Hi Brad,

Hmmm Intense Debate seems to have eaten my first comment. Apologies if this is a dupe.

I purchase books solely through the kindle. You need to take the kindle factor into account when computing your conversion stats. I wonder what percentage of your readers are kindle users?

Joel

I see your point. My back of the envelop calculation suggest an hourly rate that is much cheaper than the cost of a business trip from LA to NY.

Brad - Thanks for pointing this out to me. I would love to know the cost structure and cost curve for this technology. Any ideas? At what price points will it be interesting to Fortune 500? Hospitals? Universities? The General Public?

Also now that there are more than 6 billion people on the planet what happens when the cost of getting the optimal set of people together for any situation trends to zero?

Very exciting.

Paul is correct. Deleting mail in Mail.App does not delete the mail on gmail. The mail is archived instead. What was tripping me up is that Mail.app puts labels on the mail - the label for mail deleted from Mail.app is "Deleted Messages". It's my brain again...

Hmmm - That's not what I saw last night. It looked like deleting on Mail.app deleted on Gmail. It was a long day though so I'll experiment again today.

Brad,

You say software patents are evil. Agreed.

When (if ever) are patents good?

When (if ever) does a business founder have an obligation to their shareholders (i.e. investors) to seek intellectual property protection?

These are important questions if someone is trying to build a new company, get funding or compete in the marketplace.

Can you point me to any thought leaders in this area?

Thanks!