Weak IP laws hurting aspiring IT billionaires

The fact that we don’t have millionaire or billionaire IT innovators and app developers in Kenya or even across Africa is confirmation of our weak intellectual property (IP) laws.

Europe, US, China and South Korea mint billions of dollars as a result of patents yet in Kenya, our app developers and IT nerds languish in abject dream of poverty because of inability to patent their innovations thus being taken advantage of by companies or organizations that purport to support innovation.
It is a good thing to support innovation and set up labs and incubation centres to spur creativity. The intentions of those behind the incubation centers are brilliant and excellent. When an aspiring app developer walks into an incubation centre or a computer lab, s/he feels like the next Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey but reality soon sets in, changing the whole dream.
Setting up an ecosystem for app developers and giving them tools to become more aggressive in their innovation is very encouraging. But as corporates give them these tools to enrich themselves through brain drain, the government should be protective of its brilliant citizens when they are coming up with multi-billion solutions that will not only help themselves but the entire economy.
In 2013, Facebook’s revenue was US $ 7.87 billion while Twitter recorded US $ 664 million. These mindboggling figures that would sufficiently run our Kenyan economy that is still on the runway waiting for takeoff.
According to Wikipedia, in 2013, the US’ Patent & Trademark Office stated that the worth of intellectual property to country’s economy is more than US $ 5 trillion and creates employment for an estimated 18 million American people. The value of IP is considered similarly high in other developed nations, such as those in EU. In UK, IP has become a recognized asset class for use in pension-led funding and other types of business finance. However, in 2013, the UK Intellectual Property Office stated: “There are millions of intangible business assets whose value is either not being leveraged at all or only being leveraged inadvertently”.
Talking about patents, Kenya has shamelessly lost some patents to foreign counties and can never claim them because of very weak laws. In 2007, some activists were aggravated and went up in arms to complain after losing the Kiondo basket trademark to Japan and even the popular Kikoi fabric design was at risk of being patented by a British company. The Kikoi patent actually went away.
I would like to believe that Kenya’s Industrial Research and Development Institute (KIRDI) has failed miserably in protecting Kenya’s economic projects that identifies with its innovation. And this is the same thing that is happening in the ICT industry when young graduates walk home with pocket change after sweating it out in labs to come up with apps.
There are corporates - especially multinationals - that come and set up labs or incubation centres in the name of empowering the youths to become innovative yet when they find something good out of them, it becomes a reap off.
Probably the government should become more involved, especially the country’s ministry of ICT, to understand the models behind some of this incubation centres and how our students can benefit more and whether the projects can be scaled up to employ more people for the relationship to become more symbiotic between the innovator and the funder.
Ideas are worth billions of shillings and unless the government takes the issues of copyrights, patents and trademarks seriously, our own innovators will die poor and so is the economy.
I believe that the World Intellectual Property Rights body – WIPO - recognizes most of the global patents, trademarks and copyrights that have followed proper legal procedures as well as international standards. This calls for the government - through KIRDI and Kenya Industrial Property Institute (KIPI) with the respective ministries – to focus on fortifying the laws on copyrights, patents and trademarks to enable the young innovative minds create wealth and empower the economy.
Expansion of the Intellectual Property Right laws is therefore critical to ensure the creators of innovations enjoy full benefits for their ideas.
In Europe, America and according to Wikipedia, the increase in terms of protection is particularly seen in relation to copyright, which has recently been the subject of serial extensions. With no need for registration or copyright notices, this is thought to have led to an increase in orphan works (copyrighted works for which the copyright owner cannot be contacted), a problem that has been noticed and addressed by governmental bodies around the world.
Also with respect to copyright, the American film industry helped to change the social construct of intellectual property via its trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In amicus briefs in important cases, in lobbying before Congress, and in its statements to the public, the MPAA has advocated strong protection of intellectual-property rights.
In framing its presentations, the association has argued that people are entitled to the property that is produced by their labor. Additionally, Congress's awareness of the position of the US as the world's largest producer of films has made it convenient to expand the conception of IP. These doctrinal reforms have further strengthened the industry, lending the MPAA even more power and authority.
Such expansions of laws by our parliament will end the suits we see in our courtrooms regarding copyright infringement. Let us protect and appreciate the innovations that give us identify in the global village.http://www.cio.co.ke/blog/weak-ip-laws-hurting-aspiring-it-billionaires

Should Social Media be regulated?

http://www.cio.co.ke/blog/should-social-media-be-regulated

Since the advent of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, flickr and Instagram among, users have in more than one instance abused the sites thereby violating others’ rights including the right to privacy. This therefore begs the questions: is it time Social Media was regulated?

Even though many argue at most Internet Governance Forums that it would be impossible to regulate the internet because of its nature, I’d like to differ and argue differently. The notion that it’s impossible to regulate the internet has led most countries not to develop laws that would protect users on social media sites given the ambiguity surrounding the internet.

During the recently-ended FIFA World Cup in Brazil, you could witness the trajectory spikes on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as fans went about supporting their favourite teams.

A keen analysis however reveals that most of the content bordered on abusive, defamatory or demeaning posts toward a team, fellow fanatic or footballer for that matter. I’m very sure that at some point, one would be offended either directly or indirectly because of the nature of the content that violates one’s right.

In Kenya and across the globe, the English Premier League has become very popular, with fanatics going head to head while supporting bigger teams like Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea among others. Many fans have been shot, massacred and abused virtually. Which leads to the question: how does one get to litigate a social media offense that violates one’s right when there’s no legal provision in most of countries for such offences?

Social Media platforms have lately been used to drive political change in the Arab world. In some of these countries, protesters used these platforms to organize protests, communicate grievances and disseminate information. But to some extent, the rights of the antagonists and protagonists have been abused in the midst of fight for civil rights.

Though other countries have commenced the process of developing and implementing measures aimed to guard against abuse - including deploying software that can filter abusive content - there is need to develop laws that would prevent users from abusing other’s rights on social media.

Success has been achieved in some countries that have implemented laws against cyber-bullying and to some extent having internet censorship which subsequently curtails civil rights, something I do not advocate for because it infringes on freedom of expression and speech.

Some governments, such as those of Burma, Iran, North Korea, the Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates restrict what people in these countries can access on the Internet, especially political and religious content. This is accomplished through software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention.

In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily - possibly to avoid such an arrangement being turned into law - agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities.

While this list of forbidden URLs is supposed to contain addresses of only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret.

Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet, but do not mandate filtering software. There are many free and commercially available software programs, called content-control software, with which a user can choose to block offensive websites on individual computers or networks, in order to limit a child's access to pornographic materials or depiction of violence.

Without reinventing the wheel, the existing laws would help in formulating laws in Kenya that would regulate use of social media in a very civil manner. Just like an abusive text would land you in jail or lead to a hefty fine in court, same law should be extended to prosecute those social media users who post abusive content that undermine others’ rights.

The Kenyan government has also had a challenge in prosecuting content bordering on hate-speech or online activism that is sometimes driven aggressively by bloggers on social media platforms. As a result of weak laws that lack substantive grounds on prosecution, many have left court rooms ‘social media heroes/heroines’ despite unleashing dragon-like lashing content on individuals and corporates. 

(The writer is a Public Relations practitioner at Gina Din Group)

Google Overtakes Apple to Become the 2014 BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand

http://www.millwardbrown.com/Global/News/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetails/14-05-20/Google_Overtakes_Apple_to_Become_the_2014_BrandZ%E2%84%A2_Top_100_Most_Valuable_Global_Brand.aspx 

 Google has overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable global brand in the 2014 BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand ranking, worth $159 billion, an increase of 40% year on year.

After three years at the top, Apple slipped to No 2 on the back of a 20% decline in brand value, to $148 billion. Whilst Apple remains a top performing brand, there is a growing perception that it is no longer redefining technology for consumers, reflected by a lack of dramatic new product launches. The world’s leading B2B brand, IBM, held onto its No 3 position with a brand value of $108 billion.

Nick Cooper, Managing Director of Millward Brown Optimor, commented on the number one brand, “Google has been hugely innovative in the last year with Google Glass, investments in artificial intelligence and a multitude of partnerships that see its Android operating system becoming embedded in other goods such as cars. All of this activity sends a very strong signal to consumers about what Google is about and it has coincided with a slowdown at Apple.”

“This year’s index highlights the end of the recession, with a strong recovery in valuations and, for the first time, real growth across every category and the Top 100 as a whole,” said David Roth, CEO of The Store, WPP. “What’s remarkable is the way that strong brands have led the recovery. Seventy-one of the brands listed in our 2014 Top 100 were there in 2008. Despite the financial turmoil and the digital disruption that have decimated many businesses during the last few years, these brands have remained in the ranking, proving the durability of strong brands.”

The BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, commissioned by WPP and conducted by Millward Brown Optimor, is now in its ninth year. It is the only ranking that uses the views of potential and current buyers of a brand, alongside financial data, to calculate brand value.

The combined value of the Top 100 has nearly doubled since the first ranking was produced in 2006. The Top 100 today are worth $2.9 trillion, an increase of 49% compared with the 2008 valuation, which marked the start of the banking and currency crisis.

The BrandZ Top 10 Most Valuable Global Brands 2014

Rank 2014	Brand	Category	Brand Value 2014 ($M)	Brand Value Change	Rank 2013
1	Google	Technology	158,843	+40%	2
2	Apple	Technology	147,880	-20%	1
3	IBM	Technology	107,541	-4%	3
4	Microsoft	Technology	90,185	+29%	7
5	McDonald's	Fast Food	85,706	-5%	4
6	Coca-Cola	Soft Drinks	80,683	+3%	5
7	Visa	Credit Cards	79,197	+41%	9
8	AT&T	Telecoms	77,883	+3%	6
9	Marlboro	Tobacco	67,341	-3%	8
10	Amazon	Retail	64,255	+41%	14

Key findings highlighted in this year’s research report include:

• Share of Life: Successful brands such as Google (No 1 brand), Facebook, Twitter, Tencent and LinkedIn are more than just tools, they have become part of our lives. They offer new forms of communication that absorb people’s attention and imagination, while also helping them organize the rest of their lives at the same time. To gain more of our mind-space, brands such as Tencent and Google are even crossing categories. This trend also pushed No 1 Apparel brand Nike, a prime example of a brand seeking to become a share of life brand which offers services such as Nike+ that extend well beyond its functional raison d’etre.
• Purpose beyond Profit: Brands in business for reasons beyond the bottom line have a better chance of success in today’s world. For example, Pampers, which promotes mother and baby health issues, is at No 39 in the ranking and grew its value by 10% to $22.6 billion. Dove, which has continued to find huge success on the back of its “real women” philosophy, has a brand value of $4.8 billion. 
• Apparel fastest growing category: The top 10 Apparel brands grew in value by 29% to nearly $100 billion this year, outpacing Cars (up 17%) and Retail (up 16%). With brands such as Uniqlo, Nike and Adidas all recording double-digit increases in their valuation. 
• Technology service companies continue to climb: Not only are the top four brands technology companies, but so too are many of this year’s biggest risers. This year’s fastest climber was leading Chinese internet brand Tencent, up 97% to $54 billion and the No 14 position, followed by Facebook which rose 68% to $36 billion and took the No 21 spot. New brands in the Top 100 include Twitter at No 71 with a brand value of $14 billion and LinkedIn at No 78 worth $12 billion. Collectively, Technology companies make up 29% of the value of the BrandZ Top 100 ranking. 
• High value brands provide faster growth: An analysis of the BrandZ™ rankings as a “stock portfolio” over the last nine years shows a highly favorable performance compared to a wider stock market index, the S&P500. While the value of the companies in the S&P500 index grew by 44.7%, the BrandZ™ portfolio grew by 81.1%, proving that companies with strong brands are able to deliver better value to their shareholders. A graphic is available here. 
• Brands from the Western World bounced back in 2014, with a greater proportion of both the number and value of brands within the top 100. This reflected the resilience of established brands and the breakthrough of new brands, as well as improved economic conditions. As a result, the number of brands from fast growing economies slipped in 2014. China, with 11 brands, continues to have the largest representation, two Russian brands, Sberbank and MTS, remain in the ranking, and mobile operator MTN is Africa’s representative for the third consecutive year.

The BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report, rankings and a great deal more brand insight for key regions of the world and 13 market sectors are available online here. A new suite of interactive smartphone and tablet applications will also be available for free download via Apple IOS and all Android devices fromwww.brandz.com/mobile or search for BrandZ in the respective iTunes or Google Play app stores.

Gartner Identifies Six Key Steps to Build a Successful Digital Business

A Lack of Digital Business Competence Will Cause 25 Percent of Businesses to Lose Competitive Ranking by 2017

 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2745517

Digital business is changing the way organizations use and think about technology, moving technology from a supporting player to a leading player in innovation, revenue and market growth, according to Gartner, Inc. However, digital business should not be considered an IT program and should instead become an enterprise mindset and lingua franca, with digital expertise spread across the enterprise and value ecosystem. 

Gartner predicts that a lack of digital business competence will cause 25 percent of businesses to lose competitive ranking by 2017. 

"CIOs or IT professionals who hear 'digital business' and think 'IT' will be blindsided," said Ken McGee, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Digital business is not synonymous with IT. It is about revenue, value, markets and customers. It is outward-focused. It is a metaphorical combination of front office, top line and downstage compared with back office, bottom line and backstage. True, information and technology help to build the capabilities for digital businesses, but they are only part of a complex picture." 

"Businesses have used information and digital technology for some time as sources of efficiency and productivity," continued Mr. McGee. "However, in a digital business, digital technology, for the first time, moves into the forefront, into the heart of what the business is doing and how it generates revenue, seizes competitive advantage and produces value. Digital business represents a more extreme revolution than previous technology-driven changes, and CIOs, with their insight into technology and information, are positioned to develop and promote a successful digital business." 

Gartner has identified six crucial steps that will enable CIOs and other business leaders to build a successful digital enterprise and change the game. 

Step 1: Create the Right Mindset and Shared Understanding

Digital business is not just about expanding the use of technology. Digital business leaders must think about technology in a fundamentally different way than in the past. It is not an enabler to be applied to what the business wants to do but a source of innovation and opportunity for what the business could do. This more proactive model focuses on creative disruption and new business models to gain competitive advantage. 

As digital business continues to mature, the pipeline of opportunities that will evolve will take on the characteristics of what Gartner calls a "business moment," defined as "transient opportunities exploited dynamically." In the context of digital business, a business moment is a brief everyday moment in time and the catalyst that sets in motion a series of events and actions involving a network of people, businesses and things that span or cross multiple industries and multiple ecosystems. Business moments are important, because they will force enterprises to rethink the role they play in a value stream. Business moments illustrate a wide variety of possibilities and players and help companies envision and design new businesses that integrate people, businesses and things to do things that were not possible five years ago. The hallmark of a digital business will be the ability to spot these opportunities, however fleeting. 

Step 2: Put the Right Leaders in Place

The fast-moving digital world is exposing gaps in digital leadership, especially with regard to front office disciplines (those related to the customer experience) and head-office disciplines (those related to enterprise strategy). Three types of digital business leader have emerged to fill these leadership gaps:

• The digital strategist
• The digital marketing leader
• The digital business unit leader 

"These are roles and not necessarily titles," said Lee Weldon, research director at Gartner. "The title chief digital officer (CDO) is being used for each of these roles — to date, most often for the digital marketing leader — although the CDO title is best used for the digital strategist. Some CIOs play the digital strategist role already, so it is the most natural digital leadership role for CIOs to evolve into." 

These roles are likely to be around for the next five to 10 years, but are really just interim positions. This is because digital will simply become a part of the way we do everything soon, making a single, separate role dedicated to digital initiatives inappropriate, if not impossible. More generally, there will be significant innovation in the way businesses are managed and led in the next decade or two. While three discrete roles are optimal, one person could play multiple roles, and the people fulfilling these roles could also have other responsibilities. 

Step 3: Launch a Digital Business Center of Excellence

Create a digital business center of excellence (COE) to provide input, advice and opportunities for the collaborative formation of a digital strategy and the collaborative advice, innovations and capabilities needed for execution. 

"Start by accessing digital opportunities," said Mr. McGee. "Examine your strengths, weaknesses and potential opportunities and identify new technologies and how they might pose a potential threat. Engage people from throughout the enterprise and, more importantly, from outside the enterprise and industry, such as current and potential users, as well as recognized and unrecognized thinkers, both associated with and orthogonal to the focus of your enterprise's main vision. Assessing opportunities and especially threats start with identifying what you have not yet thought about — a task that requires requisite variety to ask new questions and suggest new ways of thinking about the issues such as via co-creation and crowdsourcing." 

Step 4: Formulate a Digital Strategy to Respond to Opportunities and Threats

Once the necessity of a digital strategy has been established, the following five elements must be addressed:

New Digitally Enabled Business Models — New digitally enabled business models afford new sources of revenue and disruptive competitive advantage for some period of time. Creating new business models will become an almost automatic default position of a digital business strategy.

The Product and Service Portfolio — In an increasingly digital world, products and services can be virtual, with no physical presence.

Information as an Asset — Information, and its effective use, has become a strategic asset and a competitive advantage to the digital businesses best able to exploit it. Although information strategy is a key element of digital business strategy, organizations must balance their desire for competitive advantage against the limitations of regulatory and other legal requirements and the privacy and manifold ethical concerns of their customers.

Technology — In the digital enterprise mobile devices and bring your own device (BYOD) are becoming more commonplace, cloud computing and cloud-based services of all kinds are proliferating, and data of all types is exploding. As a result, evolving and implementing an effective technology strategy are more complex than ever before.

Content, Media and Channels — A successful digital business strategy critically depends on understanding customers' preferences for channels, the segmentation, and the possibilities associated with each instance.

Step 5: Find, Develop and Acquire Digital Business Skills and Roles

Digital business combines the expertise, skills and roles found not just in IT, but across the enterprise. Digital business is not an IT program but an enterprise mindset. While digital business has roots in digital technology, it is ultimately about business. Decision making will be owned, operated and potentially influenced by the relationship between CIOs and business leaders. 

"Digital business leaders agree that the competition for talent will make or break their success in digital business," said Diane Morello, managing vice president at Gartner. "However, according to Gartner's 2014 CIO Agenda survey, 42 percent of 2,339 CIOs from 77 countries surveyed said their IT organization did not have the right skills and capabilities in place to meet upcoming digital business challenges. As digital business picks up speed, CIOs, HR executives and other business leaders must reimagine their quest for talent, emphasizing new approaches that accelerate and widen access to talented people while minimizing the bottlenecks of traditional serial processes." 

Step 6: Create New Digital Business Capabilities

With the expectation that digital business expertise will spread around businesses within two or three years, but the acknowledgment by many that their workforce is unprepared and inadequate, organizations will need to explore the kind of disciplines needed to drive digital business initiatives. Traditional recruitment practices will not suffice. Instead, organizations should consider launching boot camps and other learning programs about digital business across all areas of the business. They should mine informal networks and investigate "work mashups" by applying digital business and digital technologies to the distribution of work and look at piloting new channels for finding, building and acquiring digital business capabilities. 

More detailed analysis is available in the report "Six Key Steps to Build a Successful Digital Business." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/doc/2725917.

Gartner Says Worldwide Application Infrastructure and Middleware Market Revenue Grew 5.6 Percent in 2013

Analysts Examine the State of the Industry at Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2014, May 19-20 in London

  http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2740318 

 The worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software revenue market* totaled $21.5 billion in 2013, a 5.6 percent increase from 2012, according to Gartner, Inc.

"Application infrastructure and middleware projects are becoming the cornerstone of the digital business," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. "While spending in traditional AIM products continues and remains sizeable, we are seeing a growing interest toward newer offerings, such as platform as a service (PaaS), low-latency messaging, complex event processing and in-memory data grids. These technologies are essential to developing a digital business strategy, for example, connecting digital marketing and channels, or empowering staff with social networks."

"The use of multiple delivery models, increased reliance on governance technologies, and the convergence of application and data integration requirements are all driving organizations to sustain significant investment in AIM technologies and skills," said Mr. Biscotti.

Emerging opportunities such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, mobile enablement, intelligent business operations and in-memory computing are all areas in which AIM providers continue to play an active role as innovators.

"We are witnessing the early days of the idea of 'integrated business', where it is not only applications or processes that are interconnected, but also sensors and things," added Mr. Biscotti.

In terms of vendor dynamics, IBM retained the No. 1 position with a 1.6 percent growth in 2013 (see Table 1). The rankings of the top five vendors have not changed over the last three years; however, they are showing mixed performance under pressure from specialized vendors, in particular PaaS providers and open source software suppliers.

Table 1
Worldwide Vendor Revenue Estimates for Total AIM Software, 2013 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Company	2013 Revenue	2013 Market Share (%)	2012 Revenue	2012 Market Share (%)	2012-2013 Growth (%)
IBM	6,448	30.0	6,345	31.1	1.6
Oracle	3,298	15.3	3,285	16.1	0.4
Microsoft	1,084	5.0	1,023	5.0	6.0
Software AG	703	3.3	650	3.2	8.1
Tibco	545	2.5	558	2.7	-2.3
Others	9,435	43.9	8,519	41.8	10.8
Total	21,512	100.0	20,378	100.0	5.6

Source: Gartner (May 2014)

North America and Western Europe are the largest regional markets (44.3 percent and 24.9 percent, respectively), followed by mature Asia/Pacific countries (14.0 percent). Middle East & Africa, Asia/Pacific and North America have grown the fastest at 13.5 percent, 9.2 percent and 8.0 percent, respectively.

"Organizations that take advantage of the digital era's opportunities are realizing that their established application infrastructure middleware strategies are no longer adequate," said Massimo Pezzini, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Enabling digital business transformation requires IT organizations to operate with much greater agility and “on demand”. They must provide much deeper business insights, web scale systems and the ability to integrate myriad of endpoints, such as mobile apps, cloud-based applications, social networks, heterogeneous data sources and a growing number of 'things'."

To support these requirements, IT departments need to refresh their application infrastructure adding the capabilities needed to rapidly scale their systems, inject real-time operational intelligence into business processes, and target an adaptive approach to integration.

"To this end, traditional, feature-rich, but also expensive, middleware products are being increasingly complemented — and at times replaced — by lightweight, low-cost technology aimed at enabling much faster time to value," said Mr. Pezzini. "This is one of the reasons why most traditional AIM vendors are growing only modestly, whereas open source software middleware vendors and PaaS providers are achieving double-digit growth."

The need for web scale and operational intelligence is paving the way for the adoption of in-memory computing technology and is boosting the rapid growth of in-memory computing vendors. Adoption of these new technologies poses formidable new challenges to IT departments, but those who do not have the nerve to tackle them and become change agents will risk being marginalized as more IT budgets move toward lines of business and departments within the organization.