Posts tagged: BUSINESS

LZW – that is, the formerly patented Lempel-Ziv Welch compression algorithm – is free today. The footnote on the Free Software Foundation’s GIF history page says:

The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format.

I was wondering today what ever happened to the town of Half.com when I discovered a recent post at designobserver.com that answers this very question.

The backstory, in case you missed it, is that during the first dot-com boom the company Half.com (since absorbed by eBay) got the town of Halfway, Oregon to rename itself as a publicity stunt.

I gather there are mixed feelings about the way it worked out, and the town seems to have reverted to its former name for the most part.

Neelie Kroes, you rock.

Kiko, a Web 2.0-ish calendar company, recently sold itself on eBay. The buyer was Tucows, a company that you may know from their venerable and giant software download archives. Their CEO, Elliot Noss, says in his blog:

[There is] one big reason why we bought Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.

I stumbled across the Adobe Blogs recently. It looks like the site has been up less than a month, but there is some interesting reading there. I particularly like the posts from Bill McCoy, who describes himself only as being “responsible for platform product management at Adobe, including our desktop and mobile Reader software and associated PDF technologies.” I have no idea what “platform product management” means, but as long as he keeps up the good writing and candor (phrases like “XML configuration spaghetti” and “eBooks are a bit of a sore subject at Adobe right now” come to mind), he’s all right with me.