Internet pathfinder leading battle against barriers to innovation

Want some face time with Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and David Farber? Carl Malamud has a raffle he’d like you to
enter.

By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

You don’t have to send money, actually. I hope you will. Because if you do, you’ll be supporting some worthwhile
public-service projects.

You’ll also be joining the battle to curb some technological choke holds. These barriers to innovation tend to enrich a
few large companies at the expense of everyone else.

The raffle is a fundraising gimmick, Malamud cheerfully notes. The beneficiaries are several extremely worthwhile
projects he and his wife, Rebecca, have created as part of their Internet Multicasting Service (IMS).

The non-profit IMS (http://not.invisible.net) has been a path breaker for years. Its mission, says Malamud, has essentially been to “build new services for
the Internet,” services that combine the public interest and activism.

Working on a relative shoestring, he launched early Internet radio programs. Later, he was the prime mover behind the
invaluable “Edgar” project to post online corporate filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Later came a
patent database.

In the works is something called the NetTopBox, a project that could go around one of the worst choke points in
modern technology. It’s going to be an on-screen media guide, like the scrolling grids you find on your cable or
satellite TV.

You might think that a grid like this is an obvious idea. But it’s been patented by a company called Gemstar-TV Guide
International, another example of a patent system run wild. Gemstar has thrown lawyers at anyone daring to challenge
its current choke hold.

The NetTopBox would be much more interesting and useful than the on-screen grids we see today, in part because
it’s aimed at more than just television. It would incorporate databases, messaging and a variety of other technologies
aimed at a collaborative and universal guide to various kinds of media, only one of which is television. Importantly, it
would be built on non-proprietary, open standards — to be the base for innovation, not ceiling on top of it.

Malamud says the project is precisely the kind of thing that fits the IMS mandate. It’s useful for people, and involves
“extremely important policy issues and business issues.”

The IMS work comes in a rich tradition. The free software and open-source software movements are built on
openness as well. While their main target is Microsoft, they are more fundamentally aimed at creating and maintaining
an open platform for new work.

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development, a pioneer in the spreadsheet market, is funding a nascent project that
could have a major impact. He recently created the Open Source Applications Foundation, pulling together a team of
programmers to develop a software platform combining messaging, calendar, contacts and collaboration.

The idea, says Kapor, is to “increase people’s options to a number greater than one” for such software. The “one”
he’s talking about, of course, is Microsoft’s Outlook, the highly proprietary software that so many companies use as
part of the Office suite of programs.

What Malamud, Kapor and others are doing is essential. If they succeed, they’ll make technology much more useful
and affordable for larger numbers of people. And the impact from that could be huge.

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