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A moment ago this video of Jason Fried on getting your company an audience caught my attention. In this talk he explains how they’re using their knowledge to market their products.

I am fascinated about the way they share knowledge, I strongly believe this is a great way for small company’s to boost their potential. A must see.

Removed the embedded version of the video because of autoplay. Find it here!

Next week I need to give a small talk for some students in our school. It’s about Social Networks and how we at Firmhouse are using it to start building our company. We’ve got our theory on this and tested it with Tweetburner.

Now I remembered a great presentation by Tara ‘Missrogue’ Hunt. Don’t be scared about the 197 slides in there. It’s worth it. Take a sit and watch. Both a great presentation and a very good vision.

One of the subjects I postponed to write about was Intellectual Property (IP). But I ran across this news that Microsoft is granted the patent for the page up and page down function buttons on your keyboard. The patent is granted August the 19th, this year. This triggered me to write about it today.

So what are we dealing with right now?

Microsoft is granted the patent for the keys on your keyboard for a function that we already know for 25 years. So the invention is 25 years old, known by almost all computer users. Besides the function on the keyboard the patent is licensed for several usages. The example given:

“In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page,”

So besides the keys they also patented the functions related to them.

Patent offices exist to register ownership for intellectual property. It is there to regulate and prove ownership for inventions and property in the public domain. The patent offices should look after their customers and their patents, but it needs to be in favor of protecting the public domain.

At the moment patenting offices aren’t looking after the public domain anymore. They’re merely satisfying their customers that are paying the excessive fees for the patents. For example Microsoft owned 5.000 patents in 2006 already, and they’re rapidly approaching number 10.000. In the example we see today with Microsoft there is not only an invention patented, also a lot of the related functions are registered with that patent.

By patenting all these ‘inventions’ and processes the patent office is not helping the public domain. By granting patents of this kind the public domain is excluded from accessing something they already know. As in this case the keys and functions already exist in the public domain, therefore I think it should not be patented.

I’m really eager for discussion on these subjects. Drop a comment to let me know what you think.

Recently Michiel and I founded Tweetburner, a web service for Twitter that allows users to shorten, post and track links on Twitter. At the moment it’s being developed with a focus more on statistics.

About a minute ago I was browsing my feeds and I stopped at Techcrunch. As always a lot of startup and technews there. For me this is always relevant, but today something else caught my attention. When visiting the frontpage there wasn’t much news on start-ups, but there was news on the of the biggest software firms: Microsoft and Apple. And the news wasn’t good. Microsoft’s launched the long awaited Photosynth but couldn’t take the loads of traffic to their servers. Apple already launched MobileMe a few weeks ago, but it’s being chased by problems. At the moment they finally think everything is over, a major flaw in their service is unveiled. Their users are angry and unhappy with their products. Sounds logical, a titan should launch a reliable and working product.

As a start-up there is one thing you really want to happen, getting picked up by the media. After all the hard nights of work, receiving attention is what matters. But you never know when it happens. It is something where it’s hard to prepare for. Which causes a lot of start-ups to go off-line as soon as the media jump onto them. In other words, big trouble!

But going off-line is a good thing for a startup. When it’s happening to your bad ass startup, your users understand. In the first stage of your start-up, your users are loyal. They report bugs and accept the fact something isn’t functioning properly. Most of the successfull startups have the same experience.

Microsoft and Apple both had problems, major problems. Microsoft couldn’t manage their own servers (so in a sense, couldn’t work with their own product) and Apple lost email of 1% of their users. These are all big mistakes and people don’t like it. They expect a service from a titan to function properly and they certainly don’t expect a beta product with bugs.Titans, finish and test your products before launching. Simulate heavy traffic or make it beta, Google does it all the time.

Start-ups, run for that off-line moment. It’s one of the best things that can happen. Make sure to get back online soon. Keep the people informed with a blog and somekind of microblogging account. Going off-line is going to give you some negative feedback from some users, of course. But most of them will understand.

For some time I’ve been using Tumblr for my blogging needs on the Internet. It’s a great tool and it works fabolous. It’s very clean, simple and for a lot of people very easy to use. As it was for me. But I wanted to blog on subjects, make information manageable.

I want to start to blog about multiple subjects and not only collect and show my favorite content (which I think Tumblr is a very good system to use). To manage the information I’ll be creating during blogging, Wordpress is simply a better choice.

With the new version 2.5 (and of course 2.6.1, which I’m using) everything I’ve missed in Wordpress is now gone. Playing around with 2.5 made me to switch back to Wordpress.

If you’re looking for a nice and simple blogging tool, Tumblr is the way to go. You can even start following other bloggers on Tumblr and people start following. For everything else I’d say: Wordpress and Twitter.