The recently published Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020 ranks the top global startup ecosystems by metrics including performance, funding, connectedness, talent, and knowledge to highlight the winning startup cities worldwide. In a league of their own, this year’s top five global startup ecosystems have a combined value of $1.5 trillion, 1.7 times the remaining top ecosystems. Silicon Valley maintains the #1 ranking, a position it has held since 2012, when rankings were first released. Meanwhile, New York remains at #2, although now tied with London. And finally, Beijing is at #4, and Boston is at #5. Tel-Aviv and Los Angeles rounded out the top seven. The 2020 analysis includes almost 300 ecosystems, up from 60 in 2018 and 150 in 2019. It ranks the top 40 global startup ecosystems and 100 emerging startup ecosystems.
The first half of 2020 has brought so much upheaval and disruption that it is almost hard to contemplate. In the future, there will be entire treatises and dissertations in a variety of fields of study that seek to understand the socioeconomic, psychological and inter-personal dynamics brought to bear. For now, individuals, families, business leaders, government officials— everyone really—are left to figure out what is next in this ever-changing landscape before us, which in the United States has become even more complicated by domestic unrest in virtually every major city. As states are opening up slowly, many businesses— of all sizes really— remain cautious. Plans to return to pre-COVID normal are being discussed, but how can you, for example, get employees into the office when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend social distancing of at least six feet? With many offices being in high-rise buildings and elevators being only so large, the logistics of getting staff into and out of the office safely are daunting, let alone the reality that there is no plan for social distancing when using mass transit, for example.
Last week during IPWatchdog’s Patent Masters Symposium, former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Michel sat down with me to discuss the state of the U.S. patent system and best options/ predictions for moving forward. He began by lamenting that “the courts have failed and failed and failed” with flawed rulings such as Helsinn v. Teva, which Michel characterized as “completely illogical”, and Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc. To boot, the Supreme Court has refused to take any patent eligibility cases, and the Federal Circuit has managed to make the harm and illogic of the SCOTUS rulings even worse, Michel said. In fact, they’ve “expanded on the bad rulings of the SCOTUS.” Part of the problem may lie in a misunderstanding of the true intent of the patent system, according to Michel. “The real point of the patent system is to incentivize innovation, not to encourage creative people. Creative people will create no matter what. Investment is extremely risky and costly—if the incentive to invest shrinks, and there is evidence that it has, we are in trouble.” Below, Michel offers more of his thoughts on the current patent landscape, including what to expect from pending legislation and why he is cautiously optimistic that change is coming soon.
In August, the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the Northern District of California charged a pioneer of self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski, with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google under 18 U.S.C. § 1832 of the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). According to the indictment, Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 files containing critical information about Google’s autonomous-vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016. The indictment alleged that Levandowski then made an unauthorized transfer of the files to his personal laptop. Some of the files that Levandowski allegedly took from Google included private schematics for proprietary circuit boards and designs for light sensor technology, known as Lidar, which are used in self-driving cars. Levandowski joined Uber in 2016 after leaving Google when Uber bought his new self-driving trucking start-up, “Otto.” Levandowski has repeatedly asserted that he never disclosed the download, nor made use of the information while he was at Uber.
I am Emil Malak, CEO of VoIP-Pal.com Inc., and a named inventor on two U.S. patents–Mobile Gateway: US 8,630,234 & Electrostatic Desalinization and Water Purification: US 8,016,993. To date, our company owns 22 issued and or allowed patents, which we developed over the past 15 years. Against all odds, we have been 100% successful in defending eight Inter Partes Reviews (IPRs): four from Apple, three from AT&T, and one from Unified Patents. We are presently in litigation against Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Twitter and Amazon. My experience with Voip-Pal has made it painfully clear that the deck has been stacked against companies who own IP being used without license by large tech companies. The America Invents Act (AIA), orchestrated by Silicon Valley, was designed to destroy the very ladder they climbed to ascend to their lofty perch, and make certain that they could not be challenged.