A ZDNet article by Denise Howell caught my eye. It is titled Four legal predictions for Foursquare. David Canton mentioned foursquare in this recent post and Connie’s post about RockMelt and its integration of social media inspired me to write.

Foursquareand other location-based social networking tools offer an interesting service: easily find members in your community of interest. The privacy commissioner website offers another perspective on geolocation: unique rsks, mostly by a user not knowing what private information they are sharing.

Denise’s post sums up the legal issues for Foursquare as:

1. Location-savvy privacy standards and penalties
2. Service-side

. . . [more]

The Minister of Culture in the UK hints quite strongly that an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) system would be established to resolve situations where alleged inaccurate personal information is posted to the Internet.

Google’s been speeding things up lately, as you’ll know if you’ve turned on Google Instant for your searches. (See Google’s Instant Search: An Alphabet Book.)

Now Google’s rolling out Instant Preview, which, as the name suggests, lets you get a preview of the site itself. I’m not one of the lucky rolloutees yet, but Google, ever solicitous, has a Google Labs site that will let you play with the new feature. You’ll know when it arrives in your neighbourhood, because a small magnifying glass icon will a appear beside each of your results.

A click on it brings up . . . [more]

This week in biotech was very stimulating, with public funds flowing to a variety of projects.

The Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) got two new members this week and Minister of Research and Innovation Glen Murray (or @Glen4TC as he’s know to his tweeps) travelled to St. Catharines and Hamilton. ONE is what we’re now calling the network of organizations across Ontario that help innovators commercialize ideas.

The U.S. deployed its $1 billion Therapeutic Discovery Project tax credit/grant stimulus program this week, which was launched just 7 months ago as part of the health reform bill. Interestingly, . . . [more]

On Friday Adobe announced two new products that demonstrate the company is increasingly embracing cloud-based technologies.

The first product, Adobe SendNow, allows you to send large files to a single or multiple recipients. While this is not a new concept, Adobe adds several features that provide value to lawyers. SendNow allows you to set expiry times for how long a document will be available for download, and allows you to confirm that a document has been viewed by the recipient.

The second product, Adobe CreatePDF, is a cloud-based version of Adobe Acrobat that allows you to convert a . . . [more]

new social web browser launched today

I’ve got three bits of IT to pass along today.

1. The first should be evident from the typeface you’re reading this in. It’s called Josefin Sans Standard Light. And I offer it to you not so much for your reading pleasure — I wouldn’t choose it as a text face — but to catch your eye. Because, though you may never have paid attention, the web for most of its life has been anchored to those few typefaces we all share thanks to Microsoft and Apple, the commonest being Arial and some variant of Times New Roman.

Because typefaces . . . [more]

This week in biotech was all about the early stage, and there is no earlier stage in biotech than university tech transfer offices and their progeny.

Universities’ technology transfer offices (TTOs) lie at the interface between university researchers and industry, often with the mandate to monetize the University’s innovations and technological assets. A new study looked at series of in-depth interviews with 20 senior technology transfer personnel at six Canadian universities and two research hospitals and discovered a disconnect between the social and financial goals of tech transfer. One example of a recent success in this area comes from . . . [more]

Free e-mail services from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others make getting up and running with an e-mail address a trivial effort. The unfortunate side effect of choosing to use a free email address for a law office – or any business for that matter – is that these free e-mail addresses are burdened with a negative perception: price sends a signal, and using a free e-mail service as a core part of your businesses front-office sends the wrong message.

Just a few ago, cost was a reasonable justification for solos and small firms to choose a free e-mail service. The . . . [more]

If you’re summoned for jury duty in Florida keep your thoughts on your civic responsibilities and leave your personal electronics at home.

Many of you have cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices. Even though you have not yet been selected as a juror, there are some strict rules that you must follow about using your cell phones, electronic devices and computers. You must not use any device to search the Internet or to find out anything related to any cases in the courthouse.
Between now and when you have been discharged from jury duty by the judge, you

. . . [more]

There’s a new kid on the block, the block owned by Google. A search engine named Blekko launched mere minutes ago and I think you’ll want to try it out.

Search engines come and search engines go, as we learned most dramatically from the case of Cuil. Bing may still hang in there, but it seems as though Yahoo! is in decline.

So how do you find a place in a world dominated by Google? You differentiate yourself by offering different sorts of results. WolframAlpha is perhaps the extreme example of this, positioning itself as a “computational knowledge engine.” . . . [more]

Last week, the Working Group 7 of The Sedona Conference – “Sedona Canada” – issued a public comment draft of “The Sedona Canada Commentary on Proportionality in Electronic Disclosure & Discovery.”

As explained by Justice Colin Campbell in his Foreword, proportionality is not a new concept in civil procedure, but has become a critical practical imperative and conceptual ideal given the impact of electronically stored information on litigation. He says, “Civil litigation simply becomes cost-prohibitive and burdensome without early and careful attention to identifying key sources of potentially relevant data and ensuring that only potentially relevant and unique data is . . . [more]