Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog of how Apple registered “Apple Watch” in Trinidad and Tobago in March 2014 and why Apple submits trademark applications in Trinidad and Tobago first. Quoting from the full article  :

“….On March 11, [Apple] the company submitted a trademark application for “Apple Watch” in Trinidad and Tobago……

…..Under U.S. law, a company seeking to register a federal trademark starts to secure initial rights when it files an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. “If your company is the first to file a trademark application, your company is first in line to obtain the trademark registration in the United States,” says Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney in Washington, D.C. It’s what he described as a “first-come, first-served system.”

Here’s where Trinidad and Tobago enters the picture. The nation and the U.S. are signatories to an international treaty allowing applicants to secure rights in a foreign country and then transfer them over to their home country.

Under the agreement, an applicant that files in Trinidad and Tobago has a six-month window to apply for the same trademark in the U.S. without resetting the clock. In other words, if Apple applies for an “Apple Watch” trademark in the U.S. by Thursday, its application would be treated as if it were filed six months ago on March 11. So if another company trying to acquire the same trademark filed its application in the U.S. after that date, it would take a backseat to Apple’s.

So Apple got a head start in securing trademark rights for Apple Watch without the publicity that a domestic application would certainly generate.”

Read the full article at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/09/10/name-of-apple-smartwatch-wasnt-a-secret-at-least-in-trinidad-and-tobago/

Three organisations at the forefront of Information and Communications Technology in Trinidad and Tobago are working together to host a seminar on the issue of Network Neutrality  on Wednesday 20th August 2014,  from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the UWI Engineering Building, ENG 101. Registration for the seminar can be found at https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/27527 or at the Facebook event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/804220909609343/

Network neutrality (or Net Neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and network operators should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favouring or blocking particular products or websites.

The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society (TTCS), the Internet Society Trinidad and Tobago Chapter (ISOC-TT) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Trinidad and Tobago Section (IEEE-TT) encourage all citizens and stakeholders to attend this session.

The Seminar has been designed as a round table discussion including representatives of various stakeholder groups with the opportunity for attendees to make interventions with respect to how the issue of Network Neutrality in Trinidad and Tobago will be shaped given recent developments of network operators.

The Seminar is FREE! But please register at https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/27527 so we can estimate for refreshments.

Microsoft Research has demoed a method “for converting first-person videos, for example, captured with a helmet camera during activities such as rock climbing or bicycling, into hyper-lapse videos, i.e., time-lapse videos with a smoothly moving camera.”

Very cool, check out the YouTube video:

and read more at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/hyperlapse/

Twitter has posted its latest Twitter Transparency Report for the period of January 1 to June 30 2014. The Transparency Report documents three types of requests to Twitter:

• Information Requests – government requests for account information of a Twitter account
• Removal Requests – government requests to remove content from Twitter
• Copyright notices – copyright notices alleging copyright infringement as per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”)

The Twitter Transparency Report also documents how Twitter handled these requests.

The Government of Trinidad and Tobago filed an  emergency disclosure request for a Twitter user’s account information during the January-June 2014 period. Twitter didn’t produce the information requested, according to https://transparency.twitter.com/country/tt

The Document Foundation has announced the availability of LibreOffice 4.3, the latest version of the Free and Open Source Office Suite for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

From the Document Foundation Announcement:

LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:

– Document interoperability: support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more.

– Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.

– Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user.

– 3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support of this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).”

You can download LibreOffice at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Looks like a new version of the TTCS OSSWIN DVD needs to ready soon! 😉