Law and Innovation

Fresh and ( very) interesting  article posted on Wired about the imminent future of wearable technologies.  Happy reading!  "Data will not help you if you can’t see it when you need it. For Dan Eisenhardt—a competitive swimmer for more than a decade, beginning as a 9-year-old in his native Denmark—the data he needed in the water, what he could never know in the water, was his splits. His event was the 1,500-meter freestyle, the longest slog in the sport, a near-mile of grinding exertion divided into 15 laps of 100 meters apiece. As with every distance sport, pacing is all; lag your target time on the first two laps and you may never catch up, but accidentally beat it and you’ll load your tissue with lactic acid, doom your endgame. How fast was his last lap? How did it compare to his usual pace? His coach up on the pool deck could know, his parents in the stands could know. But Eisenhardt, at war in the water, could only guess. The rigors of engineering school e...

Fresh and interesting article from The Columbus Dispatch concerning a San Diego County Traffic Court case which found a California woman not guilty after being cited for wearing the computer-in-eyeglass device while driving ( i.e . Google Glass). "SAN DIEGO — A California woman thought to be the first person cited for wearing Google Glass while driving won her case last week, but legal experts predict that it’s only the beginning of numerous court battles fought in the gap between today’s laws and fast-arriving technology. Cecilia Abadie was found not guilty last week after being cited for wearing the computer-in-eyeglass device while driving. San Diego County Traffic Court Commissioner John Blair said there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the device was operating while she was driving. But Blair stopped short of ruling that it is legal to drive while Google Glass is activated. Abadie was cited under a code banning operation of a video or TV screen a...

Google's next billion dollar acquisition:  WhatsApp! Rumor or truth? Founded in the heart of   Silicon Valley  in 2009, WhatsApp is today, without any doubt, one of the most famous mobile application (downloaded by over 100 million Android users alone since its debut... not too bad, right!). Like it or not, especially the (ring)tone on Android phones that you can hear all around you (and drives you sometimes really crazy!), this cross platform messaging app has almost (totally) killed the sms industry. Some rumors say that Google and WhatsApp have been in talks for over a couple of weeks and that the Internet Search Leader wants to buy it (and to combine it with its unified communication platform Babel) for $1 billion (only?!). In comparison to, YouTube was brought for $1.65 billion  in November 2006 . At that time, Youtube was a bit more than one year old. Today, 4 years later after its creation, WhatsApp has certainly a big ...