Product Development

When does a great idea become a patentable invention? That was a question easier to answer when Thomas Edison came up with the lightbulb and Whitcomb Judson devised the zipper -- Industrial Age innovations that clearly fit with old ideas of what it meant to invent something. But a recent case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit points up the difficulty of making such judgments in the age of the Internet. Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw of WeatherWise USA Inc.

With the iPod getting to be old hat, Apple Inc. has frantically piled on extras in an attempt to make the player seem fresh again. The new version of the iPod Nano, unveiled this week at a company event, crams into the little player a video camera, FM radio, microphone, speaker and even a pedometer. Is this a sign of desperation? Well, if it is, bring it on. The new Nano is an astonishing triumph of engineering and design that has managed to pack all these new features -- along with the old ones -- into a sleek, elegant device that's a pleasure to use. None of the new features -- with the exception of the dorky pedometer -- seem like gratuitous add-ons.

It's no coincidence that most of the blockbuster video games of the last two decades have been gorefests and war simulations. Their creators were single guys in their teens and 20s whose all-night coding sessions were fueled by Doritos and Mountain Dew. John Smedley was one of them. In the mid-1990s, he helped make the trailblazing online game EverQuest, a slash-'em-up fantasy world that only a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed geek could love. But Smedley has grown up, and so has the industry.

At long last, details about a super-secret computer tablet have emerged, complete with pictures and even a video showing how it works. But it's not the long-awaited tablet that Apple Inc. has been rumored to be developing. This prototype reportedly comes from deep inside Apple's archrival, Microsoft Corp., where its development has supposedly been so blanketed in secrecy that many high-ranking company executives didn't know it existed. If it's real, that is. The device, code-named Courier, showed up on the popular technology blog Gizmodo.

The standing joke about the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach used to be that they were like the diesel version of elephant graveyards: the place where old trucks went to die. But lately, they have become a proving ground for technology that produces little or no pollution. On Tuesday, the first of 25 heavy-duty all-electric trucks rolled off a new Los Angeles assembly line. All are slated to work at the Port of Los Angeles or to make short hauls to and from the harbor.

Forty years after the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the business of space has yet to experience the renaissance many once thought possible. "It's 2009, and we thought we'd be going to the moon on PanAm by now," said John Pike, an analyst who follows the industry at think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "We thought the number of rockets that would be launched each year would be more and more and it would get cheaper and cheaper, but it didn't happen that way."

Think of it as the digital camera for the lonely. Samsung unveiled a camera Thursday with a view screen on the front as well as on the back. And why would people want this DualView camera, as Samsung calls it? To take pictures of themselves. "The growing popularity of social networking sites has given rise to the self-portrait," Samsung said in its news release, "with many consumers turning their digital cameras on themselves." Many who have used social networking or dating sites can relate to holding a camera at arm's length in front of themselves while snapping a picture.

Nirvana for the video game industry looks a lot like World of Warcraft, except without the arcane rules that mystify the average player. That vision is the driving force behind Lego Universe, a new online game that's based on the toy building bricks franchise and is scheduled for release in 2010. Developed by a San Mateo, Calif., firm called Gazillion Entertainment, the game is designed so that even a 5-year-old and his grandfather can play together.

More than a decade ago, Palm Inc. rose to prominence on the strength of its Palm Pilot, a small device that put computing power literally into customers' hands. In its stock's first day of trading nine years ago, the shares nearly tripled from their initial offering price. But the technology market bust, lowered demand and the rise of smart phones, where Palm's Treo was once a major player, took their toll.

Amgen Inc. paid $50 million Tuesday for the rights to develop and sell an experimental drug that treats heart failure. The drug, known as CK-1827452, is being developed to reactivate the heart's beating during heart failure by prompting muscle fibers to contract, said Mary Klem, a spokeswoman for Amgen. The hope is that Amgen of Irvine and Cytokinetics Inc. of San Francisco can develop the drug for the mass market, she said.