By David French
News reports have indicated that at least one of Apple’s patents which were the subject of the $1 billion jury verdict in California in August are in trouble with the U.S. patent office.
Here is one reference: U.S. Office Rejects 2nd Apple Patent
And another: Key Apple patent used against Samsung under fire
Any suggestion that Apple’s patent has been conclusively invalidated by the U.S. Patent Office is not correct. The proceedings at the U.S. patent office are not yet over. However, this raises a very interesting situation which may create a dilemma for the trial judge.
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From all of us here at Francis Moran and Associates, happy holidays and the very best for 2013. We will resume our regular blog postings on January 2.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Kernel, Both Sides of the Table, Venture Village, Business Insider and Financial Post.
Some entrepreneurs are more equal than others
Social decadence and a poisonous educational culture in the West is fooling a generation of young people into thinking they can pen runaway entrepreneurial success stories. But they can’t, writes Milo Yiannopoulos.
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By Francis Moran
I’m not much of one for doomsday predictions.
In the days leading up to January 1, 2000, when the so-called Y2K bug was supposed to affect everything from cellphones to ATMs and would cause both airplanes and elevators to come crashing down, I kept saying that at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, I wanted to be in an elevator, in a highrise, next to an airport, talking on my cellphone and with no money in my pocket. I was pretty sure I was going to be all right. As it turned out, when the clock struck that feared hour, I was at a New Year’s Eve ball with the woman to whom I had recently become affianced, and we were more than all right.
So I can’t get terribly worked up about the possibility that some long-dead Mayan timekeeper was the very first person in tens of thousands of years of human existence to be able to peer far into the future and with such precision and foreknowledge that he or she could accurately predict that the end of the world is going to come tomorrow.
Certainly, if I did believe it, I would not be spending my last hours writing this tongue-in-cheek blog post.
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By Alexandra Reid
I sat down with award-winning marketer and author C.C. Chapman to talk about storytelling and why businesses must learn to think like publishers.
Pulling advice from his books, Content rules and Amazing things will happen, C.C. tells us about today’s online environment, the attention economy and why it’s so important for businesses to stop stalling and begin developing their online presence NOW. He also explains why he hates the term “content marketing” and shares stories about who did it well and who had epic failures. Most importantly, C.C. offers advice about how to become amazing at your job, and find happiness in the work you do.
Listen here.
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Data mining, DNA or otherwise, no substitute for real customer dialogue
December 18, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Marketing, as we have repeatedly emphasized on this blog, begins with a fundamental exercise to identify a high-value pain or need that you have the potential to address, and then building the right product to meet that need.
It is by necessity a process of dialogue […]
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Commercializing research in Scotland
December 17, 2012 by Maurice Smith
It is nearly 20 years since Scottish Enterprise, then a fairly newly-formed economic agency, launched an inquiry into Scotland’s comparatively low business birth rate.
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Great articles roundup: VC, mentorship, neuroscience, media convergence, innovation, entrepreneurship and the ugly stepchild
December 14, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Forbes, David Meerman Scott, Harvard Business Review, Guardian and Wired […]
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Content is the sun around which all else revolves
December 13, 2012 by Francis Moran
Over the past several years, the way in which I describe what we do on the PR side of the house has really changed. For most of its 14 years, inmedia Public Relations was a very sharply focused proposition: We did media and analyst relations and not much else […]
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Don’t spit your PR effort into the wind
December 12, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Monday was a snow day across the Ottawa region, or, to be more precise, an ice rain day. That left tens of thousands of kids with a bonus day off from school and parents tasked with finding alternative care arrangements. Many no doubt conceded defeat and […]
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A timely post about succession planning in content marketing
December 11, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
The hand off of a marketing position is a tricky process for many professionals. It’s made even more complex when a professional has an online presence affiliated with the company or is responsible for managing multiple online company accounts […]
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Apple versus Samsung: Samsung’s ‘out’ to escape infringement
December 10, 2012 by David French
This post goes right to the very heart of a patent and what a patent can and cannot do in the marketplace. And it has a twist, if you are prepared to bear with the analysis to the end […]
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Great articles roundup: Internet governance, crappy startups, great products, iteration, market demand, women VCs and CMOs
December 07, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Globe and Mail, Read Write Web, Mark Evans, The Wall Street Journal, Venture Beat, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.
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By David French
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]