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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Patent Watch
From passwords to analytics, software makes life easier
By Kirk Teska, managing partner of Iandiorio Teska & Coleman
MHT's Galen Moore: Nerds and geeks flock to Boston conventions
Homeland Security Sec. Napolitano speaks with universities
MHT's Julie Donnelly: Colleges see uptick in interdisciplinary programs
Business method patents may be in jeopardy depending upon how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Bilski case some day soon. Meanwhile, software patents still appear to be going strong. Let’s take a look this month at a few software patents naming New England inventors.
• You probably have to remember a lot of passwords. Patent No. 7,660,880 (Feb. 9) proposes an identification server program that enables you to use many different passwords, but you don’t have to remember any of them. The identification server stores your passwords, PINS, logon names, and the like, and it knows which logon information is needed for each application. To access a given application, you logon to the identification server, and it supplies the logon information for you. Now, if you could only remember your password for the identification server. This Imprivata Inc. (Lexington) patent names David Ting of Sudbury, Chen Ho of Lexington, Parind Shah of Woburn, and Bushan Byragani of Westford as inventors.
• IBM Corp. patent No. 7,689,595 (March 30) covers an app that automatically provides you with directions to entries in your address book, based on your calendar entries. For example, if your calendar notes that you will be at a restaurant in a remote city and, after dinner, you look up an old friend in that city, the program will provide you with a map and directions from the restaurant to the friend’s home. The inventors include James Doran of New Milford, Conn.
• Another software-based navigation system app is the subject of a patent application published as No. US 2010/0017109 (Jan. 21) by Peter-Frans Pauwels of Concord. Consider this scenario. You use Google to locate the address of a place that you want to visit. Then, you have to (gasp) load the address into your navigation system. What a hassle. No longer. The system allows a person or organization to provide a destination object on their website, enabling a user to add destinations to navigation devices by just selecting the destination object. By bypassing the user interface of the device itself, adding destinations and routes is now much easier.
• Are you influential or non-influential? According to patent No. 7,653,568 (Jan. 26), marketing studies show that no one pays much attention to commercials anymore and that word-of-mouth advertising is the future. The problem is, you have to identify influential people to spread the word about your product. The patent describes a database scoring algorithm for identifying “influentials” using a person’s participation in activities such as politics, serving on committees, writing letters to the editor, signing a petition, or writing articles for magazines. GfK U.S. Holdings Inc. of Wilmington, Del., is the owner of the patent, which includes Michael Dolan of Acton as an inventor.
• Boston-based Roam Data Inc.’s patent No. 7,650,390 (Jan. 19) pertains to “rich Internet applications.” RIAs, according to the patent, are smart-client web applications that have the functionality of traditional desktop applications but transfer the processing for the user interface to the web client. The invention is a method of delivering RIAs to desktop and mobile devices in a way that addresses problems such as security, access control, computing power and bandwidth. The inventors are Michael Arner (Brighton), John Rodley (Scituate), David Lindsay (Marshfield) and Will Graylin (Saugus).
• Charles River Analytics Inc., located in Cambridge, is seeking a patent in the field of “social network analysis.” Little sensors called “Berkley motes” are attached to “people of interest” and a computer algorithm determines if an “interaction” between two people of interest occurred. Sounds kind of Orwellian, eh? Michael Farry of Belmont, Jonathan Pfautz of Carlisle, and Samuel Madden of Cambridge are the inventors in published patent application No. US 2010/0023300, dated Jan. 28.
Kirk Teska is a regular contributor to Mass High Tech.
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