The Dolcera Blog

HTC Corp plans to buy Inquisitive Minds, a US maker of children’s software, for $13 million to expand its offering of applications. Inquisitive Minds, based in California, owns game app Zoodles, which is designed for children aged eight and younger. Zoodles is a kid educational software where child can play, safely browse web, watch videos and several other features where parents can monitor the child usage of data. HTC has been aggressively expanding its mobile software platform through acquisitions (Inquisitive minds and Beats Electronics) in order to compete with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung.

Intellectual Ventures sued Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI) for patent infringement on Thursday (10/06/2011) with case title “Intellectual Ventures LLC v. Motorola Mobility Inc., 1:11-cv-00908-UNA, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington)”.

Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who has focused on creative ideas, rather than products based on those ideas. The firm has raised over $5 billion and holds a portfolio of more than 35,000 patents. The company has filed over 30 lawsuits against various companies in the last couple of years, earning it the reputation of a ‘patent troll,’ or a predatory patent-holding company.

Intellectual Ventures claims that Motorola Mobility has infringed on six patents related to transferring files among computers and technology used in an “entertainment device,” and claims at least 18 Motorola Mobility products infringe the patents in the complaint.

Intellectual Ventures claims that Motorola Mobility has directly infringed one or more claims of US7810144B2, US6557054B2, US6658464B2, US7409450B2, US7120462B2 and US6412953B1 by making, offering or selling in US and associated hardware and software devices and components included but not limited to, the Electrify, Photon 4G, XPRT, Titanium, Atrix 4G, Triumph, Rambler, Bali, i576, Quantico, Brutei680, Brutei686, Clutch i475, i412, i886, Milestone X, Theory and Lapdock for the Atrix without authority.

Intellectual Ventures says it has earned more than $2 billion in licensing fees, but its recent wave of litigation suggests investors are pressing for more.

Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time.

Intellectual Ventures noted in its complaint that it first approached Motorola Mobility about licensing its inventions in January, roughly eight months before Google announced plans to buy the device maker.

All the six patents acquired by Intellectual Ventures are most recent (last two months).

Impact on Google

This lawsuit against Motorola will certainly affect its acquisition by Google for $12.5 billion. A big rationale for Google purchasing Motorola was its vast portfolio of nearly 17,000 patents to boost the Android platform and protect Google from future litigation. Although this doesn’t affect Google directly as Motorola’s acquisition is still under review, it could prolong the time it takes for the deal to be completed.

Four of the six patent violations are software patents that Intellectual Ventures alleges relate to the Android platform, which is deployed in Motorola smartphones like Atrix, Photon 4G, and Milestone. Google could face a bigger headache if this legal battle isn’t sorted out before Motorola’s acquisition.

Patents can be ranked using several parameters such as no of claims /independent claims, expiry date, legal status, citations and more. Citations is one of the best parameter to indicate the relevancy or importance of the patents. Citations includes forward citations (citing patents) and backward citations (cited patents).
Relevancy or importance of the patents is directly proportional to the number of citations.
Citations are either provided by the examiner or the inventor during office action or during grant process of the patent. Normally citations provided by examiner will be much relevant compared to the citations provided by the inventor. Similarly, forward citations will be much relevant compared to the backward citations.
Weightage of the forward citations can be twice better than the backward citations.
Ideally the patent with more citations will be more valuable.

Media tablets, private cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are some of the technologies that have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations, according to the 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle by Gartner, Inc.

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H.R.5980 is a bill introduced on July 29, 2010 by US government. The Bill proposes the exclusion of claims and full text specification for the pending applications i.e until the patent application gets granted you cannot view the claims. USPTO will only publish abstracts for the publications or pending applications and no claims will be published. This change may impact the ability to monitor competitors’ pending applications.

See Sec-C in the bill(H.R.5980).
Also read here for more information.

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Professors Mark Lemley, Chris Cotropia, and Bhaven Sampat recently released a draft of their new article titled “Do Applicant Patent Citations Matter? Implications for the Presumption of Validity.” [Download Here.]

For the article, the trio analyzed the file histories of 1,500+ utility patents issued in 2007 and compared references used in office action rejections with the list of references cited on the patent cover-pages.  The objective was to figure-out the role of applicant-cited prior-art in the examination process.

Findings: Patent examiners rarely rely on applicant-submitted prior-art when making rejections.  Only 13% of the prior art used in office action rejections was applicant-submitted (despite the fact that 74% of cited references are applicant-submitted). Generally, the study found that examiners “effectively ignored” applicant-submitted prior art regardless of how few or how many references were cited; regardless of the timing of the IDS filing; and regardless of whether the submission included an EPO search reports identifying the references as “X-references.”

Implications: The authors suggest several implications of their findings: (1) That it likely does not make sense to find inequitable conduct when an applicant withholds prior art (since the art would not have been used in a rejection anyway); (2) That the presumption of validity associated with patents may be too strong; and (3) That studies based on patent citations likely lack merit.
There are several rational reasons for examiners to cite their own prior art. Because of the backlog, PCTs, and provisional applications, US examination often begins several years after the application was originally filed.  During that interim, many references become available that were not known at filing.  Thus, it is not surprising that applicants rarely cite 102(e) prior art, but examiners cite loads of it.  There is some reason to think that this “newer” prior art is probably better because of technological developments.  It may also be true that the applicant and examiner references are cited for different purposes — namely, applicants cite references that are generally relevant to the invention while examiners are looking for references that teach each particular element in the filed claims.  A third issue is that applicants tend to modify their claims during prosecution. That modification may make their originally cited art less relevant.

Conclusion: Most of the applicant cited references are ignored by the examiners. So, dont really trust on the citations.

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Oracle sued Google on its famous operating system ‘Android’. Oracle says Google infringed patents on its Java software platform while developing Android and also violated the copyrights owned for Java platform (including without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) by Oracle.

The following is a brief background on this news and a summary along with patent numbers to digest.

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010. Sun is now Oracle America, a subsidiary of Oracle. Oracle acquired the Java technology from Sun. Android competes with Java as “an operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices” and that the Android stack employs Java apps running on a Java-based object oriented application framework and core libraries running on a “Dalvik” virtual machine that features just in time (JIT) compilation.
Android (including without limitation of the Dalvik virtual machine and the Android software development kit) and devices that operate Android infringe one or more claims of each of the following US patents.
US6125447A-Protection domains to provide security in a computer system
US6192476B1-Controlling access to a resource
US6192476B1-Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files
US7426720B1-System and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master run-time system process
USRE38104E1-Method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated code
US6910205B2-Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine instructions
US6061520A-Method and system for performing static initialization

Source: Oracle Google Complaint

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Introduction:

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations.

Unique characteristics of a WSN include:

•     Limited power they can harvest or store
•     Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions
•     Ability to cope with node failures
•     Mobility of nodes
•     Dynamic network topology
•     Communication failures
•     Heterogeneity of nodes
•     Large scale of deployment
•     Unattended operation

Efficient power management

Several techniques are used for efficient power management

• Dynamic power management (DPM): Dynamic power management (DPM) is an effective tool in reducing system power consumption without significantly degrading performance. The basic idea is to shut down devices when not needed and wake them up when necessary.
• Data-Driven Power Management (DDPM): A new power management framework called Data-Driven Power Management (DDPM) is used as the infrastructure for integrating various energy efficient techniques, such as approximate querying and sleep scheduling.
• Efficient Sleep Scheduling based on Application Timing (ESSAT): Another technique Efficient Sleep Scheduling based on Application Timing (ESSAT), a novel power management scheme that aggressively exploits the timing semantics of wireless sensor network applications. ESSAT protocols have several distinguishing features. First, they can save significant energy with minimal delay penalties. Second, they do not maintain TDMA schedules or communication backbones; as such, they are highly efficient and suitable for resource constrained sensor platforms.

Low power operation on batteries :

Networks of sensors are widely used for monitoring and control applications. In a communication network, deployment of wires is expensive and causes hassles during normal operations and maintenance. This led to the development of wireless networks. Wireless sensor networks not only eliminate the need for wires, but also open many new application domains. Reliability and low-power consumption are the two important factors, which determine the performance of a WSN. Though messages are exchanged without any data cables in a WSN, power cables are required for powering sensor devices. Power is fed to the WSN via mains supply. But, this concept is now replaced by batteries and energy harvesting devices. If batteries are used, replacement and maintenance issues cause concern. Power management techniques (low-power/ultralow-power WSNs) seem to be the viable solutions in improving the lifetime of the batteries and various low-power technologies are being developed in this spectrum. Power/energy harvesting is an emerging technology, which eliminates the need for batteries.

Energy Harvesting technologies :

Energy harvesting technologies are required for autonomous sensor networks for which using a power source from a fixed utility or manual battery recharging is infeasible. An energy harvesting device (e.g., a solar cell) converts different forms of environmental energy into electricity to be supplied to a sensor node. However, since it can produce energy only at a limited rate, energy saving mechanisms play an important role to reduce energy consumption in a sensor node.
Energy harvesting technologies such as piezoelectric, thermoelectric and others will have potential applications in wireless sensor networks and low-power devices.

Products:

The Wireless sensor networks have Microcontroller kits which controls all motes in the network and especially for low power harvesting in the network we have different kind of batteries and energy harvesting and converting modules like thermal energy harvesters and solar energy harvesters

• NI WSN-3212(4-Channel, 24-Bit, Programmable Thermocouple Input Node)
• EnerChip EH CBC5300 Energy Harvesting Module
• Solar Energy Harvesting Wireless Demo Kit
• JenNet Protocol Stack
• JN5148 Wireless Microcontroller - ZigBee PRO Platform
• JN5139 Wireless Modules (IEEE802.15.4 and ZigBee)
• PhyNet Wireless Sensor Networking Platform
• Arch Rock Energy Optimizer
• GreenPeak Emerald GP500C Communications Controller chip
• Micropelt Thermogenerator
• SmartMesh
• Wireless Sensor Hub (Battery)
• Powercast Powerharvester module

Market research:

World Market projection:

*Wireless Sensors and Transmitters market is growing worldwide. The below figures indicates there is a drastic change in last few years and these number increases in future.

*Last 5 Years: Market growth is huge in the last 5 years increased from 180 million dollars in 2005 to 380 million dollars approximately (200 % growth).

*Future: Market forecasts reaches to 1800 million dollars by 2012 approximately (45% growth)

Global Market projection:

*The below graph shows wireless sensors and Transmitters market in different regions North America, Europe, Asia pacific, and other countries of world.

*Major market growth in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

*Last 5 Years: In North America the market increased from 20 million dollars to 160 million dollars approximately, in Europe the market increased from 15 million dollars to 130 million dollars approximately, in Asia-Pacific the market increased from 8 million dollars to 120 million dollars approximately.

*Future: Market forecast reaches to 600 million dollars in North America, 500 million dollars in Europe and 400 million dollars in Asia pacific approximately.

Contributing Authors

Rajeshwari, Haritha, Garg and Sateesh

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Gmail team announced a small Task manager called ‘Tasks’ as a lab feature last year.Tasks feature is now embedded into gmail as a permanent feature on main page.
Some features includes:
*Note the “to do list”,set the due date and write the notes for every task in the list.
*View the completed and uncompleted tasks.
*Clear the tasks
*Print the task list
*Sort the task list

Click here for complete video on new feature ‘Tasks’.

*Indoor Positioning technology is to determine the location or position of the user with in a closed space(airports, malls, buildings etc) without the use of Satellite location systems such as GPS.
*Nokia has its Research center in Helsinki where it has been working on WLAN based Indoor Positioning system.
*Recently they have launched a trail at Kamppi shopping center in Helsinki.
[http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/009/01/indoor_positioning_nrc_helsinki.htm For more details]