Office Upgrade: Half-Standing, Half-Sitting Workstation

What it is: a seat that you lean on, but don’t sit on, and an adjustable-height desk

Cost: seat starts at $650; desk starts at $1,150

A seat for standing may seem like a contradiction, but Jamestown (R.I.)-based Focal Upright Furniture believes an upright, half-standing, half-sitting posture improves circulation and can help office workers stay focused. The new Locus workstation, available in fourth quarter 2012, includes an adjustable stool ($650) that tilts and pivots on a base. The stool distributes some weight to the legs. Focal calls it a cure for “sitting disease.” Just remember not to lean back if you get tired. The desk ($1,150) adjusts height and angle, and comes with an optional LED light.

“There is a place between standing and sitting where our body wants to be. It’s a natural, neutral posture, and it just feels right,” says founder and industrial designer Martin Keen, who also founded Keen Footwear, in a release.

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Office Upgrade: Privacy Booth

What it is: a table covered by a sound-absorbent hood

Cost: N/A

Let’s hope this booth offers more privacy than the Cone Of Silence from the TV series Get Smart. Named “Confession” by Stockholm-based Scottish designer Nick Ross, the standing booth has an oak tabletop and a sound-absorbent, compressed, felt hood. Designed to provide some seclusion in open offices, “it enables the creation of a space for a quick meeting, to hear a personal story, a quiet place to read the paper with a coffee, or even somewhere to indulge in office gossip,” states the description. The booth is designed to accommodate casual, standing conversations, not seated meetings, Ross says. He designed the prototype in April in collaboration with furniture maker Bla Station while he was studying interior architecture and furniture design at Konstfack University College. Ross is looking for a production partner now.

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Office Upgrade: The Post-It Desk

Have you ever played connect-the-dots, doodled, or dragged a dulled crayon through a simplistic maze on a family-friendly restaurant’s paper place mat and thought to yourself, “I wish I could do this at work?” Lisbon-based designer Miguel Mestre’s My Desk invites your childish antics to the office by turning the entire work surface into a notepad. The 3.5-foot by 2.3-foot desk (priced upon request) comes fitted with paper of the same size. The desk doesn’t have any drawers—who needs those when all the paper you’ll ever need is right there on your desk?

Mestre isn’t the first designer to turn work spaces into a coloring book. Italian design firm Soup Studio also offers the Post-Itable, a lacquered wooden desk topped with a 500-sheet pad of sticky yellow paper. The €1,000 ($1,270) desk is touted as “an immediate support for the thoughts that pass through the designer’s head,” according to a translation of Soup Studio’s Italian-language website. “We’re going to enter into negotiations with Post-it to provide the paper,” says associate designer Carlo Tartaglia.

Mestre and Soup Studio recommend their tables as the perfect surfaces for creative types who work in the fields of art and design. But limiting them to specific industries would deprive the rest of us of their best function: the ability to write obnoxious messages on giant Post-it notes and paste them on a co-worker’s computer screen.

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Office Upgrade: Variér Ergonomic Saddle Chair

What it is: A chair specially designed to give your legs more freedom to move.

Cost: Starting at $1,095, depending on fabric and gas lift.

Norwegian chair maker Varier’s new Active chair, launched in January, features a unique, saddle-shaped seat. Designed by Olav Eldoy and Atle Tveit, it is intended for workers who like to bend and stretch their legs.

“With the saddle seat, you can have a bigger angle in your hip” and “there is no pressure on the back of the thigh” to improve blood flow, says Eline Strom-Gundersen, a spokesperson for Varier. Also, “it forces you to sit more upright. When you do that, and you’re not slouching forward, it helps you use your whole lung capacity so you breathe better and you stay sharper for a longer period of time,” she adds.

The Active chair is available in a range of wool textiles and leather.

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Office Upgrade: The 37-Year LED Desk Lamp

What it is: an LED lamp that extends bulbs’ life to 37 years

Cost: $899

Personal desk lamps are a great way to customize your workspace and give your eyes a rest—when they work. But once those taken-for-granted bulbs go out, workers are left temporarily squinting in the dull haze of overhead fluorescents.

Designer Jake Dyson, son of famed industrial designer James Dyson, has a solution: a superlamp. These $899 CSYS lamps redirect damaging heat away from the LED bulbs so they last 160,000 hours, or about 37 years if used 12 hours per day, he says. (We sadly don’t have time to put this claim to the test.) The arm glides up and down along the neck, as well as back and forth, and can also spin around. It stays in position when released. The light is dimmable, and moving it up and down adjusts the spread of the light.

“CSYS technology was designed to address these problems in existing LEDs—poor heat management, weak light distribution, color erosion, and the lack of a comfortable shade of warm white,” Dyson says in a press release.

The CSYS desk lamp is available on jakedyson.com, lumens.com, luminaire.com, and DDC in New York. A floor lamp model will be introduced later this year.

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Office Upgrade: The Magnetic Wall Organizer

What it is: a set of rearrangable magnetic plates and pods for the wall

Cost: $175 for six pods and six plates

The personal workspace has been getting smaller and smaller, especially in urban markets. Doors have disappeared, walls have fallen, and even cubicles are a luxury. To address the clutter that is finding itself confined to an ever more restricted area, Oakland (Calif.)-based Enlisted Design developed Urbio, a stylish brand of metal plates and magnetic pods in various shapes and sizes for keeping things tidy. The vessels can be reconfigured based on the user’s changing needs. They can be used, for example, to sort mail or business cards. The magnetic vessels will cling to other surfaces too, such as metal poles or railings. Urbio co-founder Jared Aller says the company plans to introduce magnetic office supplies such as staplers, pencil sharpeners, and white boards that will work with the plates.

Urbio’s not just for sorting desk detritus either—the vessels can also be used for plants, a nice addition to any office.

“Urbio can be large or small, allowing offices to make a statement piece in a lobby for everyone to share, or to break it up and have a single wall plate with a pot or two in every cubicle,” says Aller. “The magnetic system allows each user to configure Urbio how they want, so employees can personalize their space.”

The powder-coated steel plates and the polypropylene vessels are available on myurbio.com. Both are recyclable.

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Startups Party at the Patent Office

Software startups have traditionally avoided patenting their innovations, viewing it as an unneeded expense that can eat up $15,000 or so. “We thought about it, because there’s definitely some patentable stuff,” says Brett Martin, the chief executive officer of New York’s Sonar, which makes an app that helps people connect with strangers. “But we’re busy trying to build a business.”

Yet many who aspire to build the next Facebook are learning from the mistakes of their guru, Mark Zuckerberg. His company was unprepared for the battle that erupted when Yahoo! (YHOO) sued in March for infringing 10 patents. Soon after, Facebook purchased 750 patents from IBM (IBM) and spent an additional half-billion dollars on part of the AOL (AOL) patent portfolio recently bought by Microsoft (MSFT). Meanwhile, Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), and other tech giants are locked in patent lawsuits.

Which is why more entrepreneurs are thinking like Oliver Cameron. His new iPhone app, Everyme, is a social network similar to Facebook. Behind the scenes, though, algorithms perform some fancy operations, such as grouping a user’s friends on other networks according to criteria such as geography or workplace. Before the app’s launch in April, Cameron, the CEO of the Menlo Park (Calif.) startup, made sure to file his patent paperwork. “We’re not really patent whores,” he says. “We’re just proud of what we’ve built.”

“The Valley in general seems to be getting more litigious,” says Travis Katz, a former Myspace executive who co-founded travel startup Gogobot. “Big companies can sue small companies out of existence, even with a baseless claim.” Katz has had his lawyers begin reviewing Gogobot technologies that could be patented. Path, a mobile social network started two years ago, has filed for 13 patents. Karma, which makes a gift-buying app, has filed for three patents covering technologies related to commerce, notifications, and social networking.

Chris Tolles, an investor and the CEO at local news site Topix, says startups should invest in patents before pool tables and Aeron chairs—the typical accoutrements of hip young companies. “I wouldn’t do it Day One. But you’re a year in, you have some funding, then yeah, get some patents,” he says. The patent process can take as long as five years, according to Mark Radcliffe, a partner at law firm DLA Piper.

While small tech companies are learning to play the patent game, at least one larger one is trying to change the rules altogether. On April 17, Twitter announced all its patents will be governed by its Innovator’s Patent Agreement. Under it, the person whose name is on a patent—usually an engineer or scientist—retains control over how the patent is used, even if the patent is sold to another company. Patent owners must ask the innovator’s permission before suing over the patent, although there are exceptions for companies that use patents defensively.

Everyme’s Cameron and his co-founder Vibhu Norby want to support the IPA. Their first three apps were already with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the time IPA was available, though, and they don’t plan to refile them. “There are bigger things to worry about,” says Cameron. “Like launching,” says Norby.

The bottom line: While startups get serious about intellectual-property law, Twitter pioneers a type of patent friendly to engineers.

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