Chris Shipley chats with Dan Bricklin, best known as the co-developer of VisiCalc, the first mass market spreadsheet about innovation and what's cool today. Dan talks about the new connectivity permeating every aspect of the net today from blogs to cell phone text messaging. As the conversation continues, Dan riffs on the "production value" or lack thereof of so much of the content being generated in these new mediums. Jumping to the topic of open source, Dan talks about  a training video project he's involved in to educate developers about open source and copyright and "why lawyers are a developers best friend". Cool DEMO line: "Podcasting is so right - with these MP3 players, it just so appropriate to bring this audio information with use wherever we go." This of course put a big smile on Cameron Reilly's face. Cam and his partner Mick Stanic are the hosts of G'Day World and just announced the launch of The Podcast Network.

"I think copyright law has been really good for software", Bricklin said, explaining that intellectual property protection made it possible for Lotus 1-2-3 to superscede VisiCalc and, in turn, be replaced by Excel. Each, he said, is a better product than what preceded it but might never have made it to the market without patents and other protections that allow innovations to be protected. IP is a touchy subject of course, and Bricklin acknowledged the difficulties overly restricted patents can create, citing the LZW compression patent and the issues it created for graphic file format that use the compression scheme (can you say CompuServer and GIF with a straight face?).

Citing Dan's experience with pen computing years ago, Dan talked about the current state of the art and acknowledged the recent impact of the Tablet PC and Palm OS in bringing pen-based input to a larger audience. "It's like we're picking back up where we left off 10 years ago (as far as pen computing is concerned)."