House lawmakers passed a bill today to overhaul the U.S. patent system for the first time in nearly 60 years, Nathan Koppel notes on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: The House passed the America Invents Act on a 407 to 117 vote, WSJ reports. The bill would change how the U.S. grants patents and award them to the party which is “first to file” an invention instead of the “first to invent” it. The change would bring the U.S. in line with other countries, according to WSJ. The Senate passed similar legislation in March on a 95-to-5 vote. (Click here to see…
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David Wanetick, Managing Director at IncreMental Advantage, LLC, a valuation firm with expertise in valuing intangible assets and emerging technologies, based in Princeton, NJ, opines at The Business Insider: Valuing a patent is complex and imperfect. Below we’ll go into some detail surrounding the methods used to determine a patent’s value. Each is applied under different circumstances, and impacted by many factors. Some of these factors can be measured and quantified, while others are intangible and require expert judgment in order to attain a reasonably accurate estimation of value.
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Who Is the Mystery Hamptons Moneybags? asks the New York Times DealBook. The hunt is on for the New York mogul with questionable cash management skills. Speculation bubbled on Wednesday after a receipt left hanging out of a Capital One ATM in East Hampton that displayed its owner’s remaining balance as $99,864,731.94 — yes, that would be $99 million and change — was posted on Dealbreaker. The receipt, which appears to show a $400 cash withdrawal from a savings account plus a $2.75 ATM fee, was rumored to belong to the Appaloosa Management honcho David Tepper, who made billions during the…
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The Accountable Care Fiasco That’s what the Wall Street Journal calls the state of developing real-world guidelines for “the Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform.” The theory for ACOs, as they’re known, is that hospitals, primary-care doctors and specialists will work more efficiently in teams, like at the Mayo Clinic and other top U.S. hospitals. ACOs are meant to fix health care’s too-many-cooks predicament. The average senior on Medicare sees two physicians and five specialists, 13 on average for those with chronic illnesses. Most likely, those doctors aren’t coordinating patient care. This…
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Lawyers and Accountants Once Put Integrity First So asserts Mark W. Everson, commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, in an opinion piece for the Sunday NY Times: Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the integrity of capitalism, but as businesses measured chiefly by the earnings of their partners. . . . Recent decades have seen a new model take root: a business plan tied to partner earnings. Obviously,…
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No Parties After IFRS Adoption in Canada When measuring the costs of IFRS implementation, there are the not-at-all trivial costs of changing accounting methods. But there are also opportunity costs of spending time becoming IFRS compliant that you could have spent doing something other things. “The greater cost has really been the diversion of intellectual capital during this time period from doing more productive pursuits than the IFRS conversion,” opines a vice president at Canadian Tire. At CFO Journal Emily Chasen reports that IFRS adoption by our neighbors to the north has been anything but easy: If U.S. regulators want to get a…
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SEC Wakes Up to Reverse Merger Companies Weeks after several Chinese reverse-merger companies have stopped trading in the US amid widespread fraud allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a warning that, hey, maybe investors ought to think twice about those reverse-merger companies. Okey doke! Mark Gongloff relays from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued an investor bulletin that said “there have been instances of fraud and other abuses involving reverse merger companies” and that investors “should be careful” when they consider investing in the companies’ stocks. The SEC has said it is investigating the…
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Forbes reports: In the last (pre-drinking) session at the D: All Things Digital conference at the Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday, we heard from Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of Netscape and various other tech start-ups. Chatting him up: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the session: Marc simply doesn’t agree that there’s a tech bubble, and in fact says there is plenty of evidence that the public markets actually hate tech stocks right now. . . . but New York Magazine in a feature called “Bubble Vision” has…
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More Feedback: Editor: I read the May 2011 QuickRead – “Tips for Valuators” concerning stub years. I have run into this issue several times and I have seen it misapplied many times and I am glad you wrote about the topic. I noticed two points in the article that I believe need further clarification. The first thing that I noticed in the article is that the PV factors need to be modified as well if you are discounting them using a stub year. The present value factors in the article are straight factors calculated using a mid-year discounting convention that…