[EAS]BountyQuest

[pjk]

Subject:   BountyQuest

Dear Colleagues -

Have a look at

http://www.bountyquest.com/
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=564178

An intersting new venture that will help deflate some patent froth.
It could also become a tool to combat a kind of professional
retrograde amnesia, a loss of memory for older events. 

In technology a sense of intellectual history has been waning. If
it's more than five, seven (you pick the time constant) years old,
it is surely irrelevant. Practiced collaboratively within a busy
specialty doing important but forgettable optimizing, varying and
extending, such memory loss certainly contributes to opportunities
for "originality" and to fuller employment. Never mind that some
concepts (data conversion is a good source of examples) have been
implemented in conceptually nearly identical form at least three
times now (vacuum tubes, transistors, VLSI). Every era publishes
and patents anew with scant, if any, reference to the past.

Because patents have monetary value, BountyQuest is a mechanism for
making older memories profitable. Now if research papers had
monetary value, and BountyQuest extended its scope ....

All best,  --Peter Kindlmann

"Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to
 yours." --Yogi Berra