MEDIA PREDICT, INKLING AND PATENTS
Bo Cowgill May 21st, 2007
Congrats to Brent Stinski and the Inkling guys on launching Media Predict and Project Publish. NYT picked up the launch today, but doesn’t mention Inkling.
Based on the article and my browsing the site, my initial reactions are:
- Notice the words “Patent Pending” at the bottom. What could they possibly be patenting? One hopes they are not trying to create a bogus “business method” patent on the concept of prediction markets for publishing. Assuming they’re using Inkling’s standard technology, I don’t see much to patent here (granted, I haven’t logged in yet because they’re undergoing server maintenance).
- Justin’s NYT quote about the beauty contest seems to be on-point.
- Nonetheless, nice to see another high-profile company take interest in markets for organizational decision making.
I presume Media Predict is the high volume application that required an extra Inkling engineer. Anyone know who the hire was? I can’t seem to find the post anymore, so maybe the need went away.
Cross-posted from Bo Cowgill.com.
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- Comments(8)
Jed Christiansen is right (Nathan Kontny did put up an April-Fool blog post about this). That said, Bo Cowgill is asking whether Inkling needed to hire another coder for the Media Predict application. Let’s ask Adam Siegel.
April Fools: Inkling’s Hiring
from Journal by Nate
http://code.inklingmarkets.com.....iring.html
Update: This was an April Fools joke.
——————————————-
Several weeks ago, Inkling landed a huge client who is expecting to have thousands of simultaneous traders. After signing the deal, we immediately began to think through the ramifications of being able to support such a large user base. Clearly we could throw hardware at the problem, and we will do that regardless, but we also realized that Ruby on Rails, the framework Inkling is currently built in, simply would not scale to what we need. We know the Rails zealots are going to kill us for making such a statement but we simply can’t take the risk with our livelihoods in the balance. After taking a deep breath and talking to many people (you know who you are - thankyou for your advice pro and con) we’ve decided to re-write Inkling in Lisp. Specifically, we’re going to be using Arc after pleading with Paul Graham to let us be application number two using it in the wild (application one was his Reddit clone for startup news) While we’ve already begun to scaffold pieces of our application, we will also be hiring a developer as the work is simply too intense to complete in the amount of time we have before our client would like to roll out their marketplace.
Since we only want people who have actually used our application before to apply, this blog post will serve as our job posting. Please send resumes to arc@inklingmarkets.com. All candidates are welcome, but here’s a few important things we’re looking for:
- 8-12+ years lisp/arc experience
- red hat admin
- mysql admin
- communication/writing skills (you WILL be interacting with customers)
- proponent of agile development methodologies
- able to think outside the box
Also you must be willing to work remotely, have proven you can be productive with little supervision, and work well in a small team. We’re located in Chicago but co-location is not a must. We hope to hear from you!
http://code.inklingmarkets.com.....iring.html
The extra engineer was an April Fools joke we tried to pull on the Paul Graham fanboys (which kind of worked, we got 3 or 4 applicants); we didn’t need to hire anyone to do Media Predict or manage it.
Media Predict has their own team for managing the markets using the same tools all our other clients use.
Well I guess I fell for the April 1 joke. Anybody know about the patent?
http://www.google.com/patents/
Brent Stinski + Simon & Shuster = Media Predict
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....a-predict/
Submitting Book Proposals to Media Predict
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....a-predict/
MEDIA PREDICT, INKLING AND PATENTS
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....d-patents/
CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUIST: How St. Paul Engineered the Hoax that Shaped Our World.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....our-world/
Media Predict: 172 transactions trader positions, so far.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ns-so-far/
The Media Predict site is quite usable, in my view.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....n-my-view/
Project Publish = Media Predict + Simon & Schuster
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....-schuster/
Media Predict and “Infinite Reflection”
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....eflection/
Simon & Schuster’s unorthodox partnership with Media Predict is not that silly after all.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....after-all/
Media Predict’s Brent Stinski interviewed by Sandra Ruttan
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ra-ruttan/
Sandra Ruttan pinches Media Predict’s Brent Stinski’s nose.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....skis-nose/
Brent Stinski’s patents for Media Predict
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....a-predict/
I believe it is a business method patent, but it’s not just prediction markets on media. It involves contractually feeding publishers/labels/studios properties that are filtered by prediction markets. I have never seen the actual applications though and some cursory searches on the USPO’s website don’t show anything.
Jason, I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by your description. Anyway, I suppose I should reserve judgment until I read the patent application, but it sounds pretty bogus.
We all know that you can use a market to make decisions about anything (books, CDs, movie scripts, taxes, war, what to wear, you name it). There’s nothing especially innovative about applying this to any particular field. Its like someone trying to patent the notion of cost-benefit analysis.
I haven’t been convinced that Media Patent has come up with anything genuinely innovative. It would be a shame for them to stifle further progress by enforce the patent. But who knows, it could be genuinely worthy of a patent. We should find out.
Yeah I was intentionally vague. Brent can give details on the overall model (which is innovative) and the patents if he’d like.
In general though I agree about patents. I don’t understand how some of them are even granted. It’s like the patent office is just saying, “ok here, whatever — try to enforce it.”