U of So. Mississippi’s “The Garden” Offers IP-centric Startups A Leg Up
The For Rent sign on the University of Southern Mississippi's The Garden comes with a grassroots recruiting pitch.
"If you're an entrepreneur with intellectual property in smart materials - high performance materials - and you want to start and grow a company, we think we have a unique facility for you to do that," said Cecil Burge, vice president for Economic Research and Development.
The development of the previous home of the Van Hook Golf Course into a cutting-edge startup incubator with high tech resources on tap has been anything but easy. Kemp continues:
Then came Hurricane Katrina. The physical damage shut down construction for three to four months, but the financial reverberations were worse.
"We went through a design, and then we bid the building (The Accelerator) at the very height of the Hurricane Katrina run-up in construction costs," Burge said. "So our initial estimates where we could build the building for $288 a square foot turned into $400. The building has cost $26.6 million overall.
What Burge calls a "second hurricane" occurred with the recent collapse of the commercial real estate market.
The Garden should soon be up and operational and is looking for entrepreneurial tenants to join the 4 companies already signed up, so be sure to check out Kemp's Garden almost ready to open for more on the campus' bid to attract creators of valuable IP.
DownloadSquad: Microsoft recently patented an idea for the generation of "realistic" avatars. Sebastian Anthony comments on this unlikely bit of IP: "It's interesting to see such a technology being worked on. You can see its appeal -- perhaps for family video games, like on the Wii -- but you can also imagine more nefarious uses. (Would all the blonde 15-year-olds from California suddenly disappear from the Internet?) Slashdot is reporting that its primary use will be to encourage users/gamers to exercise: your health records would be used to generate a fat avatar in a gaming environment. The theory is that it would drive the gamer to lose weight, with hopes of becoming a prettier Elf." Who knows if people will attempt to game this attempt by Microsoft to bring realism to one of the most fantasy-filled places in the universe, the Internet, but bless 'em for trying. Read Anthony's complete take on this patented silliness in Microsoft submits new patent: now watch as the number of well-endowed girls on the Internet declines.
NextGov: Do intellectual property rights benefit "green" businesses? A fine question, indeed. Jill R. Aitoro's Intellectual Property: Hindering Green IT? provides a few thoughts on this increasingly important issue:
Coinciding with Copenhagen climate talks, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced a bill on Thursday calling for the protection of intellectual property rights for clean energy and environmental technology in any global climate change agreement.
As of this blog post, full text of the bill was not available on the Internet, but apparently it complements similar bipartisan language included in the House Foreign Relations Authorization Act (HR 2410), which passed this summer.
Even though the US is seeking additional protections for its homegrown IP, there are many countries that would rather be able to get their hands on the US' hard-won technologies at bargain basement prices. "Nearly 80 countries submitted a proposal to discuss the weakening of global intellectual property rights for new innovations designed to reduce carbon emissions." I'm thinking that even if the United States is interested in helping third world countries to develop methods of reducing green house emissions there won't be much support for any effort to force companies to give away valuable ideas and products at home.
Ludwig von Mises Institute: If you happen to be one of the people who think intellectual property protection is a bunch of brown bunkum, then you should read Stephan Kinsella topical piece, The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide. Of particular interest is a quite comprehensive list of anti-UP resources that Kinsella has assembled. Of course, like any good sword, this one is two-edged; the same information against IP could be used to help gather ammunition to help fight the good IP battle by those in favor.
Chasing The Power Curve: Book review time, courtesy of Greg Herlein. He writes, "A *great* way to get past the hyperbole on the Internet and learn a lot about Intellectual Property is to read “Intellectual Property, The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business” by Paul Goldstein (Penguin Group ISBN 978-1-59184-177-7)." This book could be very useful to the patent law beginner, Herlein notes: "Patent Law in particular can be tough to grok, but this book makes it very approachable with well-chosen case studies. I found it an excellent way to fill in gaps in my knowledge of IP issues. I’ve filed probably 30 applications and spent countless hours talking to patent attorneys. Yet this book was still very useful for me. I highly recommend it." Read the rest of his thoughts on this cold, hard look at IP in Herlein's aptly titled piece, Review: Intellectual Property by Paul Goldstein. You can order the book from Amazon here.
Bonus IP piece o' the day: DOJ Works Overseas to Protect Intellectual Property by Ryan J. Reilly at Main Justice.
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