In Israel the most common entrepreneurial "best practice" is to go and waste precious time, energy and money on registering a patent. Although it is a great revenue stream for patent lawyers, which we have many of those here by the way, still I am not sure whether it is a matter of delaying the unavoidable truth about most innovations - death or maybe it is a matter of a local nature to make sure no one steals your precious secret even if it does not worth a dime.
In real life as I see it, I've almost never seen a startup winning by holding to their patents, especially not in the software world - except of course highly covered (media wise) trials of the giants (MS, GOOG) beating one another with armies of lawyers.
Especially now in the era of web 2.0 startups where the most important factor is time to market and attractiveness of service to consumer.
I hate to see good people with good idea waste time on a practice, which is not "best" at all and highly distracting at early stages.
Dudu
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