Those changes, along with a newly-awarded patent for a feature that allows Bing Maps to route pedestrians away from unsafe neighborhoods, suggest Mcirosoft is driving to surpass Google Maps, which has dominated the space since surpassing MapQuest in site traffic and queries in 2008.

The changes that have been launched build off of a Microsoft Research presentation at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms last May. Those tweaks could be significant because they can incorporate new metrics in a few seconds: fast enough, the paper's abstract noted, "to support real-time traffic updates and personalized optimization functions."

The newly enhanced mapping service also allows users to select up to three routes in a single directions request. That's similar to a feature Google Maps has offered for quite some time, but the recently-upgraded Bing pinpoints potential traffic problems and suggests quicker alternatives.

For example, a trip from Somerville, Mass., where I am typing this post, to South Boston - on the exact opposite side of downtown Boston and peak rush hour traffic - will take 17 to 19 minutes, depending what route I choose, according to Google Maps. Bing, on the other hand, also tells me the 6.6-mile trip will take about 15 minutes. But when I click on a link that lets me view the route based on traffic, Bing serves up real-time traffic conditions, showing construction delays and details and tells me in all likelihood the trip will probably take closer to 22 minutes.

To be fair, the Google Maps results incorporate traffic data as well, but the Bing upgrade makes those traffic problems more obvious by displaying them directly on the map.

A screenshot from a Bing Map route request showing real-time traffic conditions in downtown Boston during rush hour on Jan. 5, 2012.

None of the technology described above is new, but it could be coming to personal computers over the next few years, if a recent patent filing from Apple is any indication.

The system would enable people to control their computer with hand gestures, manipulating on-screen virtual control buttons and knobs and navigating through documents and information in 3D. This may well be in concert with other new human-machine interface methods like on screen multitouch and voice control. Apple hasn't said whether they plan on integrating Siri with other products, but if its trial run on the iPhone goes well, we can't imagine why they wouldn't.

In its typical fashion, Apple is not exactly innovating here. Oblong Industries is just one company who specializes in 3D gesture-controlled computing. If all of this sounds reminiscent of the movie Minitory Report it's no mistake. One of the company's founders actually designed one of the UIs Tom Cruise uses in the movie.

Rather than being the first to implement the technology, Apple may do what Apple typically does and simply manage to package it in a consumer-friendly, well-designed fashion and then help popularize its use on personal computers.

The significance here is less about Apple doing some new and cool and more about where human-machine interactions are heading in the future.

Wireless Ink is the creator behind Winksite, described by us in 2007 as a "mobile conversion and community site" that allows users to create mobile sites to engage users. According to Reuters, Winksite has 75,000 registered users versus millions of Facebook mobile users and potential millions of users for Google Buzz, which was also mentioned in the suit.

"If two of the most resource-rich, patent-savvy and technologically advanced companies leading the Internet were not aware of the '983 patent, despite its potential ramifications upon a major segment of the defendants' business," Wireless Ink wrote, "this was solely due to a deliberate indifference on the part of defendants."

Google and Facebook failed to have the patent ruled invalid or Winksite's claim thrown out, so the likelihood now is that the companies will have to pay Wireless Ink Corp to get the matter resolved.

Wireless Ink is seeking a stop to the patent infringement along with compensatory and treble damages. Given the amount of users that access Facebook through their smartphones, it will likely be Facebook that is affected more by the Winksite claims than Google, considering that Google Buzz adoption remains low.

Lodsys sent a letter to application makers on May 13 saying they must pay the company for use of such technology as in-app payments. Today, Apple sent a letter to Lodsys saying the company has a "fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple's license and the way Apple's products work." Lodsys likens Apple to a landowner that a hotel is built on and the services provided are the responsibility of the hotel, not the landowner. Is Lodsys trying to sell the same bill of goods twice or are application developers liable to pay Lodsys for the patents outside of the services that Apple provides to them?

Lodsys owns four patents that it is saying application makers must pay to use, even though Apple already has a license on the patents that it says extends to developers.

Here are the services that Lodsys says it patents cover:

• provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
• conduct online subscription renewals
• provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies
• survey users for their impressions of their products and services
• assist customers to customize their products and services
• display interactive online advertisements
• collect information on how users actually use their products and services
• sell upgrades or complimentary products
• maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation

That is a pretty broad list. Lodsys says that, in addition to Apple, Google and Microsoft are licensed for the nameplate product and services enumerated by the patents.

Apple says that since the use of the patents are tied through Apple resources and its APIs that it can decide who and how they are used, regardless of what Lodsys thinks in the matter.

According to mobile-focused blog Unwired View, the innovation comes in the form of using nearby phones to measure traffic speed and density and then adapting a billboard's content accordingly.

When traffic is moving fast and drivers have no time to pay attention to billboards, or there's a dense crowd on the street so you are distracted and less likely to pay attention, the billboard may just blast a huge logo and slogan of the advertiser at you, to catch any peripheral attention it can get. When traffic slows down in a jam, and you are sitting bored at the wheel waiting for a car in front to move the next few meters, grateful for any distraction, the same billboard will give you a detailed information about the service, prices, benefits and stuff.

The two separate patents are for "Adaptive roadside billboard system and related methods" and "Adaptive pedestrian billboard system and related methods"; both are described as having a storage system that could retain a number of different messages for different speeds and traffic densities. Beyond the level of detail involved, such a system could also be used to offer interaction opportunities when density is high and speed is low (such as in a traffic jam).

The next step, of course, is for billboards to begin collecting more personal information than simply crowd-aggregated data - such as the types of cars being driven - to cater advertising more specifically to the people present. That same next step, however, treads on thinner ice in regards to privacy than simply the density and speed of traffic, which is already used by systems such as Google Maps to provide traffic analysis.

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

The nine patents that Microsoft holds Salesforce to have broken are the following.

• Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
• System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
• Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
• Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
• Aggregation of system settings into objects
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
• System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

The filing requests triple damages and a permanent injunction against Salesforce's continued alleged use of the patents.

We have been and may in the future be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights.

In an SEC filing in January, Salesforce acknowledged the interest of a company that appears to be Microsoft.

"The software and Internet industries are characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, trademarks and copyrights and by frequent litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. We have received in the past and may receive in the future communications from third parties claiming that we have infringed on the intellectual property rights of others. During fiscal 2009, we received a communication from a large technology company alleging that we were infringing upon some of their patents. We continue to analyze the potential merits of their claims, the potential defenses to such claims and potential counter claims, and the possibility of a license agreement as an alternative to litigation. We are currently in discussions with this company and no litigation has been filed to date."

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php Enterprise Tue, 18 May 2010 19:00:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, "displaying a news feed in a social network environment." Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be "one of the most significant social web patents" in a decade.

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there's going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We've got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we're going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.

]]> Working Summary: This patent appears to cover primarily implicit user activity updates (such as "person X changed their employer listed or their relationship status or became friends with person Y") and the dynamic ranking of those items when delivered in the context of a social network. In contemporary Facebook terms, it would probably cover the News Feed but not the status messages in the Live Feed. It would probably not impact what Twitter is doing today. It could impact any number of other social networks - like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. But it's possible that Facebook will only use this patent defensively. Time will tell what the company's intentions are.

18 months ago we wrote the following, as site after site adopted a Newsfeed model for delivering updates to users:


Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!

MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo!, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader and even Google Buzz - do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's? Twitter probably doesn't fall under this patent because the filing

Text of the Patent

Here's the abstract for the patent, filed August 11th, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg listed as the first inventor:


A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

An initial response from Google's Chris Messina, a leader of the Activity Streams standards organization that includes Facebook.


I hope that this is defensive and Facebook doesn't intent to enforce this patent. this is why the Open Web Foundation was instantiated, so we could work on these kinds of features without any one organization invoking patent rights. this is just one more example of how the patent system isn't architected to support the right kind of innovation.

[For all the other websites using activity streams-like formats] if this patent gets enforced, you could do it in reverse chronological order where there is no algorithmic ranking or you could license this technology from Facebook. i don't know what this means for Facebook's Platform and Connect.

It sounds crazy, but did Facebook invent the algorithm-driven newsfeed? Messina wasn't quite willing to grant that in our conversation, but it's a tough call. "Facebook certainly built the whole phenomena around the newsfeed," he said.

Don't miss: Dave Winer's take on this news.

Nick O'Neill has published the following update to his story, but I'm not buying his conclusion:


It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial.

Implicit actions are a very big deal. LinkedIn contacts making new connections or changing their jobs would be the most immediate example that comes to mind. If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social web.

There's an active conversation going on our Google Buzz page for this topic, too.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_granted_patent_on_the_news_feed_-_this_co.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_granted_patent_on_the_news_feed_-_this_co.php News Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:50:27 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick You're walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you're shown a note left in that location by one of your friends - along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again - your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn't so much anymore, does it?

18 months ago Yahoo! filed a sophisticated patent on VIRTUAL NOTES IN A REALITY OVERLAY and that patent was published last week. Check out the patent sketches below.

]]> The technology envisioned by the team of senior researchers who filed the application is reminiscent of now-available apps like Loopt, BlockChalk, Junaio and others. The whole vision of location, social and advertising features put together, however, may be quite unique. The patent also goes beyond location to include notes tied to mobile objects like cars and people.

Update: This report at first mistakenly claimed that the patent in question had been granted. In fact it has merely been filed and published. The US Patent Office customarily publishes patents 18 months after they have been filed, then evaluates them as soon as it is able to afterwords. (Usually not very soon.) Given the pace of web technology these days, that process sounds absurd, but I apologize for reporting on it incorrectly anyway.

Yahoo's patent was filed in July of 2008, published after the customary 18 months last Thursday and first blogged about by upstart tech news site GoRumors this morning. The same team of inventors had another related patent application published at the end of last year on an augmented reality device that would discover audio, video and other information that's pertinent to a user's physical surroundings and display that information on a screen overlay.

The technology described in this latest patent isn't just location-based social networking, or Augmented Reality "air tagging" - it includes social graph analysis, permissioning, expiration dates, contextual advertising and more. It's not just text notes, it includes methods of augmented reality with photos, videos and more. While the most popular mobile augmented reality apps on the market today focus on text on top of locations - there's no reason why reality can't be augmented in other ways as well.

There's no indication that the technology exists yet outside of the patent application and sketches below, but if Yahoo! could put together such an integrated vision of location-based features then it would have a very interesting service on its hands.

This vision puts emphasis on limited visibility of public notes based on the social connections of people doing the reading and writing, on the use of the tool for communication between people more than for public graffiti, on notes tied to entities and not just to places and on advertising based on a reader's past expressed interests. That sounds like the kind of thing Facebook might do with its inevitably forthcoming location services.

Will anything come of this patent? It's hard to say, since it's Yahoo, where genius flowers but then too often gets left out in the cold to die. Just two months before this innovative patent was filed, were were heralding Yahoo's brand new Location Database API as a would-be fountain of location-aware apps. Almost two years later, though geo is hotter than ever, it seems that nothing much has come of that effort. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong about that.) Six months ago we ran an article titled Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect. That doesn't seem like such a hot topic anymore, either. We asked Yahoo! for comment this morning about this latest patent and haven't been put in touch with anyone yet.

None the less, these are some very interesting ideas. Someone is sure to build something like this very soon. Maybe it will be Yahoo.

Watch this space for ReadWriteWeb's next public event and future research reports on Augmented Reality and geolocation.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location_social_augmented_reality.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location_social_augmented_reality.php Augmented Reality Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:50:20 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Google just received a design patent for Google Search's homepage. It took the US Patent Office over five years to approve this patent (D599,372) for the design of a "graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal," but Google's request was finally approved yesterday. The company already owned a patent for its search results pages. In addition, Google also received a patent for a server-based spellchecker yesterday, as well as another one for "collaborative web page authoring."
]]> We don't assume that Google will soon start a patent fight with Yahoo over this, but Yahoo Search's current homepage obviously looks quite similar to Google's, though without the two prominent button's underneath the search box. We are obviously not lawyers, but as far as we know, design patents are basically just a form of making sure the design of a functional item is protected and not so much an acknowledgment that this is a completely new invention. Design patents have to be for a new designs though, and we just have to wonder if somebody else didn't offer a similarly minimalist search interface before Google.

Tip of the hat to Ryan Tate at Gawker for first noticing this patent.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_patents_its_homepage.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_patents_its_homepage.php News Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:12:31 -0800 Frederic Lardinois We live in an age when success of innovation is mixed with unprecedented failures. On one hand we're reinventing the web, fighting for a greener future and building genomix. On the other there are housing bubbles, credit crises and war.

The technology patent crisis is important to our future. For decades the patent law served its purpose. Inventors used copyrights, trademarks and patents to protect their work and launch their innovations. But today's technology intellectual property system is a failure - unable to keep up with the speed of innovation, it's fallen apart.

]]> The result? We live in an age of open source ideas. We freely borrow and build on each other's solutions. At first glance this may seem fine, but there are important consequences that may change the way we innovate. What happens when a big company copies a startup? What happens when dozens of startups copy each other?

In this post we work through these and other questions, in attempting to understand where intellectual property in technology is heading.

The Good Old Patents

The word patent comes from Latin and means to lay open. Patents were established as the means by which inventors disclose their products to the public. In a typical process the inventor would write down the steps, or the algorithm, for the creation and send it to the patent office for consideration.

Once granted, the patent serves as a protection for the invention. Legally, no one is allowed to copy the invention; instead, they're required to license it and typically pay royalties.

The patent is granted for a limited, usually lengthy, period of time. After the patent expires, the innovation becomes essentially public and now can be used by anyone. So the protection that inventors enjoy comes at a cost, for they eventually have to give up their invention.

Previously, when facing the choice between disclosing an invention or not, people did so more often than not. The reason: the time span the patent held was sufficient to make money because of the exclusivity guaranteed by the patent.

The system worked quite well when the world was slower, but the recent acceleration changed everything. With time to market being much shorter, the patent system instantly become ridiculous and obsolete.

The Patent Crisis

Here's a simple scenario. A startup produces an innovative idea and works with a patent lawyer to file a patent. This takes a considerable amount of time (a few months at least) and a substantial amount of money ($25K+). But the startup does it anyway and after the patent is filed, people feel comforted that their idea is safe.

Right? Of course not! Not even close. Any patent filed today will take 4-6 years to approve. In the current era where a week is a long time and a year is an eternity, the time to process a patent is unbearably long. Because of this gap, filing a patent appears useless. While you can threaten based on a pending patent, people are unlikely to take it seriously.

Litigating software patents in court is expensive and often unsuccessful. The problem is that with software you can do things slightly differently and the patent becomes unenforceble. This is because lawmakers ensure patent claims are as narrow as possible. For example, if someone implements just a piece of the whole system differently, the court is unlikely to rule in your favor.

The Age of Shameless Stealing

The problem is that while your patent is pending, competitors can copy your ideas and build on them. By the time your patent is granted, competitors can already win the market, be profitable, or even exit out of business.

The mismatch between the time it takes to get the patent and time it takes to copy the innovation encourages the copycats. Today's software industry is flooded with clones.

There are dozens of me too! startups for each major technology area. All the startups are borrowing ideas, UI elements and functionality from each other. And because of the powerful technology at our disposal copying is so easy. Someone said to me once: Oh we don't want to use your technology, my dev guys can whip out something like this in a couple of days.

Sadly, the age of open source ideas is actually the age of shameless stealing.

Who Wins?

Startups copy each other, but the problem doesn't stop there. It gets worse when web giants copy startups. Once your idea gets incorporated into a big company's offering, things get tough.

A recent example is new Google browser Chrome. No doubt, it's a spectacular piece of software - elegant, simple, probably the browser of the future. A lot of the ideas in Chrome are not original, but taken from other browsers and add-ons.

Is this fair? Not really. But in today's tech world, the word fair has been replaced with the phrase fair game. Luckily for startups, most big companies are not good at execution, so it isn't that easy for them to copy. But when and if a large company comes out with a clone, the match is unfair.

Resources and distribution certainly matter when it comes to tech adoption, so the patent situation is strongly in favor of big companies. They can observe the market, see what ideas take off, and cherry pick what they see as interesting.

Who Really Wins

Perhaps the biggest irony in this patent debacle is that it benefits customers. Previously a patent would create a lock, a barrier to entry, while today innovation occurs with greater speed.

Because patents are irrelevant, companies small and large relentlessly go after each other, raising the bar, coming up with better products. At the end of the day this benefits the users.

We're observing an evolutionary dynamic where companies are battling for viewers. This is a street fight where the gloves are off and big money is at stake. Companies are pushing each other to deliver better software faster. In the meantime, users are enjoying the new elegant tools as well as the fight itself.

The Future of Technology Innovation

Where is all this heading? What is the future of innovation and intellectual property around it?

The status quo doesn't make sense. The laws need to be useful, and current patent laws are obsolete and inadequate. Is there a middle ground between old patents and no laws at all? Brad Feld, who has written a lot on this topic over the past years, thinks the answer is no:

"After wrestling with software patents for 15 years, I've concluded there simply is no middle ground. If we continue on the path we're on, patents will increase in their overall expense to the system. Everyone will feel compelled to apply for as many (and as broad) patents as possible, if only for defensive reasons."

In a related post, Fred Wilson writes a cliche of the week: Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some. He continues:

"I have never seen patents make a business, but I have seen lack of patents hurt a business on many occasions. IP battles are like the cold war. Those who have patents can keep others honest because nobody wants to start a war that might end in everyone's destruction. But those who have no patents are sitting ducks and don't have the weapons to keep others honest. My advice to entrepreneurs is always file a bunch of patents. But don't expect they'll ever do more than keep others at bay."

It doesn't seem satisfactory either way. To not have patents at all means that at the end of the day big companies will always absorb all the best innovation for free. Filing patents just for the sake of having weapons that you're likely never to use seems costly and wasteful.

Is there a middle ground? What would you like to see happen in the future with software intellectual property?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/patent_crisis_and_the_age_of_open_source_ideas.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/patent_crisis_and_the_age_of_open_source_ideas.php Analysis Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:45:00 -0800 Alex Iskold GraphOn, which considers itself a "leading worldwide developer of server-based application publishing and Web-enabling software solutions," today announced that it is suing Google for infringing on four of GraphOn's patents. According to the complaint (embedded below), Google Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube allegedly infringe on GraphOn's patent for a "unique method of maintaining an automated and network-accessible database" - a patent that is so broad, it basically covers the complete Internet as we know it today.
]]> Trivial Patents

These four patents were filed between July 1998 and May 2004. The earliest, 6,324,538, covers self-publishing on a database driven website and almost reads like a description of a modern blog, though it is more concerned with publishing directories. The later three patents (6,850,940, 7,028,034, and 7,269,591) build upon this and mostly include methods for paying for these services. We are no patent lawyers here, but looking over these patents, a lot of it seems to be material that has been covered in database textbooks since the early days of the net.

Stock Is Up

GraphOn's stock is currently up 16% for the day and is now trading at a near record high for 2008 of $0.29. At the height of the first Internet bubble, Graph on was trading for more than $22.

Not the First Time

This lawsuit against Google is part of GraphOn's typical modus operandi. Within the last few years, the company has filed lawsuits against AutoTrader.com (also for the 6,324,538 patent), Match.com, Yahoo, eHarmony, and CareerBuilder. We have been trying to get more information about these other lawsuits, but it doesn't seem like any of these suits were either settled or have gone to court yet, except for the AutoTrader.com suit, which was settled through a licensing agreement in January of 2008.

The fact that the company proudly reports this in the press-release helps to put this suit against Google into perspective: this is exactly what GraphOn does. It is interesting that GraphOn waited for five days before issuing this press release. It would almost seem like the company was hoping to drive some publicity by just filing the suit on the 13th, but when that didn't happen, they were more or less forced to announce the suit themselves.

We have embedded the actual complaint below, courtesy of Justia.com:

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/patents_graphon_sues_google_fo.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/patents_graphon_sues_google_fo.php News Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:01:48 -0800 Frederic Lardinois