Obama Nominates Former Google Attorney to Head US Patent Office

Once upon a time, the US Patent and Trademark Office was a quiet place where inventors big and small staked their claims to originality. Silicon Valley's inventive tumult, along with the insatiable commercial beast known as the pharmaceutical industry, transformed the feds' Sleepy Hollow into Ground Zero for intellectual property rights. Now the question is who could earn marketplace trust while maintaining a zeal to protect the public interest?

Michele Lee
(Image: fedscoop.com)

Well, when in doubt, President Obama taps his tech allies for someone who has the right stuff. In the Patent Office case, 44 considered his friends at Google and wondered whether they had a suitable candidate. Mountain View tapped Michele Lee as the chosen one. According to The Washington Post, Lee was appointed acting director in January, 2014. Now, BO would like to make Lee's coronation official. Apparently, she has sailed through Senate vetting.

The Post story points out that Lee's ascension is a big win for Silicon Valley firms. They typically have a perspective on intellectual content rights that essentially conflicts with Big Pharma's viewpoint on the issue. Keep in mind that Obama has characteristically gone out of his way to help Big Data firms, such as Amazon (thank you, CIA and Department of Defense contracts) and Google. While no one is disputing Lee's qualifications (electrical engineering and law backgrounds), some wonder what voodoo Big Data lays on the president of the United States.

Number of American Households Receiving Foodstamps Hits All-Time High

While the feds, the Fortune 500 business community, the real estate industry, and their media enablers beat the economic recovery drum, voiceless Americans have another story to tell. According to a post in the financial blog zerohedge.com, the USDA's most recent data on foodstamps showed a 170,000 increase in individual recipients. Further, the number of Americans receiving foodstamps has reached "an all-time high."

Does this sound like a "recovery" to you?

For more perspective on the asymmetrical aspect to the trumpeted "recovery," read a Mercury News feature story on Bay Area families disconnected to Silicon Valley's current gold rush. Of course, these barely franchised families and individuals are not selling aggregated personal information, providing the NSA with Internet and phone call data without legitimate user consent, or having off-camera negotiations with our first Big Data president. They're just, as Mitt Romney so inelegantly put it, "takers."

Meanwhile, the "makers" are very much on the make.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Expands DC-Area Presence, Big Government Alliance

Image: techcrunch.com

The commonwealth of Virginia recently announced that Amazon Web Services would add 500 employees to AWS' DC-area offices. The Cavalier State's Republican governor let the world know about this development via a news release. The story appeared on a slow news cycle in today's Washington Post.

The announcement and fawningly written WaPo article (which mischaracterized the tech company as a "retail giant") treated Amazon's decision as if it were the Second Coming. The piece pointedly noted how the average of the jobs' salaries would reach low six-figures. Meanwhile, the state provided Amazon with a $500,000 grant "to assist Amazon's recruitment and training." Why these supposedly high-tech, highly qualified applicants would need government assistance to become fully prepared for their new employment remained unstated.

The principal reason AWS is moving into northern Virginia's Dulles Internet-heavy corridor involves federal contracts. Free-enterprise Amazon has discovered the lucrative attractions of Big Government's data needs. Earlier this year, I blogged about Amazon's data storage contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. The pro-Amazon Obama Administration, enamored with Big Data's clout and reach, has intentionally or otherwise provided very useful services to Jeff Bezos' empire. Given that scenario, it is unsurprising that today's WaPo story observed that Amazon's Virginia "expansion follows an announcement this month by Amazon Web Services that the federal government had put the company on a fast track to sell it cloud computing services."

Characteristically, Amazon remained tightlipped about its plans. "An Amazon spokesman," the WaPo article noted, "declined to add more specifics, such as when the jobs would be added." Maybe the CIA has finally found its soulmate. The spooks could even offer it a codename: Sleepless in Seattle.

Five Trends to Watch in 2013

Everyone else does this during the last week of the year, so I'm taking the plunge to briefly mention a quintet of news trends for the coming year. Hell, it's cheaper than a lottery ticket and possibly more useful than one. After all, your odds of losing the lottery profoundly work against a system that's gamed against lottery players, i.e., "contributors to state education funds." Yet people play, and someone hits. Why not us?

Cartoon credit: timescontent.com

1.  Food inflation -- I went to the supermarket today and purchased an ordinary red onion. Cost? Two dollars per pound. The next time the Fed comes out with its "no inflation now" report, think about how much it costs to buy ordinary groceries. If you believe you're paying much more than last year, you're on the right track. Keep in mind this past summer's drought will impact food prices in the US and its principal export markets. According to a story in the British newspaper The Telegraph, food prices have risen in the UK by 33% since 2007. This reality hammers poor and working class families very hard.

2.  China expands its muscle in Pacific Asia -- Beijing has a new ruling regime, ambitions to exert more "influence" in the Pacific region, and the financial and military clout to make its wishes known. This is a formula for conflict. An article in today's Financial Times raises this issue in the context of China's relatively new emphasis on "patriotic education" and former outrages at the hands of foreign powers. (Japan is at the top of this list.)

The United States will have its hands full managing this situation, especially if the People's Republic of China decides to squeeze Taiwan, which Beijing considers a "renegade" Chinese province.

3.  Voting rights in the United States -- The 2012 presidential election demonstrated just how potent the exercise of the right to vote impacts political calculus. Expect a GOP move through friendly state legislatures and judiciary venues to erode "easy" voter registration and voting. This return to the very bad old Jim Crow days should be a source of shame to conservatives, and a signal that their movement is approaching moral bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the claims of the right-wing's "voter fraud" campaign have never, ever been sustained by fact.

4.  The importance of Big Data -- I'll blog on this topic another day. Just quickly: Big Data connects to commercial developments in social media, location marketing, and behavioral marketing. Right now, Big Data is the early 21st Century's equivalent of a Texas or Saudi-size oil pool. Similar to petroleum, Big Data is also a commodity, which implies tremendous advantages for those enterprises with sufficient scale and capital to leverage the situation.

Myanmar temple site
(photo: National Geographic)

5.  The "opening" of Myanmar. It's already happening, particularly with upscale tourism. I understand that the trip to get there is excruciatingly long. However, tour operators savvy with Thailand vacation packages will quickly figure out a Myanmar extension or stand-alone deal. And yes, now is the time to go. Myanmar is a nation much of whose population, culture, and everyday life, has more in common with a lost epoch than with current events. This rare phenomenon -- a nation just emerging from a time capsule -- should be experienced now.

How the Obama Campaign Leverages Big Data to Political Advantage

Big Data and the Individual

It is generally agreed that Barack Obama won the 2008 Democratic presidential primary through his shrewd use of social media, a massive volunteer effort, and sophisticated data analysis. His 2012 re-election drive has resorted to similar tactics, except not as many unpaid true believers are working on 44's behalf. However, according to a story in today's online editions of the Financial Times, big data is doing a lot of heavy lifting for President Obama's campaign.

Take time to read the feature piece. It's a fascinating window into modern persuasion campaigns and deftly underlines just how much personal data is available on the average citizen. It's not as if Obama volunteers are knocking on the doors of reclusive one-percenters. Also take time to ponder why Obama and his data exploiters went to Silicon Valley, as the FT story observed, to learn the ropes of big-league data mining. Does this sound like the tactics of someone who respects individual rights and the right to privacy?