There's nothing explicitly stopping people trademarking "Dev Mode" but there's all sorts of things around which Goods and Services you're using - which there must be related to your business and a thing called "Proof of use" which is what is sounds like - which means you actually can't just trademark all the words in the dictionary, you have to be actively using it on relevant things.
Saw some comments on twitter saying "oh but xyz used that term in 1998" - that doesn't get taken into account since at that point it's not a trademark. You don't have to be first, just the first to trademark it + it has to be relevant to your business and you have to be using it ;)
The clashes are down to an assessment of aural, visual and conceptual similarity (some fun NLP in there!) if multiple corps use the same terms, or similar terms.
Oddly terms like "Apple" get extra protection for being well known names associate with clear brands.
Yep, that was pretty much it. Price wars over BPipe vs Retuers. "You mean I have to pay twice? Once for my desktop and once for this BPipe thing, and that costs whhhhhaaat? How much?" Also it's not quite as terrifying as firm live pricing, it's only indicative with a good Bid/Offer spread. Enjoyed your blog....I like the Pricing Monkey idea. Would they be picking up the prices from the local machine though? Because surely any other way would mean the same large fees?
Just for fun I have a couple of nice Excel based stories from my time in Investment Banking.
Story 1: I Inherited a system once that had 1000s (yes thousands) of excel spreadsheets checked into SourceSafe (yes Source Safe) each sheet represented an Equity Derivatives trade, which was checked out and used by traders when pricing a deal. Also...now it gets fun...there were common functions for calculating the present value and risk metrics for each trade...so when we needed to calculate the risk the traders were running (intraday and end of day) we had a huge compute grid that would check the spreadsheets out and run them on virtualized windows boxes and sum the results to produce the official risk metrics for the bank's trading desk. Absolutely not making that up. I should really write a blog about it...it's truely terrifying.
Story 2: What if I told you that Excel has this little know function called RTD (real time data) that let's you stream data into sheets in well....real time. So you can see all your prices ticking away without refreshing the sheet. I also took over a system that had hundrends of sheets that did this (at this point you must be thinking this guy is a sucker for punishment) one of the problems here was latency...so each trader's sheet used their local machine to get prices...and the analytics library we used to calculate prices to an 'indeterminant' amount of time to execute. Oh...and one of the sheets published the banks prices out to Bloomberg...for trading. This whole mess was sorted out by eventually pricing everything centrally and pushing consistent numbers to bloomberg, the spreadsheets and the risk systems.
My overall summary is that excel is "what is dead but may never die" and you'd better embrace it if you want to deal with front office systems. That and I think people would be surprised to see how much systemic risk some of these places are running (i'm talking about a Top 15 bank here).
I sort of came to love it as a tool, but that's what people with Stockholm syndrome say right?
Oh thanks for reminding me, I did look at that a while ago, it's absolutely great. The transforming steps are amazing. Time to have another look at it. Exploratory.io is similar (nice transformation steps using dplyr) but for me it was just a bit too close to actually writing the R code.
This is absolutely terrific! I often work with csv or tsv and large data, and I just want to quickly look at it without loading excel or exporting to google sheets. https://atom.io/packages/tablr Tablr for Atom is good too. One feature request. I very often get data in JSON format (then convert to csv), it would be amazing to also support JSON. Thanks for sharing.
I wondered for a long time about the anniversary thing, then actually went and did some analysis on it. Looking at the data, it shows that people mostly tend to do leave jobs on year boundaries so contacting and targeting people at that time of year when they are thinking about changing jobs makes a lot of sense. You can argue the morals of it of course! Here's my blog on it : https://medium.com/@mrmattwright/workforce-analytics-happy-a...
Which was a while ago (April), I'll be doing a new one soon with what we have learnt since then. My main learning is around Mark Granovetter works on "the strength of weak ties" when it comes to job hunting and recruitment. That and the concept of triadic closure are really useful when trying to build technology that maps the recruitment process from first principles.
I was utterly amazed by the concept of Social Network Analysis, how emotion travels through a network, how the 6 degrees thing works. Did you know someone you have never met can affect your weight? I was so amazed I started a company building a CRM from the ground up using graph theory. We launch in Q1 2015.
Inspired to be: The seven habits of highly effective people. A great book, which many read and sight. Forcing myself to write about my values and behaviours means you have to live up to them :)
I read it once and now I am reading it again with my girlfriend actually doing all the exercises. You can read it in a week but to really take it all in you need to work on it over a lifetime. http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effect...
Cool, we are in Southwark, doing a bunch of graph visualisation stuff (http://blog.stitched.io/), so come by for a beer at some point, would be good to chat.
Sentiment.js (which is what we used in devwax and I am guessing the same here) is just AFINN based Sentiment.https://www.npmjs.org/package/sentiment which you can customize. So in our case we added things like {"barreling": 2} etc. What would be better is a bigram/trigram based approach do you could score "Going Off" and "Killed It" etc, but I am not sure if there is a js library that does that?
We did the same with Tweets and Surfing. http://devwax.herokuapp.com/ from the meetup: http://www.meetup.com/DevWax/. It was all done in a weekend with some drinking and surfing, so it's a bit rough. The trouble with surfing was that the locations are very disparate and hard to guess. Fun to have a go at though...
There's nothing explicitly stopping people trademarking "Dev Mode" but there's all sorts of things around which Goods and Services you're using - which there must be related to your business and a thing called "Proof of use" which is what is sounds like - which means you actually can't just trademark all the words in the dictionary, you have to be actively using it on relevant things.
Saw some comments on twitter saying "oh but xyz used that term in 1998" - that doesn't get taken into account since at that point it's not a trademark. You don't have to be first, just the first to trademark it + it has to be relevant to your business and you have to be using it ;)
The clashes are down to an assessment of aural, visual and conceptual similarity (some fun NLP in there!) if multiple corps use the same terms, or similar terms.
Oddly terms like "Apple" get extra protection for being well known names associate with clear brands.