I also refuse to use up my precious Internet bandwidth in India to watch the iPhone and iEverythingElse launch in far-off San Francisco, live on my Safari browser. What other status symbol inspires that kind of insanity? I just don't get it. Why are so many people watching the launch of a product that most of us cannot even afford, though Apple sales did go up 400 percent in India after it initiated its installment and buyback schemes?

In a thriving Bay Area technology sector where black and brown faces are the exception and not the norm, Chris Cruz, a Filipino American, and Isaac Reed, an African American, are crashing the party. A study conducted in 2011 by three California-based groups looked at workforce diversity at a dozen companies in Silicon Valley, including industry giants Intel, Cisco and Ebay, and found an industry where African Americans and Latinos are grossly underrepresented when compared to their percentages of the state population.

While contactless credit cards have been available since 2008, when Barclaycard first released them, the actual usage of the cards has been very low. In fact, recent studies have found that of all the people that have contactless cards in their wallets, only a quarter have actually used them. That equates to around 5 percent of the UK population having actually used contactless payment. That's a  low figure in anyone's book - especially for a technology that's been around for more four years.

The real issue is whether the framework of the century-old patent laws, which served as the basis for the San Jose decision, has outlived its essential usefulness for inspiring innovation. The essential process of this involves building upon and improving the works of others. This was precisely the real genius of the late Steve Jobs as he converted the touch-screen computer from a colossal flop to a mainstream consumer device and invented smartphones on the basis of ideas that he couldn’t claim to be his and his alone.