Came across couple of interesting articles on LOI and work for hire clauses in outsourcing contracts from a legal point of view.
The “Work For Hire” clause:
A key concern for product company in outsourcing its product development is owership of IP for the product being development by the outsourcing partner. Many firms would like to accomplish this by insisting on a “work for hire” clause in the contract to ensure that it retains the copyright for the work being done by the partner. J. Patrick Toher and Shawn C. Helms, both attorneys at Jones Day in Dallas, TX explains in this informative article that the “work for hire” clause is ineffective in technology contracts and perhaps be detrimental to their interest. They conclude that:
In fact, the work for hire doctrine rarely if ever applies to the types of deliverables prepared under these types of contracts. The best approach is to include an appropriate intellectual property assignment in the contract, assigning the deliverables from the independent contractor to the hiring company.
Letters of Intent in Outsourcing
When negotiating a large outsourcing deal that takes time, companies may opt to enter into a Letter of Intent (LOI) to kickstart the outsourcing work in order not to delay the projects in question. W. Carter Santos, assistant vice president and outsourcing transaction counsel in the Global Sourcing Office at Equifax Inc., states in this article that the LOI is risky proposition for the product company that establishes the LOI with an outsourcing vendor. He lists a number of reasons why it is risky for the company and concludes that the LOI should be avoided in almost all cases. You can read the entire article at http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202421832700 (may require subscription).
Please do share any experiences or tips on negotiating or specific terms of outsourcing contracts by commenting on this post.
Forbes recently published a special report on outsourcing titled Inside Outsourcing with a number of good articles and op-ed pieces. You can view all the articles here: http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/28/labor-technology-innovation-oped-cx_hra_outsourcing08_0529lander_land.html
One of the op-ed articles that I found particularly interesting is title “For Innovation, Look Externally” by Edward Bernstein. Here is what he says:
The world is becoming increasingly connected. Standalone economies are gone; no industry is self-sufficient. Innovation relies more and more on external collaboration. The ability of U.S. companies to innovate is central to our future economy’s competitiveness, and how well we source innovation will be a critical component of our future success.
You can read the whole article at http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/external-research-development-cx_eb_outsourcing08_0529innovation.html
We are living in a world of wireless and wired networks that bring applications, information and entertainment to individuals and connect them in radically evolving ways. Products and technologies such as smart phones, iPods, STBs, IPTV, home networking, RFID, 3G and WiFi are making the vision of pervasive computing more possible in the real world. Some of the recent developments that show the potential in making computing more pervasive are listed below.
Ultra-Wideband: This is a technology that has yet failed to take-off as expected. A recent report by ABI Research says that over 400 million UWB enabled devices will ship in 2013. UWB has the potential to make wireless connectivity between devices and computers a reality essentially replacing the USB cable. However, TI recently backed out of UWB and pledged support for Bluetooth and 802.11n as the alternative until UWB can be truly practical.
Wireless Sensor Networks: WSN is one technology that promises to make computing truly pervasive and bring to everthing around you and for that matter even in you. A recent report by ofcom titled ‘Tomorrow’s wirelss world’ talks about in-body networks for wireless assisted living and communication betweek automobiles for smart transport among others as future applications of WSNs. IETF has kicked of a recent standards effort for routing over low power and lossy networks (Roll) to make WSNs IP enabled to make them more easier to implement in the real world. Zigbee is one technology that is gaining momentum in this space. There others such as ANT’s wireless network protocol. This document by ANT’s Rod Morris discusses ANT’s advantages over Zigbee. Technologies such as RFID and Bluetooth have already made its way into real world applications in retail, security and automobiles demonstrating the adoption of pervasive computing technologies.
Wimax: The Sprint-Clearwire Wimax venture is causing some stir in the market for a technology that was almost at the stage of being written off. Couple of key backers Intel and Google want to make wireless access ubiquitous for their own benefits. It is a matter of time before we have fairly ubiquitous wireless data connectivity at affordable rates or even better free. Google is one player who has the vision and means to make the free ubiquitous wirelss data access a reality. Asia and Europe have had made tremendous advances in personalized applications on cellphones due to the free or cheap data access on their phones.
These developments show a world of tiny connnected computers all around us communicating with each other and making things interactive, automated and usable than ever before. Product engineering outsourcing companies play a key role in helping adopt new technologies much more efficiently by being able to experiment and evaluate new technologies and bring them to product companies who may not have the bandwidth and scale to acquire the new technology skills in a timely fashion. The key is being able to evolve your products and bring innovative products to the market first utlizing emerging technologies.
I’d be interested in hearing from folks who have made other innovative pervasive computing applications. Please do share your thoughts and examples.