Month: June 2014

At least when it comes to Tesla:

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has just opened up his company’s patents, saying that the company will not “initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” In a conference call with reporters also on Thursday, Musk added that the company plans on aggressively filing electric car-related patents and opening them to the public as a pre-emptive measure to thwart other companies or potential patent trolls. This also applies retroactively to all currently held Tesla patents.

Will Oremus thinks the move makes perfect sense:

Musk isn’t naive, and Tesla isn’t a charity. Rather, he knows that Tesla’s real battle isn’t with other automakers for leadership of today’s niche market for electric cars. It’s the much greater struggle between electric cars and their gas-powered counterparts.

Viewed in that context, the obstacles to Tesla’s success aren’t the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3—they’re the constraints of technology, cost, infrastructure, and customer expectations. The more money is put into electric batteries, the cheaper and more powerful they’ll become. The more electric cars there are on the road, the greater will be the demand for regional and national networks of electric charging stations. And guess what company will stand to benefit the most.

Jordan Golson nods:

Tesla needs widespread adoption of electric cars and the easiest way to do that is to get other automakers to sell them too. More electric cars in the world means Tesla’s cars aren’t so weird, and they become an easier sell to a skeptical public. … At the end of the day, the biggest risk for Musk isn’t that BMW or Toyota will steal his technology. It’s that the big automakers might not be interested in electric cars enough to bother building them at all.

Meanwhile, Timothy Lee suggests that electric cars aren’t such a unique case after all:

The standard economic argument for patents assumes that without them, new inventions will be quickly imitated by competitors, destroying the ability of the original inventor to turn a profit. But if you look at the history of actual inventions, this is often not how things work out.

In practice, the biggest challenge many inventors face isn’t fending off copycats, it’s developing a market for the product in the first place. For major inventions, the potential market is usually much larger than the first few firms can hope to serve. The challenge is converting all those potential customers into actual customers. In a new industry, competitors can actually help with this by helping spread news about the invention, pioneering better sales techniques, and developing improvements that make the product more attractive.

As a journalist, Oscar Wilde took a special interest in women’s issues:

[I]t is revealing to see just how many of Wilde’s journalistic writings are for and about women. This activity peaks when Wilde takes over the editorship of the Lady’s World, an illustrated monthly that advertised itself as a “high-class magazine for ladies”. Famously, the first thing Wilde did when he took charge of the journal was to change its title: Lady’s World became Woman’s World – a shift that signals a different target audience and different political ambitions. The revamped journal was to provide high-quality journalism aimed at modern middle-class female readers who did not think of themselves as “ladies”. These women were keen to read about culture, education and employment, and Wilde catered for their advanced tastes. Wilde’s editorship of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889 was a crucial step not only in his career as a journalist but in his development as a writer in a broader sense. It was the only period in his life in which Wilde received a regular salary. More importantly, though, he was now in charge of commissioning essays and reviews, which he did by recruiting an impressive array of women contributors ranging from successful novelists to graduates of the new women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford.

In a review of the volumes of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that cover the writer’s journalism, Stefano Evangelista observes that the genre proved a good training grounds for Wilde’s later literary experiments:

It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”. The traffic between his journalism and criticism makes us realize that to draw a sharp divide between these two fields in the Victorian age is a rather arbitrary affair. It is also in the journalism that Wilde learns to play with the epigram – a literary device that he would perfect in his society comedies. He learns to cultivate an effortless style, which mixes critical acumen with silliness, balances learning with superficiality, and tempers natural donnishness by means of studied flippancy. He learns to master that characteristic blend of praise and ridicule. He learns, in other words, to establish that easy, direct contact with the audience that made him a successful dramatist in his own time and that still makes him, on the stage and in print, so appealing to many today.

Traffic was worse than usual in Europe’s major cities on Wednesday, as tens of thousands of taxi and limo drivers in London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin went on strike to protest the competition they are facing from ride-share services, particularly the astronomically valuated Uber, Alison Griswold outlines their beef:

Taxicab drivers throughout Europe are calling for their governments to crack down on Uber with tougher regulations. London has emerged as the epicenter of the demonstrations: Thousands of drivers are rankled that the city’s public transit authority, Transport for London, or TfL, has determined that the smartphone app used by Uber drivers cannot be classified as a meter because it is not installed in the vehicle. That technical distinction is everything because TfL rules state that only licensed taxis can use a meter—a privilege that comes with strict regulatory hurdles. Drivers feel that because Uber’s app determines fare based on time and distance (and the occasional price surge), it functions like a de facto meter and should be regulated accordingly.

But Richard Read argues that the protesters are missing the point, and that “the taxi industry is overdue for a shake-up” anyway:

Many cab companies still operate using a 20th century model: travelers call for service, step outside, and wait for the cab to arrive. That may be appealing to our parents and grandparents, but for folks under 40, it’s a different story. Like newspapers and record labels, the industry has resisted change for so long, it may be too late to fix it. We understand that there are millions of hard-working cab drivers around the world who find this news unsettling. But Uber isn’t booting them out of a job, it’s changing the way they work to be more in keeping with modern technology and lifestyles.

Ultimately, protests like the ones staged yesterday in Europe make for good news stories, but they do little if anything to reform the industry or boost customer satisfaction. As proof, consider this: Uber said that the protests in London alone resulted in an 850% growth in the company’s user base, as frustrated travelers tried to work around the traffic jams caused by cab drivers.

Likewise, Jim Epstein tells the cabbies they’re wasting their time – in more ways than one:

London mandates that its cabbies pass a 149-year-old exam called “The Knowledge” that requires them to master the city’s maze-like streets and know the precise location of museums, police stations, and theaters. As part of the test, they have to verbally recite detailed explanations of how best to travel from one location to another through the city’s roughly 25,000 arteries. Passing “The Knowledge” takes years of study, and most drivers fail at their first few tries. The test causes the gray matter in applicants’ brains to expand, according to one London researcher.

Perhaps the most compelling case for letting Uber thrive is that London’s brainy cabbies should devote their oversize hippocampi to contributing to fields like computer science and medical research. In an age of ubiquitous GPS devices, many of which also incorporate real-time traffic data, circling the city in a car is a profound waste of such exceptional minds. London may as well also require that cabbies master the art of saddling a horse and mending a harness.