Pogo Sketch stylus I’ve been using until now.
I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to make it look pretty; what you’re seeing is the first take, and took me maybe four minutes to draw. So the iPhone turns out to be perfectly viable for quick sketches.
It’s in support of David Eaves‘ Facebook Group aimed at getting 100,000 Canadians to opt out of receiving those tree-killing, energy-burning, shelf-space-taking-up tomes known as the Yellow Pages. Here’s my blog post on the topic.
I just finished two days of iPad-based cartoon-blogging and doodle-note-taking at Northern Voice, the Vancouver-based personal social media conference… and boy, are my arms tired.
But both the iPad and the Pogo Sketch performed magnificently. As for me, well, I’ll leave that to you to judge.
I got to kick off MooseCamp – the narrowly-rescued unconference stream at Northern Voice – with a half-hour on webcomics. I shared a little of what I’ve learned over the past few years, but one of the things that grabbed people’s imagination is that you can cartoon without, well, cartooning.
Here are links to some of the comics I mentioned that are created with little or no actual drawing (although there’s a lot of talent still there):
- Dwell On It, Tateru Nino’s cartoon created through Second Life screen captures
- Gumshoo, a fun comic that deals with the same kind of topics I do, created on Bitstrips.com
- A Softer World, with captions over top of photos – think LOLcats for grownups (often leading dark internal lives)
- Dinosaur Comics, which uses the same clipart and panel structure in every comic
- Get Your War On, which uses truly awful office clipart to devastating political effect
- And then there’s xkcd – stick-figure cartoons from someone who every once in a while proves he can, in fact, draw pretty damn nicely.
Thanks, everyone – I loved the session!
