The school bus tracking is a perimenter warning, where the indication of location of the bus isn’t exact, but lets you know when it is within a certain radius. Of course, you already know the route of the bus, and the time that it normally comes down that route. You need a reason, and probably a password to use the system.

I can pull themes from individual patents maybe, or from individual patent holders, but I probably need to spend a few more months looking at some of these to see how strong or weak those themes might be. Generally, I see things like security, privacy, and convenience being issues that arise in some of these.

It’s also easy to see that Nokia is coming out with ideas to make phones more interesting and useful and even fun, in order to sell more phones, and they even explicitely say that in the filing for the augmented reality game filing I point to above.

It might not be a bad idea for me to try to do some kind of quarterly assessment of the patent applications that have come out, exploring that topic.

Thanks.

Many of your mobile patent posts look like they provide services that could potentially be dangerous or helpful – specially in an emergency.

I wonder if you have noticed any theme from the patent holders. Do any focus more on protection technology than the others?

some of that SOUNDS dangerous. Tracking of school buses? By who and for what purpose? Could be nefarious, eh?

I’m enjoying these mobile search patent posts so far. Interesting blog you have – I like the idea of tracking trends in mobile search.

Thanks for the excellent post.
Hope you make it a weekly feature.

A pleasure to meet you. Thanks for helping make this a richer post with your descriptions of what is going on in sportsclubs in Switzerland, and in Asia with some other mobile technology.

A few of these patent applications, and other mobile patent applications that I’ve seen this week were originally filed in Europe or Asia, and are being brought to the United States to be patented here. The US does lag behind in a number of areas involving the use of mobile technologies. I suspect part of the reason behind that is because we have invested so much in legacy technologies and infrastructure to support them. But, this is a technology area that is experiencing tremendous growth in the United States.

I expect that some of the technology described in these patent applications are things that people have been doing in one form or another, and some of the technology is something that might happen in the future, or just might not be developed.

So the technologies behind some of these patent applications may not be new, and they may already be in use. What is new are that these applications have just been published, and they might provide some insight into the methods and processes behind the technology, and the reasons why some of these companies have possibly adopted one approach over another.

I’m been working towards making this a weekly feature, and your insight in this area is very much appreciated.

Cheers.

First of all – congrats excellent researched this post. Regarding all those Patents of various Companys a view experiences from Switzerland. Many Sportsclubs offers allready since a view years during liveevents following sms-services for the audience/fans:
- SMS-Messageboard (Fan’s can send a message to a board which will be display after a controll regarding the content – I guess you can imagine )
- SMS-Auctions (Bid for a Player-T-Shirt)
- SMS-Votings (Which Player – Nr. – was the best during the whole game)
- Users receives SMS-News about Players, Results etc.
- SMS-Quizzes where the audience can win something
- etc.
- Via WAP and/or XHTML Fans get addtional informations/content for example, Videos, best-Player-Pic, Action-Shoots etc.

But all this stuff is not new – and far behind. When you have a look at Asia and or Customers of Hutchinon (3) they use those services since a view years – and MNO got nice ARPU’s .

Unfortunatly LBS/A-GPS is not yet available in Switzerland at any MNO. The User-Expenses for Mobile-Data-Access is quit expensive. Some Mobile-Mail (PUSH, PULL etc.) or any other Data-Intensive-Service will yet not sucseed.

Cheers – Howie