Facebook patents recommendations from contact lists

The USPTO awarded Facebook US Patent 9,338,250, titled "Associating received contact information with user profiles stored by a social networking system" (inventors: Michael Hudack, Christopher Turitzin; Edward Baker; Hao Xu). The patent covers the now standard feature in many social networks, both consumer and professional, where the system finds potential connections in your imported contact list and recommends adding a person who is currently not in your network.

From an innovation methodology perspective, the invention solves a typical problem that arises when users need to be migrated from an old technology space into a new one. In the System model, an effective solution improves scalability, by dramatically reducing costs of adding Sources and Tools during the synthesis phase.

tags: facebook, innovation, invention, patent, social, networking, synthesis

Facebook gets a patent for tracking user daily routines

This week the US PTO awarded Facebook US 9,094,795, titled "Routine estimation". The patent covers a technology for clustering user locations, e.g. using mobile device data, and deriving daily routine patterns related to the locations.

The technology also enables Facebook and third parties to connect location and social graph data with user activities, "likes", music played, and other personal or group information.

One can easily imagine a real-time map that shows swarms of users chugging along their daily routines and, once in a while, reminding them to do something different. Shop, for example...



In system model terms, Facebook solves a Detection problem, which is typically a precursor to solutions for Control problems, e.g. directing user activities based on detected patterns.

tags: facebook, patent, invention, distribution, control, detection

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

Linking users and concepts - a Facebook patent

Facebook continues building up a strong patent portfolio for graph-based technologies. On January 6, 2015 the USPTO awarded the company US 8,930,378 patent on a social-like network between users and concepts. The patent is titled "Labeling samples in a similarity graph", inventors Pierre Moreels and Andrei Alexandrescu.

On the figure above, circles with Us in them mean users and circles with city names mean concepts. The dotted lines show a calculated confidence level that a particular concept is "linked" to a user who is not connected to it directly.
Since the concept can describe anything in the real as well as abstract world, Facebook patented a technology that figures out the user's connection to objects, places, and other stuff based on the user's social connections.

For completeness, here's Claim 1 (click to enlarge):

The claim looks very clever, but it's hard to believe that the idea has not been covered in the prior art. Detecting infringement of the patent would also be quite difficult because an accused piece of software would be embedded deep down in the guts of a server-based implementation.

tags: patent, facebook, graph, social, networking, internet, portfolio

Facebook patents a tech to provide socially relevant ads - US 8,924,406

On December 30, 2014 the United States Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent titled "Ranking search results using social-networking information" US 8,924,406 ( Inventors: Christopher Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath, Jeffrey Winner).

The patent covers a technology that provides a new way to determine relevant ads and/or additional content shown to the user along the search results. According to the invention, a search engine takes into account the popularity of sponsored links associated with the results. The popularity is calculated based on clicks in the user's social network and a social relevancy threshold (degrees of separation).

From a business perspective, Facebook continues strengthening its challenge to the Google "relevant ads" model created in the early 2000s. Today, some of you may already see sponsored relevant links inserted in your Facebook stream or page. The patent would be a good illustration to the brief discussion "GOOGLE VERSUS FACEBOOK: THE BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL" Max and I outlined in Chapter 22 of our book Scalable Innovation.

Another interesting aspect of the patent: it shows the brave new "Me-centric" world of social networking (see Fig 1 above). From a technical and business perspective it indicates a large-scale transition from relational (excel-like rows and columns) representations of data to a graph-based one, with nodes and edges. The patent also provides a good working definition of a social network:

the social-networking system comprising a graph that comprises a plurality of nodes and edges connecting the nodes, each edge between two nodes representing a relationship between them and establishing a single degree of separation between them, wherein the first user corresponds to a first node of the graph.

tags: patent, facebook, innovation, invention, social, networking, search, control, internet

The Internet of Things: malware threat to US energy infrastructure

Destructive "foreign" software is becoming a weapon of choice for covert international operations. For example, according to today's ABC report:

National Security sources told ABC News there is evidence that the malware was inserted by hackers believed to be sponsored by the Russian government, and is a very serious threat.

The hacked software is used to control complex industrial operations like oil and gas pipelines, power transmission grids, water distribution and filtration systems, wind turbines and even some nuclear plants. Shutting down or damaging any of these vital public utilities could severely impact hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In our book, Scalable Innovation, Chapter 3, we discuss in detail one of the system security inventions I made back in 2000, while at Philips Research. The invention, US Patent 7,092,861, aims to detect novel viruses that can target networked equipment in the home, office, or industrial cite (the patent is now owned by Facebook).

More than a decade ago, it was clear to us in the labs that the emerging Internet of Things creates new types of threats. Unless such threats are addressed through a broad, consistent industry and government efforts, our critical infrastructure will be highly vulnerable to vicious attacks that could dwarf in their destructive power the events of 9/11. Ideally, all existing industrial software has to be upgraded - a difficult, but essential task for the next two decades.

Facebook patents user tracking for advertisers and content providers

Today, August 19, 2014, USPTO awarded Facebook patent 8,812,591 titled Social networking system data exchange (Inventors: Kent Schoen and Gokul Rajaram)

The patent covers a technology that tracks users across multiple service providers by matching service provider ID and social network ID. The match results in an aggregated user profile that determines user eligibility for content and ad targeting. The system uses a tracking pixel instead of the web cookie, which makes it suitable for mobile applications.

The technology breaks the wall between different publishers with regard to what they know about the user. As the patent says:

...a publisher may know very limited information about a user visiting the publisher's web page or the publisher's application. Thus, a publisher is unable to effectively target content item and advertisements to the user based on the user's interests and characteristics. The exchange server aggregates a user's information from several sources, including a social networking system, publishers, retailers, content item providers, etc.
The exchange server matches advertisements to users based on whether users' characteristics as provided by the aggregated social graph match the advertisements' targeting criteria. Additionally, the exchange server selects one or more advertisements to display to the user based on expected revenue to be generated from displaying the advertisement to the user.

tags: patent, invention, innovation, facebook, social, networking, graph, content

Facebook's new patent from the AOL portfolio (US 8,648,801).

Today, the US PTO awarded Facebook an interesting patent (US 8,648,801) with a funny title, "Aligned display navigation." Since the patent references one of my early patents, I've decided to check it out; and in the beginning it looked quite hot!

First, a little bit of background:

The patent belongs to the AOL portfolio that Facebook acquired from Microsoft for $550 Million. It covers user interactions with content using the touchscreen - a dominant UI solution in modern smartphones and tablets. The inventor, Luigi Lira, has a number of patents in this domain; most of them go back to 2002. For example, the original provisional application for this patent was filed in March, 2002.

The patent specification describes a touchscreen system that helps the user navigate between different sections of a web page. After 12 years of back-and-forth arguments with the US PTO, the patent lawyers for Facebook/AOL managed to generalize the notion of the page into "the content comprises a plurality of portions." The purpose of the generalization is clear: try to cover the modern multi-screen "swipe" interface for smartphones. One of the claims specifically mentions finger as the object being tracked by the system.

On the surface, the patent looks really broad and strong. Nevertheless, using our train analogy*, we can easily spot a logical flaw right in the middle of a long, somewhat obfuscated series of steps:

If I were to attack the patent in court, I would point out to the judge and jury that the patent describes a scenario where the move to the next screen happens BEFORE the system determines whether the user's "swipe" has been validated. That is, according to Claim 1, we move the screen first, and think second. If the system makes a mistake, i.e. the "swipe" turns out to be invalid, we return the user to the previous screen. In essence, we jerk the interface in reaction to any object flying near the screen. Obviously, modern systems do the opposite: they validate user input first, then move to the next screen.

The verdict: after 12 years of patent prosecution, Facebook received a marginally useful patent. It's biggest value would be in threatening other companies with a lawsuit that is not obviously frivolous.

-------
* The train analogy goes as follows:

Imagine that instead of the content with multiple portions (e.g. a web page or app) that needs to be presented on a touchscreen, we have to unload a train with multiple cars. Note that each car has to be unloaded separately: one by one. To make our life easier, someone has sent us a telegram with a detailed description of each car and its relative positions in the train ( in Claim 1 they call it "data representative of content to be displayed on a touchscreen display" - typical aboutness).

Your station manager reads the telegram aloud to the workers and they do the unloading. According to the patent, as soon as the train engineer hears the manager say anything or even sneezes, he moves the next car into the unloading position. If the manager makes a mistake - Ooops! - the engineer moves the train back. Clearly, this is not the best way to organize the operations. The main reason for having a qualified crew, including the manager, is to avoid unnecessary jerking of the heavy train in response to the manager's every sneeze.

tags: patent, facebook, example

Facebook wireless wake-up patent (US 8,644,892)

Today, US Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent on a wireless device with a passive RFID tag that can trigger different power modes. In one scenario, when your iPhone is in sleep mode it receives a wake-up call from an RFID reader, powers up the main battery, and transfers the data from the tag to the device.

Again, the easiest way to explain the patent is through the train analogy we used in Scalable Innovation (Chapter 3). 

Imagine that instead of wireless devices and Radio Frequency signals you are running a train station operation. You also have a telegraph machine that allows you to receive and read telegrams from neighboring stations. It's early in the morning; no major load-unload processes are in progress; the only half-awake person in the building is one Thomas Alva Edison, your trainee telegraph operator.

Suddenly, his telegraph machine starts chattering and he receives a telegram from a neighboring station that a big train is departing toward you. Mr. Edison reads the telegram, wakes up your station crew, and reads the contents of the telegram to the station manager.

In the Facebook patent, the wireless device is your train station in wake up or sleep mode. The RFID tag is Edison with his telegraph apparatus. First, he can receive a telegram that no trains are coming and send everybody home. Then, the tag receives a wake-up signal from an RFID reader (the neighboring station) and transfers the contents of the signal (the telegram) to the main memory with a processor (the manager), which is configured to run a pre-defined program. That's it. The rest of the wording in the patent is for obfuscation purposes.

The invention fits the Telegram before the Train invention pattern we consider in detail in Chapter 25. 

tags: patent, packaged, payload, control, system, example, facebook

Facebook latest patents - connectivity.

In 2012, Facebook bought a large patent portfolio from AOL for $550M. Now, we can see some of the results from the new owner. For example, here's five US Patents with the same title:

A couple of days ago, the US PTO office awarded the #1 on the list with a new set of claims. While the original invention was about establishing an alternative connection when setting a broadband link, the latest patent claims a broad concept of a mobile device with two connections. Arguably, the patent covers a smartphone app that first uses a low-bandwidth 3G connection, then switches to Wi-Fi.

1. A method comprising: establishing a first communications connection between a mobile user device and a host, the first communications connection enabling an application on the mobile user device to exchange data; establishing a second communications connection between the mobile user device and the host; enabling, using at least one processor, display of an indication that the second communications connection is established; and enabling the application on the mobile user device to continue to exchange data by way of the second communications connection.

For example, the claim describes a scenario when I start downloading a song on 3G, then switch to Wi-Fi to save mobile bandwidth. Not bad. After 10 years of lawyering, a black pig turns into a white swan.

In system terms, we have a Distribution element that has different Routes. The Control system selects a specific set, based on operating conditions, e.g. failure. Conceptually, this is no different from our favorite 19th century railroad analogy: if the Indians destroy one rail link try to ship your troops via another one. In a more sophisticated shipping system, heavy loads are shipped by sea; light ones by air.

tags: patent, example, distribution, control

Amazon patents - Content Management

Amazon continues its push into content management technology. Their  US 8,639,817 patent issued on January 27, 2014) is the latest in a series that covers delivery of digital media.

The patent applies (among other things) to delivering ads based on the original content. In their terminology, a first set of users consumes the "real" content, while a second set gets [relevant] ads. For example, Claim 2 reads:

In claim 3, they continue using the anticipatory approach we found earlier in their other patents, which cover delivery of physical goods.

With physical goods, Amazon describes a scenario where the system
1) routes packages to a general geographical location in anticipation of demand;
2) re-routes packages to a specific address, based on a customer order.

With virtual goods, Amazon patents a scenario where the system
1) delivers content to a content delivery network in anticipation of content demand;
2) delivers content to a specific user device, based on user requests or targeting logic.

In system terms, Amazon creates a smart Distribution network, which sits in between the content providers and users. We model the arrangement in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 25. Anticipating Control Problems. Because Amazon collects a lot of information about both content (Packaged Payload), users (Tool), and providers (Source), it has the ability to determine and anticipate consumption patterns. The patents are a strong indication that business value migrates from the Tool -- Source axis, to the Distribution -- Control axis.

Similarly, Facebook, Google, Twitter, NSA, and others sit between users and content providers (e.g. other users). Remarkably, Amazon doesn't cover social networking scenarios in their patents. Vice versa, Facebook doesn't talk about content management in their patents.

tags: patent, system, aboutness, distribution, control, business, value, amazon, facebook

Facebook patents secure upgrade of a wireless mobile device.

Facebook got a nice patent (US 8,631,239) that covers a secure software upgrade of a wireless mobile device. According to the specification, the system uses a public key to authenticate the software delivered over the air (OTA).

Wireless connections are notoriously unsafe and prone to hacker interception. The Facebook solution enables a service provider to perform a reliable upgrade over an unreliable channel. It's highly likely that in the future most software upgrades, especially in the enterprise environment, will be done using this approach - simple and powerful!

Unfortunately,  the patent itself has an important flaw: it does not define the term "endpoint", which figures prominently in claim 1. Moreover, in Fig 1B it uses a different term "System Front End (120)."

As I noted several times before, the company's quality control over their patenting process seems to be spotty, at best. A simple document search would allow them to spot and fix the definition problem.

1. A method comprising, by one or more computing systems: executing software from a first partition of system memory; requesting an over-the-air (OTA) software update from an endpoint; receiving a manifest for the OTA update; downloading a payload pursuant to the manifest; installing the payload into a second partition of system memory; and rebooting, pursuant to the manifest, to the second partition of system memory, wherein rebooting to the second partition of system memory comprises authenticating a bootloader signature with a bootloader public key.

Brief system analysis: the manifest represents the "Aboutness"; encrypted software update - Packaged Payload; device  - Tool; a process that runs on the device to verify authenticity - Control; endpoint - Source; over-the-air channel - Distribution. Overall, it's a textbook example of system composition (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2). To solve the problem, the inventors use Separation in Space - one of the key TRIZ principles.

Model-wise, it is quite similar to my patent US 7,529,806. They have a different payload, but the aboutness is managed and created for the same purpose. I should use the Facebook patent as a system analysis homework assignment in BUS 74 this summer.

In view of the Nortel patent and invention principles listed above, the Facebook patent can be attacked as "obvious."

tags: patent, invention, innovation, security, mobile, enterprise, system, model, aboutness

Nortel/Rockstar US Patent 6,378,069 - a ticking bomb for the smartphone industry?

In July 2011, a group of companies led by Apple, Microsoft, RIM and others bought 6,000 Nortel patents. The patents were assigned to a holding entity Rockstar Consortium, Inc. One of the patents in the portfolio is US 6,378,069 "Apparatus and methods for providing software updates to devices in a communication network," issued April 23, 2002. I ran into it while reviewing references for the newly issued Facebook patent US 8,631,239.

The original Nortel patent looks incredibly broad. Its claim 1 covers any system that has a database of subscriber records and can provide software updates to the subscribers.

Arguably, the patent covers software update systems for smartphones, PCs, tablets, ebook readers (hello, Amazon!), and everything on the Internet that requires a software update. One could try to circumvent the patent by delegating software distribution to third parties, i.e. decoupling the entity that holds the subscriber database and the one that actually communicates to the destination device. It's not clear how this solution could play out in courts. Litigation over this potential workaround would be an interesting case to watch.

Rockstar has not asserted the patent yet, but the consortium still has several years to do that. They've already sued Google for allegedly infringing Nortel patents on relevant advertisement. Most likely, the Nortel portfolio contains more patent gems; litigating them can prove extremely expensive. The industry would be wise to set up a standard-like body to figure out reasonable licensing terms, instead of engaging in a series of all-out patent wars.

From our system model point of view, the patent covers key Control Points (see Scalable Innovation, Chapter 5, System Control Points: Where To Aim Your Silver Bullets), i.e. using Aboutness to direct a Packaged Payload - this is as basic as it can possibly be. An equivalent broad patent for Facebook would cover using information about users for sending messages, including ads. For Netflix, it would be using subscriber database for sending recommendations, etc. Powerful, if you can get it issued.

tags: patent, invention, software, innovation, portfolio, communications, aboutness, packaged, payload

Amazon's "anticipatory" patent: Let's cut through the BS!

Many news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, wrote recently about Amazon's US Patent 8,615,473, issued on December 24, 2013, titled "Method and system for anticipatory package shipping." For example, Tyler Cowen, of the marginalrevolution.com fame, quoted a catchy 2-liner to describe the invention:

The Seattle retailer in December gained a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy.”

The title of Cowen's blog entry "Back to the Amazon future" tells more about people's hyped-up perception of Amazon's delivery prowess than the actual invention.

That is, the patent is a lot more mundane than journalists and bloggers imagine. It covers a scenario where a particular item can be re-routed to a specific address while it is still being shipped to a general geographical area.

The pre-emptive part of the invention is not new at all. Retailers routinely ship products before people buy the stuff. When you go to a grocery store you buy a watermelon that was pre-emptively shipped to this location for your buying convenience. The same goes for TVs, cameras, flowers, etc. It's obvious that the retailer takes into account what Amazon calls "business variables," e.g. that people buy more flowers before the Valentine's Day, than the Father's Day.

Let's de-glamourize the patent by thinking that we deal with low-tech railroad coal shipments, instead of high-tech Amazon robotic drones. Imagine that the year is 1914 and you are in the coal business. You know seasonal patterns and you anticipate customer orders based, e.g. on the weather. If it's going to be cold in Michigan you know that people will burn more coal to heat their houses. They've done it year after year after year. Being smart, you start shipping coal to Michigan by railroad before you receive specific orders. Then, when you receive the actual orders you send a telegram to the railroad company and ask them to re-route some of the coal cars to Detroit an Ann Arbor, which happen to be close to one of your Michigan coal warehouses. That's it. Only instead of coal cars in 1914, Amazon ships socks and shoes in 2014. Nothing magically pre-emptive here.

Amazon's US Patent 8,615,473 is one of the three the company received so far on various aspects of the same invention.

The patents cover the same basic scenario: ship a package to a general geographic area, then notify the shipping company of a specific address in the area before the final delivery. Most likely, the patents will never be used because Amazon is already a dominant force in the industry.

To me, this particular media event illustrates multiple layers of "aboutness" that people pile up on top of each other when describing a hypothetical object or process. First, Amazon writes a patent application about a proposed modification to a shipping process. Then, the US Patent Office issues office actions that finalize patent claims about the invention and grants a patent. Then, a blogger reads the patent and writes a blog post about it. Then, an economist twits about the blog post. Etc. etc. Once an error creeps into the aboutness process, the entire information trail ends up leading nowhere.

tags: invention, innovation, patent, hype, amazon, media, aboutness

Facebook gets a patent on the "What's his face?" feature.

Facebook's US Patent 8,631,084, issued on January 14, 2014, covers (among other things) a user scenario where you can send one's picture or a video clip from your smartphone to a server and receive a list of people in your social network who are likely to be in the vicinity. You can also tag the picture with the name from the list.

I like the idea. If Facebook donated the patent to a privacy watchdog, unauthorized snoopers, including NSA, can be sued for patent infringement. The patent would probably cover similar Google Glass applications.

From the system point of view, the patent covers the process of matching different types of aboutness to an object. That is, textual contact information about a person (name, etc.) is complemented by a photo/video. Essentially, we create an aboutness management system, where the right item can be selected based on the context of object use/interaction. The application provides the context for the matching process. In this case, it's social networking, which is "hardwired" into the patent. I would try to push the concept into other contexts, industrial, commercial, navigational (GPS), medical, office, the internet of things, AI, etc.

A generic pattern for the invention would be something like: obtaining an aboutness of type 1, obtaining a context of use, ranking objects according to the context of use, associating the aboutness of type 1 with aboutness of type 2.

Facebook US Patent 8,627,506: a blunder or strategic omission?

The vagueness of Facebook patent claims keeps surprising me. Take, for example, their latest one: US 8,627,506 "Providing privacy settings for applications associated with a user profile," (Inventors: Nico Vera, James Wang, Arieh Steinberg, Chris Kelly, and Adam D'Angelo).

The patent is supposed to cover a transfer of user private information to third party apps based on friendship relationships (social graph) in a social networking system. I wanted to use the invention to illustrate the concept of "aboutness" in our system model (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 5).

Even a brief system analysis of the claims shows that the third party app does not provide any definite information about the second user to the social networking system, i.e. a key "aboutness" element is simply missing. Only in claim 4 we find a vague statement about a second user "who is connected to the [first] user in the social networking system." We don't know the nature of the connection, nor the degree of connectedness. Maybe she is a direct connection, or maybe she is one of the billion people on Facebook. Who knows...

Since the social networking system doesn't know much about the second user, it can either give out all private data or no data at all. In short, according to the patent, where third party apps are concerned privacy is non-existent; the apps are entitled to receive the first user's entire social graph. Using this graph, they can fish for other users' social graphs, and so on.

Let's give the patent the benefit of the doubt and assume that it tries to cover a minimally useful configuration with no privacy. Then, there should be at least one dependent claim that describes what information about the second user is required to determine the amount of private data transferred to a third-party app. Unfortunately, no such claim exists in the patent.

Some people believe that such vagueness — they often confuse it with broadness — is harmless. But is it? Imagine that a patent troll looks up Facebook patent applications when they are just published and files a patent application that covers a scenario with a more specific privacy information exchange. When the troll gets its patent issued, it can sue Facebook for damages because in a real social networking system specific "aboutness" for the second user has to be exchanged to determine privacy boundaries. As a result, Facebook is going to be rightfully punished for sloppiness and vagueness in its patent portfolio.

Complaining about trolls and software patents is easy. Getting your patent house in order is more difficult.

tags: system, aboutness, patent, invention, social, networking

Invention of the Day: Relevant Advertisement.

Today, Google makes billions of dollars a year, by serving ads relevant to user searches. Bill Gross, of IdeaLab, is generally credited with inventing the business model. We use this example in class (Principles of Invention. BUS 74) and Scalable Innovation to illustrate a couple of points:

1. The difference between Invention and Innovation (for more detail see Scalable Innovation, Prologue. Soft Barrier 2: Invention vs Innovation. page xxxi).
2. Breaking, rather than accepting a broadly accepted trade-off, often leads to a major innovation breakthrough. That is, in 2000 when Yahoo dominated the web and used Google search engine to serve user requests, it made money by serving annoying banner ads. In short, Yahoo was locked in a trade-off between making more money and making user experience unbearable (very similar to today's Facebook situation). Google took Bill Gross' original idea and broke the trade-off, by making ads useful (see Scalable Innovation, 2013. Prologue, Internet Advertisement. page xxxvii). As the result, the constraint on revenue and user experience disappeared, making Google the dominant force on the Internet.

New developments in the world of patent litigation show that the concept of relevant ads was invented not by Bill Gross, but by Richard Skillen and Fred Livermore, of Nortel. US Patent 6,098,065 describes a search system that "correlates the received search argument to a particular advertisement." Derived US patents claim multiple aspects of their original idea.

In 2011, Apple, Microsoft, and others bought thousands of patents from bankrupted Nortel for $4.5B. Now, they are suing Google, Samsung, and the rest of the Android universe for patent infringement. The Skillen and Livermore patents are an element of the lawsuit. Of course, the suit will not stop Google from dominating search on the web and mobile. Rather, it is likely to result in a monetary settlement or damages awarded by the courts. The best part of it is that we now know the original inventors of a new powerful business mode. And they are Canadians!

Why Toronto, Canada is not Silicon Valley is another story.

tags: invention, patent, internet, business, model

Memristor patent issued. (Eugene's #29).

Today, the United States PTO issued patent 8,530,880 Reconfigurable Multilayer Circuit (Strukov, et al.) where I'm the third inventor (this is the 29th US patent where I'm listed as a co-inventor). The patent covers a 3-D structure that uses memristor as one of its key building blocks. I described some of the ideas behind the patent in my earlier blog post and in our book Scalable Innovation, Chapter 10.

Source: Scalable Innovation, by Eugene Shteyn and Max Shtein. 2013. Fig 10.3.

At the time of the invention, Dmitry Strukov and Stanley Williams were scientists at HP Labs, working on the theory and practical configurations for the newly created memristor architecture. (Dmitry Strukov is now a professor at UC Santa Barbara). My role was to help them build HP's IP licensing portfolio, by using  advanced invention development methods. And it worked!

This particular invention enables creation of an integrated circuit configuration where (among other cool stuff) different sensing and processing functions can be packed into the same computer chip. What's really great about it is that, using memristor-specific properties, system configurations can be created dynamically, instead of building everything in the original chip. One of the long-term applications for the technology would be a combination of sensors, neural networks, and traditional computing on the same tiny device, which makes it capable of learning.

tags: invention, patent, semiconductors, electronics

Google patent: If you don't skip ads you'll be watching them until we get tired showing them to you.

On July 2, 2013 USPTO issued to Google US Patent 8,474,713 "Targeted video advertising."

The patent covers a business model where a user can skip ads and the advertiser is charged only for the ads that actually get watched. In Claim 2 we read:

"...withholding display of a non-advertisement based video program to the user until the user has been shown a predetermined number of video advertisements without the user choosing to skip the displaying of one of the video advertisements."

Unlike in TV advertisement, video ads on the Internet will not stop if you just wait for them to stop. They will go on forever or until Google decides to stop them. As a result (since most services are personalized, claim 27) patient people will see tons of ads.

If you see an ad, skip it immediately!

Facebook patents, July 2012.

	PAT. NO.		Title
1	8,230,046		Setting cookies in conjunction with phased delivery of structured documents
2	8,225,376		Dynamically generating a privacy summary
3	8,224,716		Methods and systems for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers
4	8,219,562		Efficient storage and retrieval for large number of data objects
5	8,219,500		System and method for managing information flow between members of an online social network
6	8,214,457		Post-to-profile control
7	8,213,924		Providing distributed online services for mobile devices

#5 on the list looks most interesting. The original patent application was filed in May, 2004!
It's a good illustration that, in system terms, Facebook represents an instance of Distribution and Control.


tags: patent, facebook, example, social, networking, distribution, control