SEO by the Sea

Earlier this year, Google acquired the patents of a real time search engine started in 2009, Wowd (a play on the word “crowd.”) Wowd had no web crawlers, but rather relied upon users downloading a browser application, so that every page they visited was nominated to be included in search results. A Press Release from February, 2010 tells us about the search engine:

Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what’s popular on the Web right now. Unlike other engines in the space, Wowd focuses on discovery and exploration of the entire Web, i.e. surfacing trends, breaking news, social media topics, and popular pages. Wowd then taps into the “attention frontier” of its user community to build real-time search results. Wowd makes it easy to discover the latest trends, topics, and hottest Web pages.

In August of last year, Wowd released a search tool for Facebook, to add a number of features to the Facebook experience, including custom feeds, game spam blocking, and social search. A look at the Wowd website however tells us that “the team has decided to pursue new opportunities,” with some members of the engineering team joining Facebook. There’s no date on the message.

Continue reading Wow! Google Acquires Wowd Search Patents

Google seems to be making a regular habit of acquiring patents from IBM, with a new acquisition of 39 granted patents and two pending patent applications on September 30th, recorded at the USPTO today. Like the earlier transactions this year of 1,030 patents tranferred in May, and 1,023 patents assigned in August, there’s a wide range of technology included in the transaction between Google and IBM.

The list of patents includes one filed in 1996 involving the use of an API and a java applet, which sounded pretty interesting (I listed it first), especially considering the ongoing Oracle-Google litigation involves java and APIs. Some of the other patents included are listed in that patent as being related to it. Other inventions include such things as file archiving approaches, distributed database information systems, encryption, user authentication, and managing configurations of computer systems.

Google and Oracle are set to go to trial on October 31st on claims that Google infringed java related patents held by Oracle, in which Oracle is claiming more than $1 Billion in damages.

Continue reading Google Acquires More IBM Patents In September

It’s a tangled web when it comes to patent acqusitions and infringement lawsuits, and a scorecard isn’t enough to keep track of the all of the businesses involved and the nature of their relationships with one another, as a recent acquisition of patents by Google from Mosaid Technologies illustrates.

In mid-September it was reported that Mosaid Technologies sold $11 million worth of patents to an undisclosed technology company. The purchased involved 5 patent families that Mosaid considered non-strategic patents because there were no licensing deals in place on the patents. It was supposedly the largest sale of intellectual property by the company since they started licensing technology patents around 4 years ago.

According to the US Patent and Trademark database, Google was recently assigned a number of patents from Mosaid Technologies. The assignment was executed on September 9th, and recorded on September 20th. The patents acquired by Google sound similar to those described in the news report I linked to above, involving technologies covering flash memory, encoding data, data compression, database search, and encryption approaches. Originally, a number of these patents appear to have originated at companies other than Mosaid Technologies, including Micron Quantum Devices, Inc., Purple Ray, Inc., Integrated Silicon Solution, Inc., and Chrysalis-ITS, Inc. (which was acquired by Safenet).

If you’ve heard about Mosaid Technologies recently, it may have been because they’ve been involved in some newsworthy events. For example, they acquired Core Wireless Licensing S.a.r.l. at the start of September, which holds approximately 2,000 patents originally filed by Nokia:

Continue reading Google Acquires Non-Strategic Mosaid Technologies Patents

Google was recently assigned a number of unusual and interesting patents from Outland Research, LLC, from inventor Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD, Cal Polytech Professor on leave, and most recently professional film maker. A number of Rosenberg’s inventions have been developed into commercial products found in BMW automobiles, surgical similators and medical imaging systems, and computer mice from Logitech, as well as a 3D animation tool used on films such as Shrek and Ice Age.

It appears that Louis Rosenberg now spends more time as a screenwriter with his company Outland Pictures than as an inventor, but there are a good number of patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned to Outland Research. A number of those showed up recently in the USPTO’s patent assignment database as having been assigned to Google, with an execution date of August 1, 2011, and an assignment recording date of August 29, 2011.

These patents cover a wide range of inventions, but none of them really involve search. In addition to an alternative game controller or computer input device, there’s another patent that describes controlling electronic devices by looking at them and commanding them. Another watches where you’re looking on a computer or ebook reader to save your place if you look away or switch documents. A pair of the Outland Research patents provide ways to use your cell phone to collaboratively rate or reject songs that might be played in restaurants or nightclubs. A series of other patents add enhancements to cell phones and/or media players such as the ability for a group of people to run their own collaborative radio station, or to shake a media player in a certain way to change songs or playlists.

Continue reading Google Picks Up Hardware and Media Patents from Outland Research