We feel that in its current form, web advertising has decayed into a form which has left the advertisers, agents and audience dissatisfied. The issue is characterized by three main problems, encountered in virtually all currently existing advertising platforms:

1.  The black box that is advertising. Advertisers insert ad campaigns and money into it and receive data in return. Algorithms are hidden, shares are kept secret and the system is complex and opaque. Furthermore, Agents lack control over ads displayed on their site. Of course keywords can be filtered, but the approach is blacklisting rather than whitelisting, and even the additional tools sometimes provided only allow for restricted control of the site.
2.  This leads to the next problem: Users sense that ads are placed by bots rather than content providers, rendering the ads “dead content” – degrading the user experience of the site.
3.  Surprisingly many ads are scams, frauds or dubious at best. The algorithms which select the ads are blind to signs of shadiness, and therefore inferior to human supervision.

So, why adscaped?

1.  Our approach is simple. Agents select suitable ads for their site. A binary feedback-system (currently in alpha testing) based on votes and rewarded written feedback is provided for your convenience. We allow for full control over which specific links or campaigns you wish to run on your site – catalogued by content. And as an advertiser you will receive feedback why or why not an Agent chose your ad and how you may improve it. We understand that worry-free advertising should not only be cost effective, but time effective as well. Therefore we feel that a little time is a reasonable investment by our clients into a site of higher quality and increased visitor satisfaction. We have added emphasis into serving our clients with quick and efficient interfaces and workflows – thus we appreciate and can accommodate the feedback of early testers.
2.  Human ad selection translates into more clicks. We feel that you as a website operator know best what interests your target demographic. Ads which exist in symbiosis with your web-content are more likely to create an atmosphere of trust and improve the coherence of your web-page.
3. adscaped improves rapidly, aiming for a new experience and quality of online advertising. Dubious ads will be filtered out through negative feedback and rejection by Agents, and Advertisers are only pay if their ad is displayed. This way we can maintain ads of high quality which in turn adds value to your site and our service.

You can see examples of ads served by adscaped above this post and in the sidebar.

To sign up to our beta list, please go to adscaped.com.

1. Communicate.
   “Oh, by the way, we will do the presentation differently. So please update your part. Until when? Tomorrow.”
   The most important thing to prevent frustration in the team is to communicate everything. If you planned or changed something or discussed it with one person of the team you can not expect that the other team members will magically know as well or that they will ask others to get the news. That can happen, but you should not rely on it. Let the members of your team know about every step in the project that concerns them. It is always better to communicate too much than too less. The team members will feel left out or be frustrated when information is not shared with them.
2. Evaluate. Positively.
   “Well, that one time two months ago you came too late… And last week you left five minutes earlier… The big project you finished? Hmm, yes, that was quite okay. But you should not take the office pencils home.”
   Let your team members know what you like about their work. Of course you should tell them what you would like them to do differently. But do it in a positive way. To talk about possible improvements always creates a better atmosphere than talking about faults and flaws.
   And be clear. When your employee has to ask if you think he does good work or not you did something wrong.
   If necessary, balance the negative and positive parts of the evaluation. Always try to keep the positive part bigger to motivate your employees.
3. Take them serious.
   If a team member approaches you with an idea or a problem, take it 1000% serious. You might consider that as normal but there are people out there who obviously have no clue about it. I saw an executive laughing at the way an employee pronounced a certain word while pitching an idea. That is frustrating for the employees and will create an atmosphere where people will keep their ideas for themselves. That can be deadly for a company.
4. Make them CEO’s.
   There is a brilliant interview with Adam Bryant over at nytimes.com where he talks about motivating and focusing a team:

   “I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.”

   This method will not only keep your team motivated and creative but they will also feel more connected to the company or department because they have the responsibility for a part of it. When every member of the team knows who to address for a certain problem this will boost effectiveness and workflow. Instead of asking you what to do they will figure it out among themselves. So you can concentrate on what you are the CEO of.
   And when the team members feel like a CEO of their niche then they will care more about their position and work. People will make a difference when they have the feeling that they can. Create the potential for that.

5. Recognize and support.
   Always stay aware of what your team members do. When they pitch and pursue own, good ideas or do something creative or special, support them. Or make somebody support them. Make them feel that you and/or the company are behind them.
   If you support everybody pursuing own ideas you will create a very creative atmosphere which will in return add to the companies’ projects.
   Google is doing that very successfully.
6. Love what you do.
   In order to make your employees feel enthusiastic about a project you have to be enthusiastic about it either.
   People will be dedicated if they see that you love what you do. In return they will feel like you if you indicate that you are bored or annoyed by your job. You set your teams motivation, you decide how the work and atmosphere will be like.

I gather most of this experience while working as CEO of the startup binaerwelt. Also I had to witness all of these principles being completely ignored while working in a daycare center during my community service. (In Germany every man, when suitable for military service, has to choose between army or community service)

If you want your team, department or company to have a creative ecosystem which produces innovative ideas you should have a concept and always be aware and conscious of the things happening around you.
Like Adam Bryant says:

“You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. You can touch them all in a week and make sure they’re all pointed in the right direction. By 150, it’s clear that that’s not going to scale, and you’ve got to find some way to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.”

Create a structure that maintains itself and motivates and satisfies the people working in it.
It will keep you and your company or team healthy and agile both physically and mentally.

There are five reasons why software patents don’t work out the way patents are generally intended to work:

1. Software patents are designed in a way that is not suitable.

In the pharmaceutical area for instance you take a basic structure of a molecule and change certain parts. Then you get a patent for these changes. At this point you have already spent several million dollars so it is understandable that you want to secure your investment.

For a software patent you basically take a basic structure, you change it, often mash up a lot of code and ideas from a lot of different people and then get a patent for the basic structure and the idea.
For example facebook.
They got a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”.
Not their idea. (Although they put a lot of effort into that)
I am sure that they did not spend millions of dollars on that.
They just were first to patent it.
According to other patent structures you should only be able to patent a certain source code. Which has no point in most cases anyway because it is hard to even obtain the code.
There are so many different ways to develop a solution for a specific problem so it would be more honest if software patents were called “general idea patents”.

2. Software patents bear the risk of bad code.

Suppose Company X develops an algorithm to, let’s say, control computers in a cloud system. They would get the patent for “controlling computers in the cloud” and nobody else could commercially do that anymore without the risk of getting sued. And now suppose this algorithm is bad. Inefficient. What are you going to do?
You have to use it anyway if you need to control computers in a cloud system.

3. Software patents are generally not being used to protect intellectual property.

Recently I stumbled across the blog of the former CEO of Sun, Jonathan Schwartz.
In one of his recent posts he describes a situation which shows where software patents actually lead:

“In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”

My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.”

Read this post.

So the mass of patents and their distribution among thousands of companies paired with the horror of a long trial already prevents any use of them. In this case patents will not change anything.

4. Software patents are not “fair”.

If anybody could get their idea patented it would create a certain equality because everybody would own patents which would create a state described above.
But the fact is that you need a lot of money and knowledge of patent laws to get one.
The average costs of patenting software are an estimated 20.000$.
If you can’t put a lot of time to get into that topic you need a patent lawyer. They are definitely not cheap.
So basically only bigger companies with enough cash and a legal department can get patents.

5. It is nearly impossible to handle software patents in a trial.

When you try to patent something you will usually let a patent lawyer check if the patent is available.
But it is almost impossible to find any violations because the same process or idea might be described in another way, using other words.

So when it actually comes to a trial, all involved parties and the court are facing another big problem.
It is very, very hard to find out who is right or wrong or who owns which intellectual property. Both parties might have patented the same or a similar software idea. And is the one software really violating the patent? Does it use this or that structure? How is the patent specified? Does that include this exception or that addition?
It takes years and A LOT of money to find an answer which is not even sure to be right.
The sheer amount of specifications, the uncertainty how to apply them and the total unpredictability make this process a big gamble.

In a patent free world -that seems to be feared by large companies- it would just come down to one thing: Write better code.
Solve a problem better than somebody else. This would define your success and not if you were fast enough and had enough money.

A software-patent-free world would not look all so different than today except there would be a lot more competition, a lot more possibilities for developers and a lot less bad code.

So Friday evening before the journey we had a snow storm with 20cm of snow in one hour (which is a lot for Northern Germany) so I had to book a ticket for the train.
I would go with the train more often if it wouldn’t be so expensive here. It’s nice to travel fast and work in the same time.

So I had to get up at 6:00 AM to get there in reasonable time.

(It was frickin’ cold)

(But looked nice)

I mainly went there to talk to some hardware vendors. I was especially looking for touch panels, screens and battery elements.
The CEBIT has a Resellers Planet area only for registered companies which is a very good thing as the rest of the event is totally overcrowded.
And they have these neat little passes with bar codes which the exhibitors can scan to easily get your business data.

At the stand of IRTOUCH, an Asian touch panel manufacturer focused on infrared touch recognition.

Well, EloTouch seems to offer great solutions, they recently introduced the Acoustic Pulse Recognition panel which sounds good to me. Still have to test it though. It works by monitoring the pulses emmited by anything touching the surface of the panel.

The stand of OSADL was a little disappointing. It consisted out of two banners and a workstation on 2m². I didn’t see anybody who seemed to belong there.

In the end it was a great event, really crowded though. Most of the exhibitors speak a really nice English. Except that guy from a Chinese battery company who did not understand what I inquired while his colleague was standing and watching. Turned out the colleague spoke English very well.

It was actually easier than I expected.

So, first we need to create the root file system. I used rootstock:

Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) and Debian:
sudo apt-get install qemu
wget http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.20~jaunty1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.20~jaunty1_all.deb
wget http://launchpad.net/project-rootstock/trunk/0.1/+download/rootstock-0.1.3.tar.gz
tar xf rootstock-0.1.3.tar.gz
cd rootstock-0.1.3

Ubuntu Karmic (9.10)
sudo apt-get install rootstock

Create the RFS of Jaunty:
sudo rootstock --fqdn OMAPL138 --login ubuntu --password root --imagesize 2G --dist jaunty --serial ttyS2 --seed xfce4,gdm
Note: I am using a 2GB USB Stick so change that command to whatever size your medium is.
That takes a while so in the meantime (if your system resources allow) set up the memory device.

Format the device to ext2 (or ext3, I have not tested that):
sudo gparted /dev/sdb
Note: Your device might be at /dev/sda or /dev/sdc (etc.) so check that first.

Now get the uImage for the hawkboard at http://hawkboard.googlecode.com/files/uImage_v1

I used tftp to transfer the uImage to the board.
How to set up tftp: http://labs.embinux.org/index.php/Android_Porting_Guide_to_OMAP-L_138_HawkBoard#Setting_up_tftp_on_host_machine.28ubuntu.29
Rename the file to ‘uImage’ and put it in your tftpboot folder (default ~/tftpboot).

So turn on your board, stop autoboot and execute:
dhcp 0xc0900000 uImage

If everything is et up right it will look somewhat like this:
hawkboard.org >
dhcp 0xc0900000 uImage
BOOTP broadcast 1

DHCP client bound to address 192.168.0.2
TFTP from server 192.168.0.0; our IP address is 192.168.0.2
Filename 'uImage'.

Load address: 0xc0900000
Loading: ##############################################################
#########################################################
########################################################
########################################################
#########################################################
#########################################################
#################################
done
Bytes transferred = 1934036 (1d82d4 hex)

By now rootstock might be done leaving you with an archive like armel-rootfs-**********.tgz.
Mount the memory device and copy/extract the archive:
cp armel-rootfs-**********.tgz /mount/point
cd /mount/point
sudo tar xfp armel-rootfs-**********.tgz
sudo chown -R root.root *
sudo chmod -R 777 *

On your board change the bootargs:
setenv bootargs console=ttyS2,115200n8 console=tty1 noinitrd root=/dev/sda1 rootwait rw init=/sbin/init

And then finally boot into Ubuntu Jaunty on your OMAPL 138 hawkboard:
bootm 0xc0900000

Our company name is a connection of two German phrases:

binär = binary (from Late Latin bīnārius (“consisting of two”), bīnī (“two-by-two, pair”))
Welt = world (Proto-Germanic *wer-alt (“age of man, world”)

We chose this name because we believe that it describes the state that our world is in right now. On the one hand we have the “traditional reality” consisting out of actual matter and on the other hand we have the “virtual reality” which developed silently parallel to material reality.

We believe that this is a trend that will not stop in near future and we want to make the virtual world a better place. That means better, simpler and more reliable software and straight universal solutions.