This week in biotech, indirect effects were predominant.

The generally poor performance of most recent biotech IPOs has indirectly boosted M&A activity. Only 1 of 8 U.S. biotech IPOs in 2010 is currently trading above its IPO price. IMRIS was the last Canadian biotech IPO, completed in November 2007 at $6.00, and it is currently trading at $5.50. M&A exits are healthy, though, with two recent sales at decent prices.

As we pass the 10-year anniversary of the sequencing of the first human genome, some say we have little to show for it. Part of the reason the . . . [more]

Lawyers are big consumers of news: by and large it helps in practice not to be “out of it.” And newspapers have likely been the primary source of lawyers’ general news at least. As everyone knows, in order to cope with the impact that the loss of advertising to the internet has had, newspapers now offer their news online. But there’s a different quality to reading the news online, of course. Most people fix on the difficulty of reading on a screen or on the confusing complexity of the web page, when explaining their preference for paper. Phil Gyford, . . . [more]

Facebook's founder says we're all to have one identity now. There is legal danger here & moral wrongheadedness.

So the iPhone 4 is out. Its cool new features include:

• Multitasking: You can switch between third-party apps instantly.
• HD video recording: Shoot, edit and share video in HD.
• FaceTime: Video calling from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi.

. . . [more]

Great minds think alike, or so they say. In this case, Slaw and Steve Jobs (well, Apple, really) have come up with pretty much the same thing: a way to make your web reading a whole lot easier. Apple released Safari 5 yesterday, the latest iteration of its browser (available for both Windows and Mac operating systems); among the other improvements you’ll find (such as increased speed, and the possibility of extensions) will be Reader. When the browser believes you’re reading an article — how it knows, I don’t know: a long stretch of text, presumably — it offers you . . . [more]

It was a slimming week in the world of biotech.

Orexigen’s obesity drug, Contrave, was accepted for FDA review. Contrave joins weight-loss medicines from Arena and Vivus in the FDA hopper. Interestingly, all three are still seeking marketing partners, but there is a very real possibility that there will be an FDA-approved weight loss drug on the market soon.

Patients aren’t the only ones dropping weight. Amorfix dropped its vCJD program this week, and its CEO and 5 others are out as well. The company founder is back, along with the ProMIS rational drug design program.

Only The . . . [more]

I’ve been learning the ins, outs, and inbetweens of my new iPad, which means for the most part figuring out what apps work on it and what their limitations are. (e.g. I don’t use Word so I’m not fussed about its lack; but I do use RTF and am disappointed that I can’t create rich text files.) In the course of doing that, I’ve downloaded the iPad app version of Dropbox and have been impressed all over again by that great service.

If you don’t know Dropbox you should take a look. It’s a file storage and sharing system that . . . [more]

The Global Centre for Information and Communication Technologies in Parliament, a partnership initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, has released a considerable World e-Parliament 2010 report. (Aussi disponible en français.) According to the executive summary [PDF]:

The Report presents the latest data on the use and availability of systems, applications, hardware, and other tools in [134] parliaments around the world, based on the global survey conducted by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament in 2009.

. . . The Report highlights two critical issues – communication with citizens

. . . [more]

WIPO creates a free online resource to access data on patents, copyright, trademarks and other aspects of IP from around the globe.

That Google. They have a lot of stuff, including some US Patent and Trademark office material.

The following USPTO patent products are available for free download.

Grant images
Grant full text
Grant bibliographic data
Published applications
Assignments
Maintenance fee events
USPTO Red Book
Classification information

Google must have been delivering patents for some time through its Patents beta site since their database contains “over 7 million patents”. I don’t recall hearing about this and would have remained ignorant but for Alex Horns post about the bulk data news from Tech Daily Dose.

As the Google folks say about . . . [more]

It was recently reported that Passport Canada has issued 25,000 biometric passports, and plans to issue them to all Canadians by 2011. The government is introducing e-passports to enhance security, fight fraud, reduce identity theft and meet international counter-terrorism measures already in use in travel documents in over 60 countries, including the United States, the European Union, Australia and Israel. The e-passport will now be valid for a period of 10 years (thank you!—that’s an improvement at least).

A biometric passport has a data chip inside it that can be read electronically. The chip contains information about the holder’s face—such . . . [more]

We are all undergoing training at my place of work on the newest versions of word processing and e-mail programs. At a session today, talk got around to the the need to be careful about the “metadata” that is created whenever we create and change a document.

It so happens that the American Bar Association website has recently updated its list of professional ethics opinions from around the United States concerning the handling of metadata:

(…) the term refers to the embedded stratum of data in electronics file that may include such information as who authored a document, when

. . . [more]