25 April 2005

Sonos Digital Music System - Introduction

Jeff Nolan ordered a Sonos Digital Music System. I man-handled three back from the US in to Moscow and am the happiest music bunny out there. As it says on the Sonos website you can play it anywhere, and you can play different music in different places at the same time.

In over a month of regular use I have had no problems with it at all. A HUGE fan.

21 April 2005

Mobile = Enterprise = PAM

Russell Beattie asks what is PalmOne celebrating exactly? And then gives PalmOne a due smacking for its Treo. I am a 650 owner - OK PDA, very bad phone.

I take mild issue with the conclusion. The winner is not Nokia or Sony/Ericsson, Moto etc but RIM, Good, M$soft (Exchange 2003 upgraded w/ push service) and, interestingly, Sonus and Broadsoft.

I am not pro-M$oft but the free ActiveSync upgrade to 2003 Exchange Server is a great idea, just 5 years too late. The option to IT managers; buy a b'berry server et al or a smartphone and a good email client. And they will still go b'berry. You don't get fired for buying what everyone else is.

20 April 2005

Romanian hides stolen mobe in vagina

This too good to miss - Romanian hides stolen mobe in vagina. As with all mobiles in public places stick it on vibrate....

18 April 2005

TelSym Dies; SkypeOut Security

Glenn Fleishman on the death of TelSym. I can't say that I am hugely surprised. They were trying to fill a market position that was in constant flux and has not even begun to settle down. I watched them quite closely at the time because we spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out a business plan for a similar company. We passed because we could not figure out how to make money from a smart company. Same was true of TelSym. They had a bunch of financing to ensure that they had to worry less about hitting the wall. When it came more money slammed in to it.

In the same week that they failed a possible answer to their woes. I am a Skype-sceptic and cannot quite shake my feeling that nothing has changed since I voiced my skepticism last year. Today I heard from a friend with more knowledge than most of security-related issues that his SkypeOut account identity had been stolen and the contents of his account spent on calls to Australia. He points out that your account's security is based purely on a password. Not a great way to keep cash online.

I'll go back to why I don't think Skype is the answer; security and maintaining call state to provide applications. If TelSym had not been so arrogant maybe they could have hung around long enough to find nirvana.

Education and Statistics

Jeff Nolan posts on comparative education and statistics and damns socialism. The linkage is interesting; in Britain, at least, the government spending more on education would be viewed as a Labour (slightly to the left) policy. The UK election battle over education is about how to spend less, or at least the same, better. He acknowledges, obliquely, that there is no obvious linkage between cash invested and the quality of the output. Which is the first reason that I felt compelled to post - statistics do lie.

The second reason is that as Russia and Ukraine tend not to be overly covered in comparative studies I was previously forced to go the OECD to get comparative tertiary education data, and thus spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing the data so that it fitted the stroy I was trying to tell. The statistics don't lie they have just been presented to tell my story. So the long and short if you have been unfortunate enough to get a presentation from me on why Ukraine's and Russia's educational system make it a good place to build world-class technology companies you would have seen a table like this one.



The US is clearly ahead of the pack in enrolment in tertiary education but (and I can't find the stats now) has a remarkably low hit rate in mathematics and science, which is probably required to be at the forefront of an innovative society, unless of course you just outsource R&D. If the argument were turned on its head and I posited that Russia's enrolment in tertiary education and dedication to mathematics and science which clearly results in quality meant that Russia was on its way to becoming a major center for innovation then it could be argued that I was exploiting statistics to make an arguable point.

I'll leave my thoughts on education spending, statistics and socialism with this point. The former Soviet Union boasted literacy rate of 99% and spent more (as a % of GDP) on primary and secondary education than any other �developed� country. I struggle to make the sequitor between spending on education and socialism, consumerism, capitalism.

I await Jeff's post on the quality issue.

14 April 2005

American Universities Fall Way Behind in Programming...

Russian universities two in first three and three in top ten; which includes Izhevsk, which to the best of my knowledge has the honor of producing my excellent receptionist and little else.

A Russian friend working in the Valley forwarded me this report. He has a PhD in something complicated and a 7-year old son. He is worried that the public-education that he is giving him will qualify him to be a lawyer, consultant or investment banker but certainly nothing that requires 2x2 being equal to 4 at all times.

I'm damned if I can import the chart and keep the formatting so you will have to find the standings here. The top 13 included 5 Universities from Russia, 5 from China (not bad on a comparative per head of population basis,) and 5 from Europe. The first US university/ies came 17th=. By which time a bunch more Russian, Belorussian and Chinese Universities had also joined the list. It is true that the average standard of education across Russia is falling rapidly. In a comparative report sponsored by the OECD has the average level of mathematics in Russia and the US at the same level. The statistic seems to me to be out, but as a trend it's difficult to argue with. Yet at the top end the trend is clear. Russia and the CIS is the world's leading powerhouse in mathematics. That strength is beginning to show up in complicated programming problems and has been recognized by (inter alia and/or principally) Intel, Motorola and Boeing. And I mention them because they were the principal players in Tuesday's poorly attended session on high technology at the Russian Economic Forum. The panel was led by Sergei Kravchenko of Boeing who stated in his opening comments that VV Putin wanted Russia to catch-up with India's $12bn in exported IT services. Russia's export services in 2004 amounted to a paltry $0.5mn. Ex-Komsol leaders like Kravchenko are unlikely to publicly disagree with Our Great Leader.

The comparison is misleading. Not that Russia's export services are paltry, they are, but that India is Russia's competitor. It seems unlikely that an Indian design team will be responsible for 1/3 of the Boeing 7e7 or 777, or build Motorola's phone software development which is being developed by a great company in Nizhny Novgorod. Nor would Intel go to Indian scientists to sort out RF issues with the Centrino chip, after their Israeli development team ran in to issues. But even that maybe missing the point. No one refers to the quantity of export services from Israel. Instead Israel's high tech success is measured in companies that raise venture financing and go public on NASDAQ. This is where Russia should be competing. Where the comparison is meaningful is that competition to provide intellectual services is global. Nearly all of Russia's competitors provide inducements of one kind or another to build outsourcing centers. Russia cannot assume that its intellectual abilities alone will create demand for its scientists.

13 April 2005

Thoughts From the Russian Economic Forum

REF is Russia's leading big business conference. Everybody who is anyone is there which means that the best attended event is coffee. It may also have something to do with the fact that Russians are not great at listening to what others have to say. I had intended to try to blog the sessions that I attended. Power sockets were slightly rarer than rocking horse shit and there was not a WiFi connection to be had for love nor money. So instead here is this consolidated impression and some specific thoughts on the technology session in another post.

My leading and most useless observation impression is that Russian presenters have improved little over the preceding 10 years. Lack of structure, verboseness and irrelevance were the hallmark of the majority of the speeches from Russian presenters. My second impression is the overwhelming negativity of the majority of the Russian participants. Maybe the only happy guys at the whole event were the money managers; Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital winning the award for most overwhelming positive speech (paraphrased - the things that the press worries about are overblown from a stock market perspective). Boris Fyodorov, Honorary Chairman of UFG, a Russian investment bank, and a board member at Gazprom definitely won most logically optimistic speech (paraphrased - things have been a lot worse and are actually pretty good right now; GDP growth, budget surplus etc.)

Sitting somewhere in the middle was Bob Dudley, CEO at TNK-BP, who told a story of substantial investment in the opportunity that is natural resource exploitation in Russia but worried that the business climate was getting worse and worse. Brian Gilbertson, formerly CEO at BHP-Billiton, and now CEO at SUAL did not really touch on the business environment. However, his subsequent statements to the press where he stated that SUAL would probably not seek a London listing because the Russian government did not look kindly on foreigners owning strategic reserves spoke volumes for what he really thought.

At the far end of the spectrum Misha "2%" Kasyanov, Andei Illiaronov and Boris Nemtsov launched in to a blistering attack on the government. The theme of all three was effectively the same; lack of continuing reform is really hurting economic progress. Misha "2%" in his "I'm standing for President in 2008" speech extended the criticism to every element of society. He may have a point, in fact he probably has a very strong point. However if the best that big business can muster to force a quasi-democratic discussion with those inside the Kremlin is a man whose moniker is 2% then we probably should not be holding our breath for a non-Putin blessed successor in 2008. I am assuming that the political world knows that there is little chance of beating Putin's anointed successor so rather than be damned in the process of failing they will put up a candidate who has no chance of winning anyway.

It does however illustrate the paucity of the level and purpose of the debate. The Russian businessmen presenting were all beneficiaries of "loans for shares." LFS was a bribe to big business in 1996 to get Yeltsin out of an electoral hole. Having succeeded the Government would like its economy back. To the extent that they are improving Russian business it is in their hiring of western businessman to run their cheaply-acquired assets. The concentration of assets in the hands of a few men (22 people control 40% of the economy) makes them a political liability and the means by which they acquired their wealth does not make them natural allies of the clean-hands school of business.

Not a single senior member of the Government or Presidential administration turned up. Apparently it was because Kasyanov was due to speak in a key note speech. It is a mark of their failure to understand that debate can be beneficial to policy that only lends credence to the criticism that they are not much better than a bunch of 5th Directorate Thugs.

After all is said is done it was great to catch up with guys who have been playing Russia for a while.

09 April 2005

Patents and Intellectual Property in Russia and Ukraine

It's been a while since I have had the energy or inclination to take on a larger subject. The complexities of IP protection and rights in Russia, and to an extent Ukraine, have been exercising my grey matter for a while. To be clear this is not an attempt to engage in any beneficial lobbying for the software, film, music industries. With both Russia and Ukraine somewhere close to the top of the list of countries that peddle in pirated goods. M$oft, the music and film industries are already effectively lobbying the government. The issue in Russia is not about the law but the enforcement of it. In Ukraine the law needs to be implemented. What this post is about is the region's ability to turn its undoubted mathematical and scientific achievements in product-driven companies that compete in global markets.

So what is the problem that vexes the tiny group of us engaged in financing and developing high tech markets in Russia and Ukraine. The good news is that, in Russia at least, patent laws are well developed and clearly and definitively adhere to international norms. There is even a suggestion that they are actually well written, though that is beyond my competence to judge. As an entrepreneur or academic wishing to protect an invention specifically in Russia it is relatively easy, and cheap, to apply for a patent from RusPatent and subsequently to prosecute believed infringements of that patent. The process of transferring patents and patent applications owned by Russian firms to foreign ones is also very straight forward; as you would expect in a country that has no balance sheet recognition of soft/intangible assets. As with many aspects of Russian law the courts ability to understand and make coherent decisions based on the law may be lacking. As I have written before there are a number of international bodies training Russian judges and lawyers to help them make coherent decisions. As judges remain significantly under-paid they will remain vulnerable to bribery especially at the lower end of the judicial chain.

Russia's domestic firms are not major consumers of technology, and especially Russian developed technology. Nor have they developed the ability of Huawei, for example, to copy and turn out Cisco-like products. The lack of entrepreneurial and management abilities that mean that so much Russia-related technology remains unlocked potential also means that intellectual property theft is fairly low-level and certainly no greater than the usual academic spats over original ideas.

The issue that is frequently insurmountable relates to ownership of ideas. Many of the truly disruptive ideas that we come across in our trawls through the local high-tech universe were born in Universities and other government-funded high tech institutes and firms. The current Minister of Science and Technology has been trying to lay out the ground rules as to how to assign ownership rights but like many reforms they are being roundly ignored at the operating level.

By way of an example. A company which we are doing some background due diligence on, and we have to like it to be doing this work, is based on an invention by a core group of scientists which itself is the subject of a patent which in turn refers to the Institute at which they were working at the time of the invention. This patent was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union and so was the property of the State. No great issues so far. The company on which the invention is founded is willing to cede some ownership to the Institute in recognition of its role in funding the discovery. But as the discovery was funded by the State actually the property belongs to the Ministry of State Property. And that is where the black hole starts and continues into infinite nothingness. The Ministry cannot take ownership in private companies and certainly not in ones that are created in Delaware. It cannot transfer its ownership back to the Institute but continues to insist on its ownership rights. So this would appear to be circular black hole where we continually arrive back at the starting point.

Given what would very likely be a legal opinion that would focus on the inherent negative in financing a company which probably does not own its invention another disruptive technology will probably stay on the shelf.

Pickled Garlic for Breakfast

Nothing differentiates people more than what they eat for breakfast. Northern Europeans are keen on cold meats and cheese on brown and rye bread. My own homeland is rightly famous for the heart attack inducing fry up. Russian's however, are partial to pickled garlic (in brine in case you are curious.) Each to their own. Except that pickled garlic is not to its own. Everyone gets a piece of it.

If you are now to understand that I am on a full plane to London from Moscow you will understand that my aversion to Pickled Garlic has risen to the top of my current hate list.

04 April 2005

The Pope

I am not Catholic; I have no truck with organized religion. As Jared Diamond points out in "Guns, Germs and Steel" organized religion is a necessary pre-condition for inter-community/state organized violence.

To the extent that I have a Church, I am a Scottish presbyterian who was always led to believe that the Papists were actually the Devil's form on earth. Actually it had more to do with the football team that you supported. So the Pope as the head of the Devil's church was never really top of my Christmas card list.

Whatever his views on marriage, contraception and the other half of the population (women) he had the guts, political strength and following to tell Poles;

"You are men. You have dignity. Don't crawl on your bellies."
It was the start of the end of Communism.

25 April 2005

Sonos Digital Music System - Introduction

Jeff Nolan ordered a Sonos Digital Music System. I man-handled three back from the US in to Moscow and am the happiest music bunny out there. As it says on the Sonos website you can play it anywhere, and you can play different music in different places at the same time.

In over a month of regular use I have had no problems with it at all. A HUGE fan.

21 April 2005

Mobile = Enterprise = PAM

Russell Beattie asks what is PalmOne celebrating exactly? And then gives PalmOne a due smacking for its Treo. I am a 650 owner - OK PDA, very bad phone.

I take mild issue with the conclusion. The winner is not Nokia or Sony/Ericsson, Moto etc but RIM, Good, M$soft (Exchange 2003 upgraded w/ push service) and, interestingly, Sonus and Broadsoft.

I am not pro-M$oft but the free ActiveSync upgrade to 2003 Exchange Server is a great idea, just 5 years too late. The option to IT managers; buy a b'berry server et al or a smartphone and a good email client. And they will still go b'berry. You don't get fired for buying what everyone else is.

20 April 2005

Romanian hides stolen mobe in vagina

This too good to miss - Romanian hides stolen mobe in vagina. As with all mobiles in public places stick it on vibrate....

18 April 2005

TelSym Dies; SkypeOut Security

Glenn Fleishman on the death of TelSym. I can't say that I am hugely surprised. They were trying to fill a market position that was in constant flux and has not even begun to settle down. I watched them quite closely at the time because we spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out a business plan for a similar company. We passed because we could not figure out how to make money from a smart company. Same was true of TelSym. They had a bunch of financing to ensure that they had to worry less about hitting the wall. When it came more money slammed in to it.

In the same week that they failed a possible answer to their woes. I am a Skype-sceptic and cannot quite shake my feeling that nothing has changed since I voiced my skepticism last year. Today I heard from a friend with more knowledge than most of security-related issues that his SkypeOut account identity had been stolen and the contents of his account spent on calls to Australia. He points out that your account's security is based purely on a password. Not a great way to keep cash online.

I'll go back to why I don't think Skype is the answer; security and maintaining call state to provide applications. If TelSym had not been so arrogant maybe they could have hung around long enough to find nirvana.

Education and Statistics

Jeff Nolan posts on comparative education and statistics and damns socialism. The linkage is interesting; in Britain, at least, the government spending more on education would be viewed as a Labour (slightly to the left) policy. The UK election battle over education is about how to spend less, or at least the same, better. He acknowledges, obliquely, that there is no obvious linkage between cash invested and the quality of the output. Which is the first reason that I felt compelled to post - statistics do lie.

The second reason is that as Russia and Ukraine tend not to be overly covered in comparative studies I was previously forced to go the OECD to get comparative tertiary education data, and thus spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing the data so that it fitted the stroy I was trying to tell. The statistics don't lie they have just been presented to tell my story. So the long and short if you have been unfortunate enough to get a presentation from me on why Ukraine's and Russia's educational system make it a good place to build world-class technology companies you would have seen a table like this one.



The US is clearly ahead of the pack in enrolment in tertiary education but (and I can't find the stats now) has a remarkably low hit rate in mathematics and science, which is probably required to be at the forefront of an innovative society, unless of course you just outsource R&D. If the argument were turned on its head and I posited that Russia's enrolment in tertiary education and dedication to mathematics and science which clearly results in quality meant that Russia was on its way to becoming a major center for innovation then it could be argued that I was exploiting statistics to make an arguable point.

I'll leave my thoughts on education spending, statistics and socialism with this point. The former Soviet Union boasted literacy rate of 99% and spent more (as a % of GDP) on primary and secondary education than any other �developed� country. I struggle to make the sequitor between spending on education and socialism, consumerism, capitalism.

I await Jeff's post on the quality issue.

14 April 2005

American Universities Fall Way Behind in Programming...

Russian universities two in first three and three in top ten; which includes Izhevsk, which to the best of my knowledge has the honor of producing my excellent receptionist and little else.

A Russian friend working in the Valley forwarded me this report. He has a PhD in something complicated and a 7-year old son. He is worried that the public-education that he is giving him will qualify him to be a lawyer, consultant or investment banker but certainly nothing that requires 2x2 being equal to 4 at all times.

I'm damned if I can import the chart and keep the formatting so you will have to find the standings here. The top 13 included 5 Universities from Russia, 5 from China (not bad on a comparative per head of population basis,) and 5 from Europe. The first US university/ies came 17th=. By which time a bunch more Russian, Belorussian and Chinese Universities had also joined the list. It is true that the average standard of education across Russia is falling rapidly. In a comparative report sponsored by the OECD has the average level of mathematics in Russia and the US at the same level. The statistic seems to me to be out, but as a trend it's difficult to argue with. Yet at the top end the trend is clear. Russia and the CIS is the world's leading powerhouse in mathematics. That strength is beginning to show up in complicated programming problems and has been recognized by (inter alia and/or principally) Intel, Motorola and Boeing. And I mention them because they were the principal players in Tuesday's poorly attended session on high technology at the Russian Economic Forum. The panel was led by Sergei Kravchenko of Boeing who stated in his opening comments that VV Putin wanted Russia to catch-up with India's $12bn in exported IT services. Russia's export services in 2004 amounted to a paltry $0.5mn. Ex-Komsol leaders like Kravchenko are unlikely to publicly disagree with Our Great Leader.

The comparison is misleading. Not that Russia's export services are paltry, they are, but that India is Russia's competitor. It seems unlikely that an Indian design team will be responsible for 1/3 of the Boeing 7e7 or 777, or build Motorola's phone software development which is being developed by a great company in Nizhny Novgorod. Nor would Intel go to Indian scientists to sort out RF issues with the Centrino chip, after their Israeli development team ran in to issues. But even that maybe missing the point. No one refers to the quantity of export services from Israel. Instead Israel's high tech success is measured in companies that raise venture financing and go public on NASDAQ. This is where Russia should be competing. Where the comparison is meaningful is that competition to provide intellectual services is global. Nearly all of Russia's competitors provide inducements of one kind or another to build outsourcing centers. Russia cannot assume that its intellectual abilities alone will create demand for its scientists.

13 April 2005

Thoughts From the Russian Economic Forum

REF is Russia's leading big business conference. Everybody who is anyone is there which means that the best attended event is coffee. It may also have something to do with the fact that Russians are not great at listening to what others have to say. I had intended to try to blog the sessions that I attended. Power sockets were slightly rarer than rocking horse shit and there was not a WiFi connection to be had for love nor money. So instead here is this consolidated impression and some specific thoughts on the technology session in another post.

My leading and most useless observation impression is that Russian presenters have improved little over the preceding 10 years. Lack of structure, verboseness and irrelevance were the hallmark of the majority of the speeches from Russian presenters. My second impression is the overwhelming negativity of the majority of the Russian participants. Maybe the only happy guys at the whole event were the money managers; Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital winning the award for most overwhelming positive speech (paraphrased - the things that the press worries about are overblown from a stock market perspective). Boris Fyodorov, Honorary Chairman of UFG, a Russian investment bank, and a board member at Gazprom definitely won most logically optimistic speech (paraphrased - things have been a lot worse and are actually pretty good right now; GDP growth, budget surplus etc.)

Sitting somewhere in the middle was Bob Dudley, CEO at TNK-BP, who told a story of substantial investment in the opportunity that is natural resource exploitation in Russia but worried that the business climate was getting worse and worse. Brian Gilbertson, formerly CEO at BHP-Billiton, and now CEO at SUAL did not really touch on the business environment. However, his subsequent statements to the press where he stated that SUAL would probably not seek a London listing because the Russian government did not look kindly on foreigners owning strategic reserves spoke volumes for what he really thought.

At the far end of the spectrum Misha "2%" Kasyanov, Andei Illiaronov and Boris Nemtsov launched in to a blistering attack on the government. The theme of all three was effectively the same; lack of continuing reform is really hurting economic progress. Misha "2%" in his "I'm standing for President in 2008" speech extended the criticism to every element of society. He may have a point, in fact he probably has a very strong point. However if the best that big business can muster to force a quasi-democratic discussion with those inside the Kremlin is a man whose moniker is 2% then we probably should not be holding our breath for a non-Putin blessed successor in 2008. I am assuming that the political world knows that there is little chance of beating Putin's anointed successor so rather than be damned in the process of failing they will put up a candidate who has no chance of winning anyway.

It does however illustrate the paucity of the level and purpose of the debate. The Russian businessmen presenting were all beneficiaries of "loans for shares." LFS was a bribe to big business in 1996 to get Yeltsin out of an electoral hole. Having succeeded the Government would like its economy back. To the extent that they are improving Russian business it is in their hiring of western businessman to run their cheaply-acquired assets. The concentration of assets in the hands of a few men (22 people control 40% of the economy) makes them a political liability and the means by which they acquired their wealth does not make them natural allies of the clean-hands school of business.

Not a single senior member of the Government or Presidential administration turned up. Apparently it was because Kasyanov was due to speak in a key note speech. It is a mark of their failure to understand that debate can be beneficial to policy that only lends credence to the criticism that they are not much better than a bunch of 5th Directorate Thugs.

After all is said is done it was great to catch up with guys who have been playing Russia for a while.

09 April 2005

Patents and Intellectual Property in Russia and Ukraine

It's been a while since I have had the energy or inclination to take on a larger subject. The complexities of IP protection and rights in Russia, and to an extent Ukraine, have been exercising my grey matter for a while. To be clear this is not an attempt to engage in any beneficial lobbying for the software, film, music industries. With both Russia and Ukraine somewhere close to the top of the list of countries that peddle in pirated goods. M$oft, the music and film industries are already effectively lobbying the government. The issue in Russia is not about the law but the enforcement of it. In Ukraine the law needs to be implemented. What this post is about is the region's ability to turn its undoubted mathematical and scientific achievements in product-driven companies that compete in global markets.

So what is the problem that vexes the tiny group of us engaged in financing and developing high tech markets in Russia and Ukraine. The good news is that, in Russia at least, patent laws are well developed and clearly and definitively adhere to international norms. There is even a suggestion that they are actually well written, though that is beyond my competence to judge. As an entrepreneur or academic wishing to protect an invention specifically in Russia it is relatively easy, and cheap, to apply for a patent from RusPatent and subsequently to prosecute believed infringements of that patent. The process of transferring patents and patent applications owned by Russian firms to foreign ones is also very straight forward; as you would expect in a country that has no balance sheet recognition of soft/intangible assets. As with many aspects of Russian law the courts ability to understand and make coherent decisions based on the law may be lacking. As I have written before there are a number of international bodies training Russian judges and lawyers to help them make coherent decisions. As judges remain significantly under-paid they will remain vulnerable to bribery especially at the lower end of the judicial chain.

Russia's domestic firms are not major consumers of technology, and especially Russian developed technology. Nor have they developed the ability of Huawei, for example, to copy and turn out Cisco-like products. The lack of entrepreneurial and management abilities that mean that so much Russia-related technology remains unlocked potential also means that intellectual property theft is fairly low-level and certainly no greater than the usual academic spats over original ideas.

The issue that is frequently insurmountable relates to ownership of ideas. Many of the truly disruptive ideas that we come across in our trawls through the local high-tech universe were born in Universities and other government-funded high tech institutes and firms. The current Minister of Science and Technology has been trying to lay out the ground rules as to how to assign ownership rights but like many reforms they are being roundly ignored at the operating level.

By way of an example. A company which we are doing some background due diligence on, and we have to like it to be doing this work, is based on an invention by a core group of scientists which itself is the subject of a patent which in turn refers to the Institute at which they were working at the time of the invention. This patent was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union and so was the property of the State. No great issues so far. The company on which the invention is founded is willing to cede some ownership to the Institute in recognition of its role in funding the discovery. But as the discovery was funded by the State actually the property belongs to the Ministry of State Property. And that is where the black hole starts and continues into infinite nothingness. The Ministry cannot take ownership in private companies and certainly not in ones that are created in Delaware. It cannot transfer its ownership back to the Institute but continues to insist on its ownership rights. So this would appear to be circular black hole where we continually arrive back at the starting point.

Given what would very likely be a legal opinion that would focus on the inherent negative in financing a company which probably does not own its invention another disruptive technology will probably stay on the shelf.

Pickled Garlic for Breakfast

Nothing differentiates people more than what they eat for breakfast. Northern Europeans are keen on cold meats and cheese on brown and rye bread. My own homeland is rightly famous for the heart attack inducing fry up. Russian's however, are partial to pickled garlic (in brine in case you are curious.) Each to their own. Except that pickled garlic is not to its own. Everyone gets a piece of it.

If you are now to understand that I am on a full plane to London from Moscow you will understand that my aversion to Pickled Garlic has risen to the top of my current hate list.

04 April 2005

The Pope

I am not Catholic; I have no truck with organized religion. As Jared Diamond points out in "Guns, Germs and Steel" organized religion is a necessary pre-condition for inter-community/state organized violence.

To the extent that I have a Church, I am a Scottish presbyterian who was always led to believe that the Papists were actually the Devil's form on earth. Actually it had more to do with the football team that you supported. So the Pope as the head of the Devil's church was never really top of my Christmas card list.

Whatever his views on marriage, contraception and the other half of the population (women) he had the guts, political strength and following to tell Poles;

"You are men. You have dignity. Don't crawl on your bellies."
It was the start of the end of Communism.