Editor’s note: This marks the second and final installment of a unique profile—a detective story, really—of a Boston-area entrepreneur and his famous invention. The story was excerpted from Xconomy contributing writer Seth Shulman’s The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (W. W. Norton 2008), which will be officially released on Monday. The first installment ran yesterday. Be sure to examine the pictures in today’s article.

*******

Over the next few days, in a binge of work, I puzzled over a complex knot of irregularities about Bell’s life-altering visit to Washington, D.C. To begin with, the timing of the trip seemed more than a little odd. Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, but, according to Bell’s laboratory notebook, he did not successfully transmit intelligible speech over a telephone until March 10th. Was it true that, in the lingo of the patent office, Bell had yet to “reduce his invention to practice” at the time he filed his patent application? That, in other words, Bell patented an invention he had never actually made?

Even the logistics of this question were mystifying. I knew from reporting on disputes over intellectual property that working models of inventions were required by the U.S. Patent Office in the 1800s. It took only a little digging to learn that on February 14, 1876—the very day Bell filed his telephone patent—a U.S. Senate Committee held hearings on a bill calling for the agency to do away with this requirement. Supporters of the bill, proposed by Connecticut Senator James E. English, testified that the patent office’s attic coffers were literally overflowing and that there was no space to put the roughly twenty thousand new models the agency expected to receive in the coming year.

Of course, there would have been no point for the Senate to debate the issue unless, as of February 1876, the patent office at least technically continued to require working models to accompany patent applications. Why, then, hadn’t the patent examiner in Bell’s case required him to submit a functioning model of his telephone?

Equally baffling was the patent office’s decision to grant Bell his telephone patent even before he had returned to his lab in Boston on March 7, 1876. How was it, I wondered, that one of the most momentous patents in history was issued in just three weeks? When I looked at other patents filed and issued around the same time, they all seemed to have taken months, if not years, to issue…

The U.S. Patent Office’s speedy work to approve Bell’s patent seemed all the more extraordinary because, on February 19, 1876, the patent examiner had notified Bell that his patent would be “suspended” for three months, after which time, the letter said, the office would formally decide whether to declare so-called interference proceedings. Such interference disputes almost always include formal hearings to determine which inventor can rightfully claim “priority of conception.” Sorting out the interference claims on inventor Emile Berliner’s 1877 patent application on the microphone, for instance, ended up taking more than thirteen years. That was, of course, an extreme case, but even the more common interference proceedings lasted for one or more years.

There was no question about it: the swiftness of the patent office’s actions seemed highly unusual. I wondered what had made U.S. Patent officials change their minds so quickly about their contention that the claims of others overlapped with Bell’s. For that matter, I wondered exactly what those other claims were.

Thanks to the Dibner Institute’s extraordinary library at MIT, I easily answered the latter question. The filing that conflicted Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.

Today, if he is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.

History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.

As I soon learned, once you start looking, you can find a good deal of information about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end…

In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the patent office called a “caveat.” Although … Next Page »

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Editor’s note: Just about everyone knows the story of Alexander Graham Bell and his invention of the telephone—and those famous words uttered in the inventor’s Boston workshop to his assistant, Thomas Watson.

But what if the whole history of the telephone was rooted in a lie? A few years ago, when I walked into the Dibner Institute at MIT to turn in a letter of recommendation for Xconomy contributing writer Seth Shulman to spend a year as a fellow studying the history of science and technology, I had no idea that in some small way I might be taking part in challenging Bell’s famous account. But a few months ago, when I first saw the fruits of the labor Seth began during his fellowship year—a manuscript for a book entitled The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (W. W. Norton 2008)—I was instantly brought alive with the awareness that history was being rewritten.

I decided on the spot that Xconomy had to run an excerpt when the book was published (sales officially begin next Monday). Bell, after all, was a Boston entrepreneur. His startup company—the Bell Telephone System, aka AT&T—is one of the area’s greatest corporate success stories. Of course, Xconomy normally covers the present and future of entrepreneurship and new technology—and Bell’s first telephone call took place more than 130 years ago. But Seth’s research and its potential impact on Boston’s innovation legacy are just too compelling to ignore.

So, in two parts, beginning today and concluding tomorrow, you can judge for yourself whether Bell deserves his place in history, or whether the story of the telephone needs to be reconsidered. —Robert Buderi.

Mr. Watson, come here!

Thomas Watson hunched over the bureau in Alexander Graham Bell’s attic bedroom at the modest boardinghouse at 5 Exeter Place in Boston. Watson’s ear pressed tightly against the metal frame of the small “speaking telegraph” receiver.

The booming voice was unmistakable, even in a tinny, ghostlike facsimile. Watson reeled in amazement when he heard it. Jumping back, he swung open the bedroom door and ran into the hallway.

In the adjacent room, Bell was leaning over his workbench and shouting into the mouth of a metal cone clamped onto a block of wood…

Bell was undoubtedly still shouting into the contraption when Watson burst into the room to report what he had heard. Only then did Bell realize that he had placed the world’s first telephone call.

The feat was hard for either man to believe. They had labored toward the goal for so long—and with such paltry success—prior to that moment on March 10, 1876.

The Bell and Watson “eureka” moment is one of the best-known stories in the history of invention and among the most romantic with its two earnest and visionary young inventors profoundly changing the world from their humble quarters. I first heard the tale as a child and have read enough versions now for its familiarity to give it a luster, the way polished old wood develops a patina.

Bell’s voice traveled just ten yards along a bare wire from one room to another. It was a modest transmission of sound waves to have unleashed such an enormous change in human interaction. Yet even today, after untold billions of long-distance conversations spanning more than a century, Bell’s oddly emphatic words are still probably the most famous ever uttered into a telephone.

The story of the telephone’s invention is not just well known, it is impeccably documented, beginning that very evening, when both men wrote about it in their notebooks. With contemporaneous eyewitness accounts from each of the episode’s principals, the story is the historian’s equivalent of a slam dunk.

Late one October evening, I was working in the plush office I had been given for the year at MIT. On my computer screen, courtesy of the Library of Congress, was a high-resolution, digital reproduction of Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory notebook from 1875 and 1876, exactly as he had written it in his own hand.

The large windows near my desk looked out on the Charles River and downtown Boston. I gazed at the glow of the night skyline and realized I could practically see the spot at 5 Exeter Place in Boston where, more than a century ago, Bell had written the words before me.

On the screen, the images of Bell’s notebook lacked only the musty smell of the notebook’s leather binding and the brittle feel of its lined pages. In every other respect, they offered a perfect facsimile, allowing the viewer to follow Bell’s work straight from his own fountain pen. In some passages, I thought I could even roughly gauge Bell’s excitement from the way his penmanship got scratchy when he seemed to write more hurriedly.

I wondered what Bell would have made of the fact that I was viewing a perfect reproduction of his notebook via the World Wide Web. He’d surely marvel at the technology. And he would also be justified to feel proud. After all, the Internet is little more than a powerful descendant of the communication device he himself pioneered.

As a journalist who specializes in science and technology, I have long been interested in invention—how it occurs and how it is remembered. So I jumped at the opportunity to spend a year as a science-writer-in-residence at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. It was the first time they had invited an outsider to join in the program’s seminars and discussion groups.

Given my interest in inventors, I had proposed to do a year of research on the relationship between two towering icons: Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was a project that seemed full of possibility and I was grateful for the opportunity to begin it. …

*******

On the night I was paging through Bell’s notebook, the first thing I noticed was its sensible progression. Day after day, Bell made incremental changes in his experiments using the same elements: electromagnets, vibrating reeds, and tuning forks. The work was clear, tangible, elegant. I felt I understood what Bell was doing and maybe even what he was thinking about.

For the most part, he was not thinking about the device we now call the telephone. Bell, like many other inventors in his day, was actually trying to solve a problem then plaguing the burgeoning telegraph industry: how to send … Next Page »

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Updated and corrected, December 21, 2007. For details on the revisions, click here.

It is every online shopper’s nightmare (that is, if you awake to know it has even happened). You’re at the computer buying movie tickets, flowers, or pet food and, after completing your purchase, an enticing pop-up comes on the screen offering a $10 rebate. You type in your e-mail address to take advantage of the offer and the next thing you know, wham! You just unwittingly transferred your credit card number to a company you’ve never heard of and enrolled yourself in a dubious “rewards” program charging you $10 per month in perpetuity.

Such is the scenario outlined in hundreds of pages of court documents filed in a sweeping class-action lawsuit against Norwalk, CT-based Webloyalty.com and online partners that include Fandango.com, Priceline.com, justflowers.com, and others that is slowly working its way to trial in the Federal District Court of Massachusetts in Boston.

A key phase of the legal battle, known as the discovery process, will start in earnest after the holidays but won’t likely be complete until late this spring. It requires Webloyalty to produce vast numbers of corporate documents, including e-mails and minutes from meetings, as well as to allow attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case to take testimony from company employees in legal depositions. The process could reveal some eye-opening details about Webloyalty’s online marketing practices and arrangements with an estimated 75 major online retailers.

No matter the outcome, the case is being watched closely in both legal and financial circles. Lawyers say the suit could help shape the way laws governing online transactions are interpreted and enforced. Investors note that Webloyalty’s type of business, known as part of the so-called “lead generation” field, is a tempting and profitable branch of e-commerce. But, they say, any revelations from the case about deceptive practices would certainly give many would-be investors pause.

Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who has served as an attorney and expert in litigation involving online advertising fraud, says the case is important because it addresses two key issues in online lead-generation practices. “First, is there any limit to what Webloyalty and others can put in the fine print? Second, might there be some practices that are so likely to deceive that they cannot be permitted, even if disclosed in the fine print.” On this last point, Edelman is focused on the way Webloyalty gets consumers’ credit card numbers without customers explicitly handing them over. “Usually consumers know they’re entering into a contract because a retailer requests a credit card number,” he says. “But Webloyalty implemented a remarkable alternative—getting users’ card numbers directly from other merchants, and beginning to charge users who never told Webloyalty their card numbers.”

The named plaintiff in the lawsuit, Joe Kuefler, a resident of Stow, Massachusetts, bought movie tickets from Fandango back in December 2005. He claims he was unknowingly enrolled in one of Webloyalty’s so-called rewards programs after clicking on a pop-up offer, later finding a recurring $10 charge on his credit card from “WLI Reservations Rewards.” Kuefler got his money back after complaining about the charge, but the lawsuit alleges that he never gave his credit card information to Webloyalty and didn’t realize he had subscribed.

The complaint alleges violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, unfair and deceptive acts and practices, invasion of privacy, and civil theft. Since this is a class-action suit, Kuefler is, of course, not alone. His lawyers say that the more than 700 consumer complaints they have reviewed attest to the validity of their allegations. The Connecticut Better Business Bureau alone says it has fielded 1,048 complaints … Next Page »

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Myomo, the privately held Boston-based startup, has a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. The company won FDA approval in July for its first product: the “e100 NeuroRobotic System,” an elbow brace that helps stroke victims recover use of their arms by detecting tiny electric signals from the skin’s surface. Earlier this month, Popular Science cited Myomo’s brace one of the top technological innovations of 2007. And the company recently announced that it has brought on board, as CEO, Thomas Glover, a veteran manager with more than 25 years of experience marketing medical devices, most recently as CEO of New York-based Vasomedical (a leading provider of non-invasive cardiovascular technologies), and formerly an executive at Johnson & Johnson. Now the question is: can Myomo make the leap to build distribution to reach the millions of patients who could potentially benefit from its product?

Steve Kelly, Myomo board chairman and founding CEO, says the key to the company’s technology is that it is “the first personal robotic wearable device controlled by the patient.” The concept was central enough, he says, that it feeds into the firm’s name, which is short for “my own motion.” With technology covered by MIT patents garnered by its founding inventors John McBean and Kailas Narendran, Myomo uses electrodes to detect subtle electrical signals on the skin to determine when a patient is trying to move. Then, much like power steering in a car, the company’s brace assists the effort. Myomo’s initial elbow brace has been shown to help patients move their arms whether 10 days or 10 years following a stroke.

Most remarkably, though, Myomo’s technology has also shown promise in helping stroke victims regain independent use of their so-called hemiparetic, or partially paralyzed limbs, taking advantage of so-called “neuroplasticity” whereby the brain essentially re-wires itself to recapture at least some mobility. Much more clinical work is needed, but early studies offer hope that Myomo’s technology can allow at least some stroke victims’ neurologic pathways to be strengthened enough that they can ultimately regain unassisted use of their formerly incapacitated arms.

Myomo’s initial FDA clearance for its brace is only for hospital or clinic-based use with arm dysfunction caused by stroke (Myriad other applications of the technology may be possible; more on that in a bit.) But even the arm application represents a remarkably big market. Stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability in the U.S. with some 5.7 million current stroke survivors. Roughly half of these patients have some one-side paralysis that often impairs their use of their arms. And, with some 78 million baby boomers approaching retirement, the numbers are sure to grow.

Myomo is the first out of the gate with a noninvasive, straightforward device with the potential to help a large number of patients. But the fields of neurological research and robotics are burgeoning. Scores of research groups around the world are now working on similar devices and robotically assisted therapies to treat stroke patients and others with brain or neurological disorders. Myomo, meanwhile, has just 17 employees and, despite is promise and positive press, the effects of its sole product have only been documented in two tiny clinical studies to date. The market may be big, but there is no doubt that incoming CEO Thomas Glover will have his work cut out for him.

Step one, Kelly says, is to build distribution channels by selling Myomo braces to rehabilitation hospitals and clinics. Then, next year, Myomo spokesperson Maureen Liberty adds, the company hopes to work toward approval for home use.

But Kelly’s also thinking beyond that. “We’re at the very beginning,” he says. “We see Myomo as a kind of foundational platform technology.” In addition to helping stroke patients, he says, Myomo’s technology could potentially be useful for people with spinal cord injuries, or even degenerative conditions like multiple sclerosis. “With all the medical breakthroughs to come for people with paralysis,” Kelly says—whether stem cell injections to treat spinal cord injuries or other treatments as yet unimagined—”rehabilitation will play a central role and Myomo devices could help patients make the most of their treatments.” Without too much prompting, Kelly envisions an entire system of Myomo devices, with “patients being wheeled in and, depending on their situation, regaining enough function to ultimately walk away unassisted.”

Kelly’s vision might even sound too good to be true—and it still may prove to be so—but the company’s strong track record to date bodes well. The fact is, Myomo’s path from idea to startup could hardly have been smoother. The company began as a graduate student project at MIT in 2002 and even then it won awards, bagging top honors in MIT’s well-known “50K” competition (now the 100K) for its initial business plan. Early development occurred on campus in the so-called MIT Active Joint Brace Research Group with two rounds of “ignition grants” from MIT’s Deshpande Center to help it spin out as a privately held firm in 2004. (The company is fairly tight-lipped about what capital it has raised since then.) Now, with a strong patent portfolio, swift and trouble-free FDA approval and a new CEO, Kelly seems right when he notes that, so far at least, “this has been a project blessed with serial good luck.”

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Among the many interesting tables published in the U.S. Patent Office’s annual performance report issued on Thursday are a state-by-state breakdown of patents issued in 2007, as well as listings of patent applications filed between 2003 and 2006 (this year’s figures on patent applications won’t be published until next month). Almost any way you parse the data, Massachusetts makes a strong showing—with 3,876 patents issued in fiscal year 2007, and a record 10,506 applications filed in 2006. Way to go home team!

How does that track record compare to other states? With just a little work, the raw data from the patent office offers all sorts of tantalizing ways to compare states’ innovation efforts to figure which might be trending hot and which might be cooling down. Of course, all the usual disclaimers apply. Numbers of patents—issued or applied for—is not a particularly good indicator of real innovation. The data does not allow for comparisons by subject matter, institutional affiliation, or other potentially useful criteria. And states are, after all, a pretty crude lens through which to look at the picture. Nonetheless, as a veteran watcher of the innovation equation, I couldn’t resist whipping out my calculator and combing through U.S. census data to come up with per capita numbers. I offer here some often surprising highlights derived from the report’s figures:

First of all, in terms of raw numbers, there is no real contest. California is the overwhelming leader, with a whopping 22,888 patents issued in the last fiscal year. Texas comes in second with 6,316; New York innovators brought home 6,007, and Massachusetts ranks fourth with the aforementioned 3,876. No real surprises there.

What happens, though, when you correct for population? I calculated the number of patents per 10,000 residents. The runaway winner is…Idaho, of all places! The “potato state,” with roughly 1.4 million residents, managed to bring home 1,478 patents. By way of comparison, Maine’s 1.3 million residents produced just 133 patents, an order of magnitude difference. I’m still scratching my head about what accounts for Idaho’s patent productivity. Ideas, anyone?

Adjusted for population, here are the top 10 (listed by the number of patents issued per 10,000 residents). You’ll notice that two other New England states, Connecticut and New Hampshire, also make the list:

1. Idaho 10.08
2. Oregon 6.48
3. California 6.28
4. Massachusetts 6.02
5. Washington 5.97
6. Minnesota 5.79
7. Connecticut 4.66
8. New Hampshire 4.63
9. Colorado 4.36
10. Delaware 4.14

At the bottom of the heap, offering fewer surprises, came states such as Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia, Hawaii, and Louisianathat have very little in the way of innovation infrastructure. These states all weigh in with well under one patent per 10,000 residents.

Still, with the patent application process now routinely taking upwards of three to four years in some sectors, patents are not a particularly up-to-date way to track innovation. Looking at patent applications filed, Massachusetts makes an even stronger showing—with a per capita rate of patent applications in 2006 that nudges out even California. You know, that place that has Silicon Valley.

What about trends? With the patent office offering annual data on applications going back to 2003, I went back to the calculator to compute which states’ patent applications are increasing the most rapidly. Here again, Massachusetts makes a respectable showing, with a 20 percent increase in patent applications between 2003 and 2006, roughly in line with a number of other big patent states such as Texas.

Here, though, the data reveal five surprising states—Vermont (another New England rising star), West Virginia, North Dakota, Georgia, and Utah—in which patent applications are up significantly. Their overall numbers of patent applications might still be small, but these states clearly appear to be making strides in building innovation infrastructure from the ground up. In this category, though, there’s unmistakable winner that is less surprising: Washington state. Between 2003 and 2006, with help, no doubt, from Microsoft, Amazon, and a host of software startups, Washington’s patent applications jumped from 6,293 to 10,444, an impressive 66 percent increase that earns Washington the top spot among states trending hot for innovation in the patent sweepstakes.

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The big news in the annual report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office out today: it takes longer than ever to get a patent these days, and the backlog in patent applications continues to grow at an alarming rate.

Average “pendency”—as the patent office calls the waiting period from application to issued patent—is now 31.9 months, up even from last year’s dismal performance at 31.1 months. And the backlog—the number of patent applications waiting in the queue—grew by more than 100,000 from last year,to 1,112,517. When you go to apply for a U.S. patent, in other words, there will be more than a million applications ahead of yours needing review, and it is likely to take more than two-and-a-half years to make it through the process.

The fact is, even these gloomy overall numbers don’t tell the whole story. The backlog is considerably worse in many high-tech sectors, where applications are often highly technical and complex. What’s more, in many of these sectors, the pace of change is so fast that they arguably have the greatest need for swift patent protection. As the chart below shows, the wait for a patent in biotechnology is approaching three years, and in software and communications it is getting closer to four years. Michael Kirk, director of the American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association, has previously told me that increasing pendency rates cast “a cloud of uncertainty over the marketplace.”

Of course, as is the case with many government reports, news of the patent backlog isn’t exactly highlighted in the patent office’s Annual Performance and Accountability Report for Fiscal Year 2007. The figures above, for instance, are contained on page 112 of the report, buried in a mountain of stats. They were far behind such important information as the fact that workers at the U.S. Patent office raised $1.3 million for charity in FY2007 (p.12); that more than 3,000 patent office employees work from home at least one day per week (p.13); that electronic filings of patent applications tripled last year to 49.3% (p.17); and that it took the Patent Office an average of 13 days to reimburse workers’ travel payments (p.50).

In a departure from previous years, this year’s report doesn’t even give the figures for the past year’s pendency in given sectors. Fortunately, I happened to have past reports on hand. It might come as no surprise to learn that the average pendencies are up in most of these sectors. The bottom line is this: for so-called utility patents that make up the bulk of the patent office’s important business, applications last year hit a record high—while the patent office actually issued fewer utility patents than last year. The result is a growing backlog that ought to give any innovator pause. Here’s the graph one doesn’t see in this year’s report. I had to pull the numbers out and make it myself:

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Talk about the eleventh hour. At the last possible moment, a federal district court in Alexandria, VA, handed down a ruling yesterday evening that—at least for now—blocks new U.S. Patent Office rules that had been scheduled to take effect today: November 1, 2007. The new rules would have, among other things, made it harder for companies with pending patents to file so-called “continuations” that elaborate on their discoveries.

Continuations are favored, especially by biotech companies and university tech transfer offices, because they allow applicants to file patents early in the life of an invention or discovery—when not all the details of the invention are clear—and then add new claims that clarify and elaborate on them as they are pending. The Patent Office, which now faces an unprecedented backlog that is aggravated by such continuations, has contended that the new rules, which were finalized in August, are needed to streamline and speed up the patent process.

In the preliminary injunction, the court granted pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline’s motion to block the new rules, agreeing that the rules would likely do irreparable harm to the roughly 100 patents Glaxo has pending at the U.S. Patent Office. By granting an injunction, the court also signaled the likelihood that the U.S. Patent Office might well lose the case. Glaxo has argued, among other things, that the Patent Office has exceeded its authority in the new rules, especially by making them apply retroactively to pending patents. A full ruling is unlikely before hearings on the matter resume in December.

The prospect of the patent office’s rule change had already sent patent lawyers around the country scurrying on behalf of their clients, and the latest injunction just adds more chaos to an already uncertain climate in the patent world. As Michael Siekman, a patent attorney at Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks in Boston, explained in an email, the ruling took many in the field by surprise. Most close observers, Seikman says, thought it “unlikely that a court would stop an executive agency from implementing its rules on a relatively arcane subject when the court was not even going to hear the case until the day before the rules were to go into effect.”

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You don’t have to look far to find signs that participation in local communities is on the decline in the United States. In one obvious example, overall voter turnout in local elections is at a low ebb: according to a recent Pew Charitable Trusts survey only 26 percent of Americans aged 18 to 25 claim to vote regularly. Meanwhile, traditional sources of local information are dwindling. More Americans are getting their news from national sources than ever before, and just 16 percent of young Americans say they read any daily newspaper at all.

Now a trio of well-known figures in media and technology at MIT is launching an ambitious center to use technology to build local community engagement. With $5 million in private foundation funding, the new Center for the Future of Civic Media (or C4FCM) is setting out to study the problem, design solutions using new media and technologies, and eventually field test and implement those ideas.

C4FCM is the brainchild of Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, and Mitchel Resnick and Chris Csikszentmihályi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-hi), both of MIT’s famous Media Lab. Jenkins, a prolific voice on technology and social networks, brings a wealth of media experience to the team. Resnick’s “Lifelong Kindergarten” group has an impressive track record of building usable technological tools for kids, including the popular, web-based programming language “Scratch.” Meanwhile, Csikszentmihályi is an up-and-coming IT specialist who heads the Media Lab’s Computing Culture group.

Resnick and Jenkins graciously took time out from scrambling to get things going to talk about their plans. The group’s funding, announced last May and spread over the next four years, comes from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, built from profits from the Knight-Ridder media empire. And Resnick and Jenkins both use the problems faced by traditional local newspapers as a jumping off point for what they’re doing. “In the past local newspapers played an important role in supporting people’s efforts to be engaged in their local communities,” Resnick explains. But today, Jenkins notes, even in Boston, with a strong local paper in the Boston Globe, it is still hard to find out who the candidates are in local elections in his hometown of Cambridge, MA. “This kind of local political coverage is becoming less and less available to many Americans through traditional news sources,” he says.

As Resnick puts it: “We’re looking closely at the conceptual underpinnings of what’s happening today—the shrinking and changing of local media and local connections. And we’re asking: how can we build tools to help engage people in all kinds of active participation in their local community?”

Jenkins and Resnick are both quick to note that this involves a lot more than issues of newspapers and voting. “When we talk about civic engagement,” Jenkins says, “people immediately think about voting. But we’re not just talking about showing up at a polling place every few years.” Rather, he explains, the team is thinking about civic engagement, “not as a special event, but as a lifestyle.” Jenkins says the team seeks to connect all sorts of local entities and individuals with one another: not just government with citizens, but parents with schools, old with young, longstanding local residents with newcomers.

Exactly what kinds of tools are Jenkins and Resnick talking about? At this early stage, the team is looking at all sorts of possibilities, from the growth of locally focused online resources (such as websites like xconomy.com) to prospects for “micro-local” citizen and student journalism focusing on specific neighborhoods or communities—even the possibility for cell phone-based software platforms for resource banks, volunteering, sharing expertise, and exchanging local information.

Jenkins says the team’s first job is to recognize that a number of trends are occurring simultaneously. For instance, he notes, the decline in newspaper circulation no doubt stems at least in part from the fact that people are increasingly getting their news from online sources. But, in terms of local engagement, he says, it is equally important to understand changes brought about by increasing mobility in the United States. According to Jenkins, Americans move an average of once every five years, most often to pursue work opportunities. With that kind of a transient population, he says, it is little wonder that there is diminishing investment in local communities. While digital technologies have made it easier for people to keep social networks intact even when they move, he notes, the same attention hasn’t been paid to connections on the local level.

One goal of the team, therefore, is to take advantage of “more than a decade’s worth of research into the kinds of online communities that can emerge within networked cultures,” Jenkins says. “With this project, we seek to draw on that research to strengthen people’s ties to their own local communities.” In particular, he says, the group is interested in building upon online efforts, like blogs and bulletin boards, in which local residents can take “the flow of information into their own hands,” as well as ventures like Meetup.com that combine online and face-to-face interactions. As Jenkins puts it: “We may live in a so-called digital world and our relationship with our local environment might be changing, but the local needs are still there.”

With the C4FCM still finding its footing, it is too early to say exactly what kinds of technologies the group will develop or what products it might eventually spin off. But Jenkins and Resnick say looking directly at the problem of local involvement is sure to lead them to some interesting new tools. As Resnick puts it: “We’re confident that new media and programming can open up ways for engagement that were not possible before, allowing people to become involved in new ways and through new channels.”

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The next time you are waiting for your luggage at the airport baggage carousel and marveling at the security challenge posed by those hundreds of bags, consider this: somewhere between 9 and 11 million cargo containers come into the United States through its 361 seaports annually, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s roughly 2 billion tons of freight, making up 95 percent of the nation’s overseas trade. Anyway you look at it, port security represents a major vulnerability in the fight against terrorism. And today, some six years after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, unlike that airport luggage (as you’ve no doubt heard) only a fraction of the shipping containers entering the United States are fully inspected to make sure they aren’t carrying weapons of mass destruction or other contraband.

That’s where a fast-growing, Acton, MA-based startup called Passport Systems comes in. The company is designing and building new cargo screening detection devices with technology developed at MIT. Its first target: the nation’s seaports. The privately held firm was founded nearly five years ago, in 2002, by a group led by well-known venture capital investor Gordon Baty, a retired director and co-founder of ZeroStage Capital (all told it has raised some $3.4 million in two rounds of venture financing). To date, the firm has also garnered more than $15 million in U.S. government contracts to develop two related detection systems that can automatically determine the “nuclear fingerprint” of a shipping container’s contents within 20 seconds.

The technology won’t be cheap to develop or build. But Passport Systems believes the added security will be well worth the price. The whole reason the firm exists, says Gustavo Bottan, VP for business development, is because its founders, including MIT physicist William Bertozzi, “saw the potential for using new technology to solve a very significant problem.”

Bertozzi’s brainstorm occurred to him in his MIT lab not long after the Lockerbie terrorist explosion of a Pan Am jet in 1988. Bertozzi says the incident spurred him to use his knowledge of nuclear physics to try to combat terrorism. The result was a technique called Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence, or NRF, that uses gamma rays to detect the unique atomic makeup of any cargo materials with atomic weights higher than that of helium. Bertozzi and MIT won two broad patents on all uses of NRF technology, and Passport Systems obtained exclusive rights to the technology.

Bertozzi’s NRF technique capitalizes on the ability of the tiny-wavelength gamma rays in a high-energy photon beam to penetrate the steel walls of the containers, and the fact that the nucleus of every atom, when excited by the rays, displays a unique fingerprint that can be detected by a specially designed spectrometer. As a result, the technique can theoretically tell the difference between even isotopes of the same material, distinguishing, for instance, between depleted uranium (U-238) and the enriched uranium (U-235) capable of being used in a nuclear device. As Bottan explains, this capability can be crucial in limiting false positives. Other sophisticated detectors, he notes, might be able to determine that a container holds a metal with a high atomic number, indicating either nuclear materials or the metals, such as lead and tungsten, that might be used to shield them. “But do you evacuate the port?” he asks. NRF scanning could, in a matter of seconds, determine that a container didn’t just have lead shielding, but that it held enriched uranium. In that case, Bottan says, “you’d have plenty of information right away to know you had a serious problem.”

Currently, Passport Systems is involved in trying to meet last year’s mandate by the U.S. Congress that all incoming cargo to the nation’s seaports be screened for radioactive materials by the year 2011. In the so-called CAARS Program (Cargo Advanced Automated Radiography System), the U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded more than $1 billion in contracts to three large firms to accomplish the task: New York City-based L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and American Science & Engineering Inc. (AS&E) of Billerica, MA. Passport Systems is designing a module for AS&E’s detector system that will automatically sound an alarm when the system detects any nuclear threat, shielded or otherwise. The contracts stipulate that these systems be ready to enter a production phase by mid- to late 2009.

In addition to its work on the CAARS program, though, Passport Systems is working on its own to take full advantage of the company’s patented NRF technology with a system that will allow complete, real-time cargo identification. The graphic shows one conception of the company’s plan in which the shipping containers are driven on trucks through an automated detection system. The firm recently won a U.S. government “proof-of-concept” contract worth a possible $9.8 million for what the government considers a “transformational technology” that will use spectrometers to give inspectors a real-time read-out of the contents of a container or cargo hold. Passport Systems’ 23-person team in Acton is actively at work on the system. Bottan stresses that the technology itself is proven, but the focus now is toward the creation of a prototype that can reliably scan containers fast enough to avoid impeding the flow of cargo.

Adding to the degree of difficulty, the Passport Systems detection system must be safe enough to pose no threat of radiation exposure to operators. According to Bottan, the government requires that any seaport cargo screening system must emit so little residual radiation that a pregnant woman could safely be in the vicinity of the scanner.

Still, Bottan is optimistic. He says Passport Systems is designing its state-of-the-art NRF scanner to ultimately work either as a stand-alone detection system or as an add-on to complement detection systems already in place. And, he says, “We think we’re on track to meet all the government’s requirements.”

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With its bevy of top-flight universities and hospitals, Massachusetts boasts a fire-hydrant-like flow of some $5.5 billion in federal research dollars pumping into the state annually. How can the state best help commercialize some of that research to further boost the Bay State economy? That’s the daunting mission of the three-year-old Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (MTTC), led by tech-transfer veteran Abigail Barrow.

The job is even trickier than it might sound at first: Barrow has to find a way to succeed with an operating budget of just $500,000 a year and a tiny team of five staffers, only two of whom are full-time. What’s her strategy?

First of all, Barrow explains, “We don’t actually do tech transfer.” That job, she says, is best left to the state’s universities and other research institutions themselves, either through their in-house tech transfer offices, or by bringing in outside professionals to help. Instead, MTTC works with the tech-transfer offices to help try to launch startups within the state. “What we do is try to connect all the dots,” Barrow says. “This means helping researchers with marketable ideas prepare their presentations and finding people locally who can help support the new initiatives.”

Toward that end, MTTC runs a seminar program for researchers about how to assemble the right team to commercialize their research. And it offers early, “proof-of-concept” funding to everyone from university undergrads to medical researchers and emeritus professors. In the last fiscal year, the agency gave out some $720,000 in such seed grants (funds that are not counted as part of its operating budget). Among the eight recipients in the latest round, announced this summer, was Scott Gallager, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who received funds to develop his idea for a new technology to detect toxins in drinking water. Another was John Frangioni, an oncologist at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital, who got “proof-of-concept” funding to help bring to market a new hand-held fluorescence imaging device for highlighting tumors during surgery.

“We work in all technology areas,” Barrow says. “We will pull together a small, select group to listen to a researcher’s pitch and give input.” Barrow says she tries to tailor these small groups to the technology in question, inviting angel investors, professional service providers, corporate attorneys, and maybe even potential customers, all of whom volunteer to help out. “The key,” she says, “is to try to get in at a very early stage.”

Even when everything goes right en route to the market, though, there’s an additional twist to Barrow’s challenge. Take the case of Illumina, the fast-growing biomedical firm in the emerging field of “personalized medicine.” Back in 1998, Tufts University researcher David Walt had the idea for the company’s seminal technology. Tufts still gets a revenue stream from the patent that helped launch the company. But, armed with California-based venture capital, Walt opted to headquarter the firm in San Diego. Massachusetts might get bragging rights as the home of the breakthrough research, but the $180-million company and its 800 employees went elsewhere.

Barrows knows the Illumina story particularly well because she came to her job as director of the MTTC after years working on technology transfer at the University of California at San Diego. “The story of Illumina is absolutely something we face,” Barrow says. “We can’t build a barricade around the borders of Massachusetts. And it’s exciting to see new ideas turn into vibrant companies wherever they locate. But there is a lot we can do by bringing in local talent to encourage researchers with great new ideas to establish their companies here in Massachusetts.” (Barrow says she can take no credit for it, but Walt’s latest startup venture, Quanterix, is local, based in Cambridge.)

Most recently, Barrow says, her agency has been trying to coordinate with other efforts to support the emergence of technology “cluster areas” within the state, both in the biomedical field, with partners like the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and the energy area, in conjunction with the state’s new Clean Energy Council. In high-growth areas like these, she says, clusters can at least theoretically serve as magnets for even more local investment.

Funded by the state legislature in two lump-sum stimulus packages in 2003 and 2006, the MTTC has operating funds to continue its work through the middle of 2009, as well as roughly $800,000 left to award in new grants. Until the funding runs out, Barrow says her office is working hard on all fronts to show legislators the value of their investment so they’ll continue the program. “The truth is our success rests largely on all the smart people we have around here doing smart research. They make this job possible,” she says. “We’re just trying to be the best catalyst in the process we can be.”

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After years of relative neglect, the courts, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and even Congress have taken important steps over the past several months to correct some of the patent system’s most glaring problems. (For one example, see this post from July.) The latest changes attempt to deal with dreaded “submarine patents” and the threat of trumped-up patent suits alleging “willful infringement.”

Submarine patents

In recent years, so-called submarine patents have been produced when savvy applicants have abused the patent office’s option of “continuation applications,” which allows them to repeatedly modify their patent applications while they are in process. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for patent applicants to make modifications. But the existing system has also been exploited by some applicants who have tried to use a series of well-timed continuations to drag out the patenting process. The goal of the strategy is to lurk until a lucrative product related to the patent comes to market. Then the unscrupulous applicants can allow their patents to “surface” and spring potent charges of infringement on an unsuspecting manufacturer.

Now, in an effort to make submarine patents a thing of the past, new rules announced on August 20 will restrict the number of continuation applications a patent seeker can normally file. Jon Dudas, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said the changes sought to “bring closure to the examination process more quickly, while ensuring quality and maintaining the right balance between flexibility for applicants and the rights of the public.” More here from the patent office.

Willful Infringement

In other welcome (by most corporations, anyway) patent news, a recent court ruling will make it more difficult for patent holders to collect much-feared treble damages for so-called willful infringement of their patents. The unanimous ruling also came on August 20, but this time from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which handles all federal patent appeals). In the case, which has dragged out for seven years, an inventor had, along with MIT, sued California-based Seagate Technology, alleging willful infringement of two patents on a method to avoid “unwanted dynamics” (i.e. vibrations) in the inputs into mechanical or electronic systems.

In the past, the mere charge of willful infringement, with the associated threat that the accused might have to pay tripled damages and whopping attorneys’ fees, has led many innocent firms to settle patent cases rather than risk a legal battle. With a refreshing dose of common sense, the new decision holds that, to establish willful infringement, plaintiffs need to provide convincing evidence that “the infringer acted despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of a valid patent.”

Further reforms of this willful infringement standard could be coming in the Patent Reform Act of 2007 now wending its way through Congress. The current version of the bill includes a provision that would require companies to warn would-be infringers and give them a chance to respond before they can bring charges of willful infringement. It remains to be seen whether this bill will pass, and the Seagate case could also conceivably be revisited by the U.S. Supreme Court. For the moment, however, companies have won a reprieve from the overly powerful cudgel of frivolous willful infringement charges that have too often held the day until now.

Intrepid interested readers can find the verdict In re Seagate Technology, LLC, No. 06-M830 (Fed. Cir. August 20, 2007) here.

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Change is afoot at Harvard University’s technology transfer operation. As Harvard spokesperson B.D. Colen puts it: “There’s no question that there is a new emphasis here on getting out into the world technologies that can benefit the public and that have too often been languishing on the shelf.”

Most recently, a faculty committee studying the commercialization of research at the university briefed incoming Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust on the findings of its work over the past year. The panel, led by Harvard cancer biologist Laurie Glimcher, is now nearing completion on a public report. Insiders say that one of its major recommendations is for Harvard to adopt uniform standards across disciplines that will allow the university to play a larger role in the commercialization of technologies emerging outside the biomedical field. Unlike most universities today, Harvard currently lays automatic claim to inventions only in the areas of medical diagnostics, therapeutics, or public health, or if the discovery has been facilitated by an unusual amount of financial support from the university.

The university panel’s recommendations, which have yet to be formally adopted, are just the latest sign of change. Harvard’s tech-transfer operation has been in full “re-vamp mode” ever since 2005 when Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers brought Isaac Kohlberg to Harvard from stints at Tel Aviv University in Israel and New York University.

Summers’ goal in bringing Kohlberg aboard was clear. At the time, Harvard was drawing some $10 million in corporate research funds compared to MIT’s $60 million. With government funding flat, Summers sought closer ties with industry, especially in the biotechnology field.

The fact was, prior to Kohlberg’s arrival, Harvard lagged badly in commercializing—and profiting from—its faculty’s research, despite the university’s nearly unmatched $26 billion endowment and top-flight research efforts. A study by the independent Milken Institute, released in 2006, made the case particularly strikingly in the biotechnology field. According to the study, Harvard ranked first in biotech research as measured by the numbers of papers and citations produced. But, between 2000 and 2004, in a measure taking into account technology licensing, licensing income, and start-up firms created, Harvard ranked 18th in technology transfer—behind institutions like Cornell and the University of Utah.

Kohlberg, who came to Harvard empowered with the title of Senior Associate Provost and Chief Technology Development Officer, began shaking things up right away. He consolidated operations between Harvard Medical School and the so-called Faculty of Arts and Sciences—licensing offices that had a longstanding history of operating as separate fiefdoms. He expanded the staff, packing the newly named “Office of Technology Development” with Ph.Ds who had enough expertise to help spot potentially lucrative faculty innovations early. And, in a well-publicized shift, he went out of his way to familiarize himself with the Harvard faculty’s intellectual property, visiting labs and famously installing an espresso maker in his office to encourage university researchers to come meet with him about their work.

As Kohlberg told the Boston Globe not long after his arrival: “I want people to say five years from now, even three years from now, that Harvard has the most effective technology-transfer program in the country.”

Kohlberg also set up a $10 million fund to incubate some six to eight new Harvard-spawned technologies annually that need extra work to become commercially viable. Harvard’s B.D. Colen says the fund, now halfway to its funding goal, is being conceived of as a philanthropic effort in which investors will not expect a return on their investment but rather will encourage technological development.

To many insiders in the area, it looked a lot like Harvard was taking a page from the playbook of its more applied neighbor down the river. But Lita Nelsen, Director of the Technology Licensing Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dismisses the idea that Harvard is trying to emulate MIT’s efforts. “I don’t think it’s right to portray Harvard’s efforts as a case of ‘great dome envy,’” she says. “It’s true that we’ve shown that you can do a lot with tech transfer and have had a lot of success. Harvard has a first-class research effort. There’s no reason they can’t have success too.”

So far, however, Harvard’s published numbers don’t seem to indicate that its new focus on tech transfer is bearing fruit. To date there is no discernible change in the number of patents granted to Harvard faculty; if anything, the number is slightly down since Kohlberg’s arrival. Meanwhile, licensing revenues are flat. In 2006, with $20.9 million in licensing income, Harvard still earns less than half of the $48.2 million MIT garners from licenses on its technology. Nonetheless, patent applications at Harvard are up markedly in 2006 from years past.

The big outstanding questions are how successful Harvard’s incubator fund will be, the extent to which Harvard’s new president Faust will follow in Summers’ footsteps to make tech transfer a priority, and whether Kohlberg’s efforts will start to show up in soon-to-be-published FY 2007 numbers.

Stay tuned.

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High-tech patent holders take note: legal experts are calling the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in KSR v. Teleflex the most important patent ruling in decades, throwing into question the validity of many existing patents, especially in the e-commerce and biotech fields. Some IP watchers, like Audrey Millemann, a patent attorney at Sacramento-based firm of Weintraub, Genshlea, and Chediak, go so far as to argue that the Supreme Court’s verdict has already “completely changed the patent landscape.”

In its unanimous verdict on April 30, 2007, the Supreme Court essentially called for common sense in patenting, signaling its view that too many obvious patents have been granted for inventions that reflect no real innovation. The decision, which calls for an “expansive and flexible approach” to determining when something is too obvious to be patented, will almost certainly make patents more difficult to obtain and easier to invalidate. The latter prospect is the one raising the most significant outstanding question: just how many existing patents will now wither in the face of legal challenges that they are too obvious to have been granted in the first place?

The good news is that the Supreme Court ruling may ultimately help stem the flow of so-called “junk patents”—such as claims on obvious software subroutines or biotech applications often garnered brazenly by opportunistic patent squatters—that have long been the bane of many high-tech fields. In the meantime, though, the verdict leaves a great deal of uncertainty in its wake for patent holders.

The case in question, KSR v. Teleflex, centered on a dispute over the design of an automotive gas pedal. KSR International of Canada was supplying General Motors’ SUVs with adjustable gas pedals governed by an electronic sensor. Limerick, PA-based Teleflex demanded royalties from KSR, citing its 2001 patent on a similar device used in trucks made by Ford. But KSR refused to pay, claiming that Teleflex’s patent—which simply paired an existing electronic sensor with an existing gas pedal design—was too obvious to be valid.

In 2003, the federal district court ruled in KSR’s favor, but the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the verdict to uphold Teleflex’s patent in 2005. The battle ultimately landed before the U.S. Supreme Court, hinging on a deceptively simple question: what kind of standard should the courts (and by inference the U.S. Patent Office) use to determine whether something is too obvious to be patentable?

Traditionally speaking, at least since the U.S. Patent Act of 1952, patents are supposed to be granted only for inventions that are novel, useful, and “nonobvious,” but that last criterion has always been a tricky one, especially once a patent lawsuit gets under way. To determine obviousness, the courts have, for many years, relied on an arcane test that only a patent lawyer could love. To win in court, a plaintiff had to produce and document what the lawyers called a particular “suggestion, teaching, or motivation” that would have led “a person of ordinary skill” to create the invention himself. Absent that legalistic “smoking gun” evidence of obviousness, the patent would stand. In its recent decision, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the long-accepted test was “too rigid” and confusing, holding that a more flexible, common-sense definition of obviousness must apply.

It might not sound like much to get excited about until you start to realize how widely applicable a ruling it is, potentially affecting every existing and pending patent on the books. Because of its universal application to patents, some attorneys are predicting that KSR v. Teleflex, is likely to become the most widely cited legal precedent in patent law. In fact, after just a few months, the ruling has already been invoked in several appeals court decisions to invalidate patents on the basis of obviousness. One of these high-profile cases involved a dispute between Fisher Price and Leapfrog Enterprises over a touch-screen design for an electronic children’s toy. Citing the KSR v. Teleflex case just nine days after the Supreme Court decision, the appeals court ruled on May 9 that Leapfrog’s patent on the technology was simply too obvious to enforce.

In a separate case on July 2 involving the manufacture of an aluminum trailer hitch (Andersen Mfg. v. Diversi-Tech Corp.), a federal judge even denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against the alleged patent infringer, ruling that it was unlikely the patent in question would meet the new obviousness hurdle laid down by the Supreme Court in KSR v. Teleflex.

Little wonder that many in the legal community realized just how high the stakes were as soon as the Supreme Court decided to hear the case, filing an astonishing 36 separate amicus (or “friend of the court” advisory) briefs on behalf of everyone from General Electric to high-tech industry associations and public interest groups. Commenting after the verdict, Teleflex attorney Thomas Goldstein, of the firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, said that the stakes of the case “couldn’t possibly be higher” because they ultimately affect literally “trillions of dollars” worth of intellectual property. As Goldstein put it, “It’s clear that the Justices wanted to make it harder to get a patent. What’s not clear immediately is how far they want to go. That’s the next big fight.”

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