11/01/2012 - 12/01/2012 - G25 Publications

Nokia seeks Blackberry sales bans after patent dispute

By Gadiola Emanuel - 7:17:00 AM

Blackberry devices could be forced off shop shelves if it does not agree to pay licence fees

Nokia has asked courts in the US, UK and Canada to block sales of rival Blackberry smartphones.

It follows a patent dispute between the Finnish company and Blackberry's parent, Research In Motion (RIM).

Nokia says an earlier ruling means RIM is not allowed to produce devices that offer a common type of wi-fi connectivity until it agrees to pay licence fees.

All current Blackberries would be affected. RIM had no comment.

It is the latest legal distraction for the Canadian company as it prepares to launch an operating system that could determine its survival.

Share drop

Nokia's action comes two months after an arbitration ruling by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in Sweden.

The organisation had been asked to act as an arbitrator in a dispute over RIM's use of handsets and tablets featuring wireless active network (WLAN) connections to the internet.

Nokia says more than 40 companies license its mobile-phone patents

RIM had argued that an earlier licensing deal with Nokia meant it should not have to pay a separate fee for the technologies. However, the tribunal disagreed.

After news of Nokia's latest action was revealed by Computerworld magazine, RIM's shares fell more than 10% in after-hours trading in New York.

When contacted by the BBC, Nokia confirmed it had taken action "with the aim of ending RIM's breach of contract", adding it would also continue to pursue a separate case against RIM in Germany involving antenna, email and navigation technologies.

Nokia noted it had licensed its intellectual property rights to more than 40 other companies. The revenue from such deals helps justify its current $11.8bn (£7.4bn) market valuation.

Patent wars

RIM is also fighting several other patent lawsuits at this time.

They include a dispute with Washington-based patent portfolio owner SoftVault Systems, which alleges RIM has infringed its anti-piracy DRM (digital rights management) technologies.

RIM is also involved in a case against California-based Lochner, which is suing a number of big-name tech firms over the way their devices play videos streamed over the internet.

RIM chief executive Thorsten Heins talks through the Blackberry 10 system

RIM has itself sued others in the past over patents, including Motorola - before the handset division was bought by Google - and the instant message software Kik,

However, the timing of the clash with a big-player like Nokia could be particularly troubling as it comes less than three months before RIM plans to release its first Blackberry 10 handsets.

"RIM has had a tough time losing market segment to other smartphones. And the future of the business is now going to be based on the success of its new operating system, which itself has been delayed," said UK-based patent attorney Andrew Alton, from Urquhart-Dykes & Lord, who has previously acted for Apple.

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TECHNOLOGY

With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again

By Gadiola Emanuel - 7:27:00 AM

This is the cover story of the November 21, 2011, issue of Forbes Magazine.

The Republic of Chad, a landlocked desert dictatorship once described by FORBES as the planet’s most corrupt, is a strange place to find Bill Gates. Yet there he was in September, beside Chad’s Qaddafi-trained president, General Idriss Deby. “He and I walked around giving polio drops to a bunch of kids,” recalls Gates. “I shared in confidence with him some views of how he might be even more effective in the way he manages his campaign.”

Yes, a far cry from hunkering down with Paul Allen in an Albuquerque motel to reimagine how the world conveys information, or with Warren Buffett in Sun Valley to brainstorm the future of philanthropy. But to Gates diplomacy with thugs is now just as important, a dispassionate component of what he views as his final legacy. “The metric of success is lives saved, kids who aren’t crippled,” says Gates. “Which is slightly different than units sold, profits achieved. But it’s all very measurable, and you can set ambitious goals and see how you do.”

Notice the words: metric, measurable, goals. While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.

It’s heady, historic stuff: America’s richest man—he’d be the world’s richest had he not already given away so much money—still in his prime (he just turned 56), with the reputation, resources and determination to stamp out infectious disease. “I’d be deeply disappointed,” says Gates, if in the next 25 years he can’t lower the death toll by 80%. Otherwise, “we’re just not doing our job very well.”

Sitting with Gates, overlooking the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s gleaming new $500 million campus, full of glimmering reflecting pools and glass edifices, it’s possible to see a future with exponentially less pain and suffering. It’s also a remarkably incisive exercise in getting inside the brain of one of history’s greatest business visionaries. By dissecting with him and his wife, Melinda, how he tackles this grand human problem, you can also learn intuitively how he built Microsoft. How a mechanical genius methodically tackles an abstract problem. And perhaps most of all, how power and capital—both literal and political—can be spent to maximize positive impact on the world.

Bill Gates’ plan to eradicate disease stems from a bold concept: The demographic theories of Thomas Malthus, generally accepted for the past two centuries, are wrong. Specifically, that subsistence eventually translates into population growth, and population growth eventually translates into misery.

Bill and Melinda Gates grappled with this concept years before forming their foundation, and months before even getting married, on a prewedding 1993 African safari. Their vacation had been planned around watching predators and prey—Darwin in action. “You go to see the animals, and you go to see the savanna, and it’s gorgeous,” says Melinda. But they instead found themselves pondering that classic Malthusian riddle: “Why is that woman walking along the road with sticks on her head, a baby in the belly and a baby on the back?” Gates had no immediate reason to challenge 200 years of dogma: “We know how to get agricultural productivity up, but not that much,” he says. “Jobs, unrest, education—a high population density makes solving all those problems harder.”

So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health—their eponymous foundation would come into being in two years—they focused on birth control, funding a Johns Hopkins effort to use computers to help women in the developing world learn about contraception. The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?

It wasn’t dissimilar from the formula that he was developing behind a multibillion-dollar push into education reform. In that case, he based his giving on this formula: Success = teachers ÷ students. Smaller class sizes would result in more attention per student and smarter kids.

But much as Gates loves elegant solutions, his greatest achievements have resulted from perseverance and adaptability. It took three versions to get Windows right, and the Xbox originally lost billions. He’s not afraid to challenge assumptions when they don’t work. And in education he’s had a clear reversal: Class size, it turns out, is not the best determinant of student outcome. Teacher quality is. So after spending a fortune, Gates shifted course.

That same epiphany for his public health philanthropy came even earlier. Bill’s dad had set up a dinner at Seattle’s posh Columbia Tower Club with the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). While the meeting started with birth control—among other efforts, PATH taught Chinese condom makers to test their products before shipping them—Gates began consuming data that startled him. In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.

“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.

In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.

He could have focused on clinics and doctors, but that doesn’t scale. “The magic tool of health intervention is the vaccine, because they can be made very inexpensively,” he says. “We had to choose what the most impactful thing to give would be—not just money, but our time, energy, voice.” Melinda, his partner in all things philanthropic, echoes that thought: “Where’s the place you can have the biggest impact with the money? Where can you save the very most lives with those resources?”

More heavily than anyone ever had—even John D. Rockefeller, whose Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research pushed many key discoveries in 20th-century virology—he changed the global dialogue when it came to vaccines, which a decade ago had become controversial because of now-disproved autism fears. The first Gates vaccine donation, $100 million, directed at the United Nations and administered by PATH, focused on getting existing vaccines to kids. To celebrate the gift, Bill and Melinda hosted a dinner for vaccine experts at their 66,000-square-foot home on Lake Washington. After Gates asked his guests, “What could you do if you had even more money?” the room exploded with new ideas. That’s when he decided to blow up his original foundation and, in 1999, reconstitute it as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, endowed with $21 billion, instantly making it one of the largest charities in the world. The endowment is now $36 billion, with $25 billion given away.

But the vaccine epiphany just unlocked an entirely new set of problems. Yes, he could use his money to save lives through original research. Gates’ munificence has resulted in vaccines for meningitis and malaria. And yes, he could keep increasing the efficacy of those vaccines by creating a so-called cold chain—a storage and distribution system within host countries. He’s done that, too.

But again he ran into the scale problem, one inherently market-based. How do you encourage Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and other pharma giants to produce enough expensive vaccines for children who need them most but can afford them least? The answer, Gates increasingly believed, lay in making Adam Smith’s invisible hand more visible, giving the newly formed market a benevolent shove in the direction of free enterprise.

Here’s the truest definition of power: When you have the ability to not just solve a problem but also to create a sustainable market that addresses it. “There was nobody you could a write a check to,” remembers Gates, who stood ready a decade ago to buy billions of vaccine doses. In the 1980s Unicef had tripled the percentage of children who got basic vaccines for polio, diphtheria, tetanus and other diseases by corralling public funds, negotiating on price with other aid agencies and deploying thousands of aid workers to deliver them. But those efforts still fell woefully short of the need, and new medicines hitting the U.S. market faced an intolerable 15-to-20-year lag before reaching the kids of Tanzania or Nicaragua. “The chance of death from those diseases is 50 times greater in poor kids than in rich kids!” says Gates, his voice rising.

The first critical step, he realized, was forging a lasting public-private partnership. The public half of that equation was solved quickly with his checkbook: Previous attempts had faltered due to lack of funds and infighting among aid organizations over scarce dollars. But the private component was trickier. Compared with manufacturing pills, making vaccines is difficult and expensive. Drug companies wanted to immunize kids in, say, Afghanistan, but couldn’t count on demand that would be large and predictable enough to cover their costs. They faced the unappetizing choice of being humane or profitable.

So back in 1999 Gates traveled to Bellagio, Italy to hammer out a solution, along with Unicef, the World Bank, the UN, various pharmas and aid groups. The result was the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation, now called the GAVI Alliance, which Gates ultimately backed with a $2.5 billion pledge and personal will, exhibiting the tough-guy tactics, when necessary, that earned Microsoft the fear of its rivals and enmity of U.S. antitrust regulators. “Bill was a little like a poker player who put a lot of chips on the table and scared everyone else off,” says Seth Berkley, who ran a Gates-funded AIDs vaccine effort and is now GAVI’s chief executive.

Gadiola Emanuel

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CELEBS

How to Hide That Thanksgiving Food Baby, Rihanna-Style

By Gadiola Emanuel - 7:56:00 AM

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CARTOONS

HOW BABIES WILL BE BORN IN FUTURE

By Gadiola Emanuel - 7:46:00 AM

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HEALTH

Artificial Wombs: Is a Sexless Reproduction Society in Our Future?

By Gadiola Emanuel - 6:18:00 AM

Cutting-edge research around the world will soon launch a new era in human procreation – a world in which embryos can be ‘brought to term’ in artificial wombs, replacing traditional pregnancies.

In “Like a Virgin: How Science is Redefining the Rules of Sex,” author and genetic scientists, Aarathi Prasad writes, “This might be the biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex.”

Cornell University’s Dr. Hung-Ching Liu has engineered endometrial tissues by prompting cells to grow in an artificial uterus. When Liu introduced a mouse embryo into the lab-created uterine lining, “It successfully implanted and grew healthy,” she said in this New Atlantis Magazine article. Scientists predict the research could produce an animal womb by 2020, and a human model by early 2030s.

In Japan, Juntendo University researcher Yosinori Kuwabara and his team kept goat fetuses growing for ten days. While this womb was only a prototype, Kuwabara predicts that a fully functioning artificial womb capable of gestating a human fetus will evolve in the near future.

However, ethicists voice concerns that this technology could endanger the very meaning of life. Mother-child relationships, the nature of female bodies, and being ‘born’, not ‘made’ all play a role in defining how most people around the world view this magical state of existence called life. Artificial wombs will enable both men and women to reproduce entirely alone, removing intercourse from the reproductive equation.

But proponents believe people will reason, “Why risk gestating the baby in a biological womb, when this new science can produce a child with our exact genetic makeup, perfect personality, and zero flaws.”

“The womb is a dark and dangerous place, a hazardous environment,” says University of Virginia Professor Joseph Fletcher. Fetuses are 100% dependent on their mom’s health and sensible judgment. If the mother falls prey to accidents, disease, or inadequate nutrition, the embryo can become traumatized.

Although naysayers believe that this bold science makes us less human, most experts predict that artificial wombs will one day be accepted by mainstream society as more people recognize its many benefits. Babies would no longer be exposed to alcohol or illegal drugs by careless mothers, and the correct body temperature would always be maintained, with 100% of necessary nutrients provided.

Concerns over losing emotional bond between mother and newborn are unwarranted, say scientists. Artificial intelligence advances expected over the next two decades will enable doctors to reproduce exact parent emotions and personalities via vocal recordings, movement, and other sensations. The developing infant would be maintained in a safe secure environment, connected electronically to the mother 24/7.

In the near term though, experts predict most women will probably gestate their children the old-fashioned way; but career-minded females might welcome a concept that allows them to bear children and raise a family without becoming pregnant, a physical condition that often weakens their job status.

Ultimately, this technology would enable anyone – single, married, male, female, young, old, heterosexual or gay – to combine DNA from his or her own body with another person; and the gene pool marches on; a clean birth without pain or morning sickness.

As this science matures, people could freeze eggs and sperm in their teen years when they are most physically fit; then create children later when ready for a family. Artificial wombs may sound radical, but people already donate eggs and sperm to create life in a lab and bring it to term in a surrogate mother.

In an unusual twist, this technology offers justification to pro-lifers in the abortion debates. Choosing an abortion to protect a mother’s health would not be necessary, as artificial wombs could bring all aborted embryos to term. Unwanted pregnancies would no longer mean a death sentence for the unborn.

As we move into the future, this procedure could become the preferred method of birthing; but today, many disagree. Some see artificial wombs as a triumph of modern science; others believe it’s the ultimate folly. We ask again; is a sexless reproduction society in our future? Time will tell. Comments welcome.