Technology

Roy Raymond opened a little store called VictoriaSecret, now one of the most popular lingerie businesses in the world, because he was embarrassed to buy lingerie for his wife in department stores.

The brand was founded on the premise that men needed a safe space to buy lingerie for women and women needed a larger variety of sexy, angelic bras and other intimates to wear for men.

But it2018. Women, today, buy lingerie for themselves. They want to be comfortable and functional and beautiful all at the same time.

&[VictoriaSecret] was always about the angel and the fantasy and a lot of push up and wire so womenbodies could conform to a marketing campaign,&said Michelle Cordeiro Grant, founder and CEO of direct-to-consumer lingerie startup Lively, and aformer VictoriaSecret senior merchant. &Inspiring women to be Candice Swanepoel is not feasible for most women in the world. I wanted to create a product that is for women and by women.&

Recognizing the gap in the market for bras that don&t stab you with underwire, she built Lively. To date, the company has raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series A investment from GGV Capital, NF Ventures and former Nautica CEO Harvey Sanders announced today.

&Previously, women had two rows of products in their drawer.One row they wanted to be seen in … and the other row was ones that were more basic and comfortable — but no nobody wanted to be seen in them.&

Though she began work on Lively before the #MeToo movement, Cordeiro Grant says it pushed the business forward in a big way. In the last year, the size-inclusive startup has seen 300 percent growth. What began as a direct-to-consumer company selling $35 bras and underwear has expanded to offer swimwear, activewear and loungewear. Physical retail is next.

&Women have been ready for a conversation like ours,& she said.

The startup is using the capital to open brick-and-mortar stores, a trend among other e-commerce businesses. The first of several stores in the pipeline, a 2,700-square-foot location, opened in New York CitySoHo neighborhood this July. Stores in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas are also on the docket, as is a partnership with Nordstrom that will have Lively selling a limited distribution of intimates across 11 stores beginning next week.

Lively competes with several other brands of direct-to-consumer lingerie and activewear, including ThirdLove, AdoreMe, TomboyX and Outdoor Voices.

Sorry Santa Claus, Jeff Bezos is your Father Christmas now. Amazon, in its ongoing quest to utterly dominate the holiday season, has announced plans to start shipping real, live Christmas trees, come November.

That news comes courtesy of The Associated Press, which notes that the seven-foot-tall Douglas firs and Norfolk Island pines will be sent via Amazon box, sans water. Shipping should occur within 10 days of being cut down, so as to keep them green. The firs will run around $115 a pop, along with $50 for a wreath.

This isn&t the first time the online giant has dabbled in trees. Amazon dipped its toes in the water by offering up Charlie Brown-style trees measuring less than three-feet last year. Third-party sellers also used the platform to sell their own larger trees.

The whole prospect likely isn&t very appealing for those who&ve made tree shopping a part of their holiday ritual. Nor are owners of pop-up Christmas tree lots likely super psyched about Amazondabbling. But the offering is about what the company has always been about above all else: convenience.

Blockchain is perhaps the most hyped technology of the past five years. The technology that allows us to create trustless immutable shared ledgers promises to bring transparency and honesty to commerce by disintermediating and decentralizing functions that rely on trusted third parties today. The promise and the potential are almost as big as the hype.

While still the early days, there are several applications that have already launched on blockchains — the first being the Bitcoin cryptocurrency payment protocol. Bitcoin is just a unit of account on blockchain. And more recently, with the implementation of smart contracts, code that is shared across the whole blockchain to execute conditionally with irrefutable results, we have the possibility to tokenize many new financial constructs on blockchains.

This has given rise to the ICO, a token-generation event whereby tokens are sold in order to raise financing for a blockchain project in which the tokens will serve some purpose. This innovation in finance changed the way startups raised funds in 2016, 2017 and 2018, with more than $18 billion dollars of funds pouring into blockchain startups in 2018 alone.

What has all this got to do with a patent war

Everything. At the same time that the hype around blockchain has been growing, the number of patents filed has been growing, as well. Whatmakes this technology different from past innovation explosions is that the startups are better funded than ever before.

Another very new factor is the ideology behind this innovation wave. A majority of these startups are founded on the basis of decentralization and open-source principals, meaning their code is open and they release it under the Apache 2.0 or similar open-source license. Philosophically, many project leaders are opposed to the very idea of intellectual property ownership such as patents.

This has several implications.

First, there are many technology startups working on cutting-edge innovations that are taking no precautions other than Apache Open Source licensing to protect their innovation. Many of these same startups have carried out ICOs and are now exceptionally well-funded with cash treasuries ranging from $10 million to $4 billion. There are several hundred young startup companies sitting on an average $25 million treasury that they are using to fund their development of open and freely accessible innovation.

Second, there is a small concentration of such well-funded startups that are patenting blockchain technology. That may be a precursor of future patent assertion entities (PAEs), commonly known as &patent trolls.& Effectively, the modus operandi of some of these entities could be called &patent hoarding,& filing patents on any patentable aspect of blockchain that they can with the intent to become &patent trolls& in the future.

Increasingly, large corporations are also patenting blockchain technology, although their patents tend to revolve around their core businesses; for example Visa, has filed patents on blockchain technologies related to payment services as they would relate to credit card usage, and UPS has filed patents for blockchain technology in shipping.

Finally, putting these together we have a very interestingpatent battlefieldshaping up.

There are large corporations that will defend their core business by asserting their patents against challengers who threaten their revenue streams. This is typical behavior and is often derided as the reason patents can hold back innovation.

The more interesting players are the new ones. On the one hand you have very well-funded startups that have taken little to no precaution to protect their innovation. On the other hand you have very clever and agile PAEs, patent trolls, that are also well-funded and will use these resources to attack any startup that could be remotely considered to be infringing on their patent portfolio.

There has never been a case of so much free-floating cash being readily available in startups just waiting to be attacked. This could become a boon for the PAEs, a slaughter for the idealistic and well-funded startups and result in a massive transfer of funds from startups to PAEs in the coming years. This would be a very sad outcome for innovation.

Everyone is, of course, entitled to their own views on the value of patents and whether their company should file for them. But regardless of your position, we, as a community, must acknowledge that there are others in this world who are obtaining blockchain patents purely for their own profit motives. For example, Erich Spangenberg of IPwe has stated publicly, &… It is a curious path how a collection of misfit trolls, geeks and wonks ended up here — but we are going to crush it and make a fortune…& You can read more about Erichintentionshere.

Because of this, it is important to take intellectual property very seriously. Make an effort to identify and patent your innovations. To that end you can joinLOT Network, a nonprofit founded to allow patent holders to jointly protect each other from the eventuality that their operating patents will fall into the hands of a PAE. This will improve your protection and help protect fellow network members from PAEs. Think of it as your &patent troll flu shot.&

The more blockchain innovators join together to protect and nurture our innovation, the better for our ecosystem. We all agree that patents in the wrong hands will hurt our industry and the speed at which others embrace blockchain. We all must take responsibility and be good corporate citizens when it comes to IP. By removing the uncertainty that comes from PAEs, we can avoid the turmoil and costly litigation we saw play out in the smartphone and semiconductor industries. If we remove friction, we can accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology. This tide will raise all boats.

Whether you are an investor or an entrepreneur in blockchain projects, you should strongly consider the manner by which your projects handle their intellectual property and do careful diligence to ensure that your interests are not threatened by a potential patent battle.