Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself.

Here’s how Twitter defines “defensive purposes”: “Defensive purposes means that you can defend yourself should another party try to initiate patent litigation against you or your customers or users. Under the IPA, it also means that you can use these patents against anyone who has sued others offensively in the past (up to ten years).”

The first patent to get the IPA treatment is Loren Brichter’s pull to refresh user interface interaction, which was built into Tweetie, the Twitter app that was acquired by the company and adopted as the official client.

Basically, Twitter is saying it’s not going to go after companies that are using pull to refresh, or other parts of Brichter’s patent, within their app. If someone were to claim to have created the functionality first, only then would Twitter defend itself.

Twitter has also announced that two other companies, Biz Stone’s Jelly and the Lift task tracking app, will also be adopting the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. With so many ideas running around, there should be no reason why the first person to successfully file a patent should hold the power to make everyone’s lives miserable. At the end of the day, all companies benefitted from Brichter’s work, and it’s been nice to see Twitter not going after anyone else for replicating parts of it.

When the IPA was announced last year, Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger had this to say:

This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

Using patents as a shield will hopefully slow down the rampant patent trolling that has plagued the technology space for the past ten years. Twitter, Jelly and Lift promise not to be trolls, and that’s a good thing.

You can read the full IPA draft here to see if it’s something your company would want to adopt.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The USPTO published a number of Apple patent applications Tuesday, including two related to automobiles (via AppleInsider). The car patents both describe systems that can be built into future iPhones, replacing most of the functionality of your standard key fob with the smartphone, and providing a way to help drivers navigate the often maze-like interiors of parking garages to find their ride.

In one application, Apple describes what amounts to a series of different indoor positioning systems to help drivers locate their cars when parked. The system would involve pairing a car and an iPhone via Bluetooth, and then using that connection to automatically detect when a car ends up actually parking in a spot. Then, it uses sensor data communicated from the parking facility itself to peg a location.

Once a user returns to the garage, they can trigger the phone to find their current positioning data from the same system, and then provide actual guidance or directions back to their car itself. The patent describes parking garages in which devices are placed at regular intervals throughout to help facilitate the indoor location portion. Apple’s recent acquisition of indoor positioning system company WiFiSLAM could also work very well in terms of helping provide a way to make this system work.

The IPS element is interesting, but where Apple’s patent is really unique is in using on-board device sensors, including things like the camera and microphone, to determine automatically when a car parks to begin with to trigger the car location logging information. There are plenty of “where did I park my car” apps out there (though few boast IPS), but the automatic, fully-integrated way Apple’s system would work would make it so that you don’t even have to remember to activate it.

The other car-related application describes a system that would turn the iPhone into a remote car starter, unlocker, and essentially a parental control device for a target vehicle. The patent talks about using Bluetooth to pair a car and a handset, then allowing a user to choose their level of security, making it possible to have the phone unlock the car automatically based on proximity, or require a PIN to even use any car control functions.

Apple’s patent goes further than most remote starter/unlocker key fobs by allowing a user to set specific limits for particular devices, like making it possible to start the engine with a phone only during set hours, setting a max speed for use with a particular device, limiting access to infotainment services, and building in geofencing. All of these can be used in theft prevention, but also to set limits on say a teen child’s car permissions.

It’s about time that cars got tighter integration with mobile devices, in ways that make the best use of all the tech on board our modern smartphones. Many car companies seem to be open to working closer with Apple, too, so while there’s a lot of infrastructure changes described in these patents, we still could see these features make their way to shipping devices over the next few years.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Archive Team, the same group who once saved around 900 GB of Geocities content before Yahoo shut it down, later releasing it in torrent format, is now focusing on archiving content from another Yahoo property preparing to hit the chopping block: Upcoming.org. The collective’s involvement in saving the index of the events database follows an impassioned plea from creator Andy Baio, who recently explained how Yahoo’s security made it difficult to back up the site’s content by simply scraping pages.

His post on Friday – well worth the read for the personal insight on what it was like to watch Yahoo slowly destroy his startup following the acquisition – has him calling the choice to sell to Yahoo “a horrible mistake,” and Yahoo “a particularly horrible steward for the community” Upcoming.org had built.

Baio doesn’t at all mince words in his post, saying that the team came into Yahoo hopeful, but soon discovered that the tech company wouldn’t live up to its promises. He wrote:

It wasn’t clear how dysfunctional the rest of Yahoo was until we’d settled in, and there was no indication how horrible they’d soon become in the years to follow. This was long before they gave up dissidents to the Chinese government, closed Geocities, weaponized their patents, “sunsetted” Delicious, and a number of other awful decisions.

The founder, also known for having built Playfic and Supercut, and helping to build Kickstarter, among other things, refers Yahoo’s decision to shutter Upcoming.org as “Yahoo’s typical f***-off-and-die style,” noting that the company offered only eleven days of notice and no way to back up past events.

He then detailed some of the technical challenges involved with attempting to archive from Upcoming, saying that even though its events and venues use auto-incremented IDs, Yahoo security measures only allow for scraping a few pages using curl or httrack before Yahoo starts serving up blank responses.

Baio then asks the community for help with getting a dump in any form.

As it turns out, the community had already stepped in. Baio tells us that he heard about the closure from friends, and then posted about it on the afternoon of the 19th. But he soon realized that the Archive Team had started rescue work of their own, after checking out this Github repository.

And now, the Archive Team needs your help, too, if you’re at all inclined.

The team, led by computer historian Jason Scott, has experience pulling down content from not only Geocities, but also other sites and services like Friendster, MobileMe, and Fortune City. It’s also currently working on Posterous, Formspring, plus Gamespy, 1up, UGO, and IGN, to name a few.

To help with Upcoming.org’s archival efforts, interested participants can download and install ArchiveTeam Warrior for Windows, Mac or Linux. The software is a virtual appliance that helps anyone to archive websites, then backup the saved content to Archive Team servers.

After you install the application, just choose the “Upcoming” project to begin the backup process, or choose “ArchiveTeam’s Choice,” which allows the team to adjust the software’s focus on demand. You can track progress of the Upcoming.org archival process here.

Here’s how the software works, an explanation courtesy of Baio himself:

Baio says that the Archive Team’s software also addresses the technical challenges he had previously encountered, noting that “they’re very thorough.”

And he adds that while he has no plans to ever relaunch Upcoming, he does want to put the saved content back online. “I’m hoping to set up a permanent archive for posterity and some visualizations of the site’s activity over the last decade,” Baio explains.

If you have spare cycles, it’s a lot more beneficial than bitcoin mining these days, that’s for sure.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new patent published by the USPTO today (via PhoneArena) indicates that Amazon is looking into a way to limit the amount of data exchanged when two parties engage in a mobile payment transaction. The patent describes a way to sub in unique identifiers for information like name and email address that would otherwise be used to verify the identities of buyer and seller.

Participants who want to keep their information to themselves would have to first register with the service, which presumably would be operated by Amazon. They’d then be issued temporary tokens, which expire once a transaction is completed to help initiate and complete the payment. No information about either party would be revealed, with Amazon itself the only one involved with the identity of buyer and seller.

To initiate a transaction, what you would do is send a text to Amazon’s mobile payment service, something like “PAY 20,” which authorizes a payment of $20. You’d get a code in response, which you could then send to the merchant or payee, and they’d be able to use that to credit their own account. Security measures, like tying a code at least partially to a recipient’s phone number, would ensure only that party could redeem it to make sure messages couldn’t be faked or intercepted and redeemed by others.

If Amazon were to implement this, they could become a competitor for payment intermediaries like PayPal. Given that its online marketplace already competes with PayPal owner eBay, and that it already has millions of user accounts with active credit cards on file, it’s not too much of a stretch for the company away from its core business.

Last year, we reported that Amazon might be working on a Square competitor, which would be another different entry into mobile payments. Anonymized payments based on SMS or email codes might be a different way of looking at the same problem, but it’s an indication that Amazon is at least investing research and development dollars into the idea.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft just scored a coup on the patent royalty front, with a new deal with Taiwanese phone maker, Hon Hai, which owns Foxconn.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will get paid a flat fee per Android and Chrome-based device that Foxconn makes. And there are a lot of those. A whopping 40 percent of the world’s phones come from the firm’s China-based factories. Foxconn is an ODM, or “original design manufacturer”, and makes Android devices for clients like Acer and Amazon (it makes the Kindle Fire).

It’s famous for making iPhones and iPads as well.

The exact patents licensed were not revealed, but Microsoft has been famously litigious on the patent scene. With regard to the Android OS, legal documents filed in 2010 against Motorola and against Barnes & Noble in 2011 give some clues.

One of its patent claims is against a way that long and short file names are implemented, and is linked to the FAT16 file system used by older Microsoft OSes like MS-DOS and Windows.

Other patents include data management, across flash drives and another in contact databases. Microsoft’s user interface patents are also involved.

Microsoft said that over 50 percent of the world’s Android phones come from manufacturers that already have patent agreements in place with it. These include Samsung, LG and HTC, for example. Adding Foxconn to that list will give it a huge boost to these royalty payments, an already huge sum—in 2011, Microsoft was estimated to be making more from patent royalties from phone makers than its own smartphone business.

Other behind-the-scenes manufacturers similar to Foxconn such as Quanta and Pegatron also have licensing agreements with Microsoft.

Microsoft going after manufacturers has been referred to as “extortion” by Google. It made this statement in late-2011 after Samsung and Microsoft decided to cross-license their patents. Probably because Samsung was sick of all the lawsuits with Apple.

Hon Hai is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, and holds some 54,000 patents globally.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today pledged that it will not sue any users, distributors or developers who have implemented open-source versions of its MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets, even though these implementations (including, for example, Apache Hadoop) probably infringe upon 10 patents Google holds for this technology. This move, the company’s senior patent counsel Duane Valz writes in today’s announcement, is meant to “serve as a model for the industry, and we’re encouraging other patent holders to adopt the pledge or a similar initiative.”

Obviously, this pledge only covers a very small slice of Google’s overall patent portfolio, but Google expects to expand the set of patents and technologies covered by this pledge over time. The company also reserves itself the right to retaliate if it is attacked first.

Patent attacks are, sadly, a constant threat in the software business and some groups like the Open Invention Network, which counts Google, Red Hat, Sony and IBM among its backers, are trying to make it a bit easier to ensure that the development of popular open-source products isn’t held back by patent concerns.

Google believes that this “Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge” will serve as a model and believes that similar pledges that its partners and competitors will hopefully take will introduce some much-need transparency, breadth and security to this process:

• Transparency. Patent holders determine exactly which patents and related technologies they wish to pledge, offering developers and the public transparency around patent rights.
• Breadth. Protections under the OPN Pledge are not confined to a specific project or open-source copyright license. (Google contributes a lot of code under such licenses, like the Apache or GNU GPL licenses, but their patent protections are limited.) The OPN Pledge, by contrast, applies to any open-source software—past, present or future—that might rely on the pledged patents.
• Defensive protection. The Pledge may be terminated, but only if a party brings a patent suit against Google products or services, or is directly profiting from such litigation.
• Durability. The Pledge remains in force for the life of the patents, even if we transfer them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung lost out big to Apple last year in a mobile patent blowout in the U.S., but it’s been slowly building up an arsenal of patents that potentially will keep it from falling into the same situation again. Samsung, also currently the world’s biggest mobile company, received the most mobile patents in 2012, and it now holds the most mobile patents of any company worldwide, according to the latest patent report out from mobile analyst Chetan Sharma, which lays out a thicket of companies scrambling to put a legal seal on their intellectual property in the fast-moving world of wireless communications.

For his study, Sharma looked at more than 7 million mobile patents awarded in the U.S. and Europe, the two biggest markets for patents globally at the moment. He found that the U.S. has stolen a march over its old world counterpart since 1996. The U.S. accounts for nearly three-quarters (72%) of all mobile patents across the two regions.

Within the wider world of technology patents, mobile in particular is on the rise. In the U.S., Sharma believes that by the end of this year mobile patents will account for 25% of all patents granted, compared to just 5% in 2001. In Europe, mobile patents will be 10% of the whole patent pool.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Not only is mobile in a rapid period of development at the moment — the growth of smartphone and tablet usage is fuelling a massive market for services, hardware features, networking innovations and more. But in addition to that, mobile patent litigation has, for better or worse, proven to be lucrative for those who win — either by way of licensing fees (one example: the cut that Microsoft gets on Android devices) or court victories (the $1 billion Apple/Samsung case perhaps being the most notable example, even if it is still getting contested).

On the European side, the fact that the proportion is lower could be due to fewer companies in the region putting as much emphasis on R&D as in the U.S., but also it is a comment about the wider shifts in gravity that we see in the tech world. On that note, it’s also interesting to note that 2011 was the first year that China outstripped the U.S. in patent growth — 22% that year compared to 3.3% for the U.S. and 3.8% worldwide — although it is still far behind the U.S., Europe and Japan in terms of actual patents. “The numbers of foreign filings are now in the majority for both the applications filed as well as the patents granted,” Sharma notes.

Sharma notes that Samsung’s rise to the top has bumped Nokia from its traditional position as biggest mobile patent holder. Others that are still making the top-10 include Sony, Microsoft, RIM, LG, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Panasonic, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia. The full ranking for mobile patents granted in 2012 is as follows:

Among mobile operators AT&T, NTT Docomo and Sprint took the top-three slots — but their numbers were too low to get them to compete against vendors.

Part of Samsung’s prominence in patents, meanwhile, is down to fact that it covers a wide range of business pieces, similar to Nokia in its heyday. It led not only in device patents, but also infrastructure and platform — the one category where Apple also made it into the top-10:

For a look at what may be coming on the horizon, Sharma also looks at patent applications. He notes that patent applications grew by some 61% in 2012 compared to the same period 10 years ago. Taking into account granted and pending patents, IBM stands out ahead of the group, with Microsoft and Samsung closing in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple has been awarded a patent today (via AppleInsider) that describes an augmented reality (AR) system that can tag real-world items in a live video stream and display information about them in a HUD overlay. It sounds exactly like Pop-Up video in practice: turn your device to focus on Rick Astley, for instance, and get a pop-up picture of the singer belting out “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

The patent describes an AR system for iOS devices, which can be used in a variety of different ways. At its most basic, it works by labeling elements of an image in a live video feed, as when it names the parts of a circuit board being shot with the rear-facing camera on an iPad-like device in Apple’s patent. But it has more advanced features, too: Apple describes a user being able to edit the supplied data in case of inaccuracies or incorrect matches, and also includes various means for sharing the information between users and devices.

Apple’s system involves a collaboration aspect, as one user can annotate or edit the information being presented on their own view, and send it to a second user’s device. The iOS device employing the AR tech is also described as being able to show both the straight image itself, and the version with overlaid information at once in windows side-by-side, allowing both an unobstructed view and one with all the contextual information. In Apple’s provided example, a real-world view of San Francisco is paired with a computer-generated model of the same. The user can interact with the CG model to navigate through streets, and modify points of interest in case they’re traveling, something which sounds like it would add considerably to the current iOS Maps experience.

This type of dual-view could then be shared live with a second user, Apple says in the patent. So one user could build a virtual map and highlight important POIs, and then sync that with a second user’s device to help them navigate. It could also be used to collaborate in various professions, including doctors comparing x-rays or other medical imaging.

This AR system is mostly unique because of its sharing and collaboration features, but it also includes techniques that could easily be at home in a wearable AR display like Google Glass. But even as just a simple extension to Maps, it has value, and as an API built into iOS, the possibilities really start to take off. AR is getting more advanced, but we’ve seen players like Layar pivot away from similar products. Still, Apple would have different goals with such an invention, so it’s still possible this could make its way to shipping product.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple has a couple of new interesting glimpses into possible new future tech published by the USPTO today, including a patent application for an iPad Smart Cover with a built-in battery and induction charging, and a mobile camera design that offers true optical zoom, instead of the low-quality digital zoom we’re all used to in current devices.

The induction charging patent application (via AppleInsider) makes the Smart Cover about a thousand times more useful than it is in its current form. It adds an inductive charging coil to the Smart Cover, which can transmit to a receiving end within the iPad itself. The Smart Cover would also contain a battery within its segmented padded divisions, which would make it possible to charge up the iPad when the Smart Cover is covering the iPad’s screen and lined up properly via the existing built-in magnets, or when folded behind the iPad to prop it up for viewing.

The Smart Cover itself would need to be plugged in to charge, or alternatively could be fitted with solar panels to pick up extra juice from ambient light. But the big news for the larger ecosystem would be that the iPad itself would have to be outfitted with wireless charging equipment. So long as Apple stuck with an accepted standard like Qi for that tech, it would open the door for plenty of new opportunities from third-party accessory makers: you can basically taste the fresh batch of new Kickstarter projects.

In a second application published today (via UnwiredView), Apple describes a new type of digital camera for inclusion in mobile devices, which would enable optical zooming in a module that’s still small enough to fit inside of an iPhone 5′s case. Basically, the camer would bounce incoming light off of an internal mirror at a 90-degree angle, meaning it could use the entire width of the phone to build a lens and optical zoom element rather than just being limited by the thickness of the device’s body from front to back.

The patent also describes using a light splitter cube to break up incoming light into separate red, blue and green frequencies, which makes it possible to use camera sensors that are more color-accurate, and take in much more light in the same environment vs. sensors that have light-splitting features build in. Once again, this is made possible thanks to the added room for camera elements Apple would be able to use by changing the orientation of the camera components to lengthwise across the device via the mirror behind the lens on the back of the camera.

Both of these patents are significant, because they provide avenues Apple can explore to add truly new and useful features to the iPad and iPhone. Induction charging has been rumored as a possible feature of the iPhone 5, the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6, but so far it hasn’t come to pass. Apple generally waits on wireless tech for it to prove its value with consumers before adding it to their products, however. The camera design modification, however, is something it could easily implement ahead of anyone else, since Apple tends to focus special attention on camera improvements in the iPhone, especially when making otherwise iterative improvements (as in the leap between the iPhone 4 and 4S, for instance).

Dramatic changes to product hardware would go a long way toward helping Apple address criticism that it’s ‘falling behind’ rivals like Samsung in the innovation department, and these in particular would be impressive by avoiding the specs race in favor of more interesting changes with real relevance to users. Still, Apple’s patents are never a good indicator of immediate product development strategies, so don’t hold your breath for these features in Apple’s next generation of devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple has been granted a patent today (via AppleInsider) in an area where it hasn’t had tremendous success: social networking. But the system described in the patent isn’t specific to Apple’s own social services, and instead describes software that could be integrated into iOS and made accessible to other apps and services as an API to help regulate and maintain a common “friend service database.”

On the one hand, Apple’s patent describes a way to reconcile data from various apps around friends and friend requests, updating existing contacts and merging entries as necessary to make sure that data from all social apps is used to keep records as up-to-date as possible. Already, we see something like this at work as the iOS Contacts app can plug into and draw information from Facebook and iOS, but this patent covers much broader use which could be made available on an app-by-app basis via an API.

The other, perhaps more important feature here is an anti-spam recognition engine that can automatically flag users who are virtually ‘stalking’ others, by pelting them with numerous friend requests. Apple’s patent describes a way to assign users both a spammer and stalker count depending on their actions. The spammer count is upped every time a user sends out a friend request or similar attempt to connect, while the stalker count increases every time one of those requests is rejected. Hit a certain pre-determined threshold in either, and that user’s requests will be ignored entirely by the other party.

Social networks already employ anti-spam measures in their own products, but Apple’s is interesting because it would be made accessible to outside developers via API, as described in the patent. An anti-spammer and stalker database that covers iOS and its third-party developers as a whole would be a powerful tool, and potentially a big help in curbing unwanted connection attempts, which is in turn better for overall engagement.

Apple isn’t likely to go all-out on a social networking product of its own: it seems to have accepted that the best way to make the iOS platform social is through third-party service integration. But tools like the one described in this patent could help others who are doing social on the platform maximize their own products.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch