Monday March 8, 2004
Patent

Just found out we've been granted a patent for our geosearch work five years ago. Congrats to Charlie, Marty, and Dwight.

There was a proof of concept running on Northern Lights around four or five years ago. Add an address to a search term and the results came back distance sorted (with an optional Mapblast map). This way a search for pizza would show the closest pizza joint at the top of the list. This worked even if the pizza joint was half a mile away but in another state, which most search engines can't deal with. [update: now they can]

This was back at Vicinity, which means the patent is now the property of Microsoft who, as chance might have it, has been showing interest in the search engine business. Lucky them.


Eric Vitiello • 2004-03-08 03:44pm

So I'm guessing you'll get nothing out of the patent other than the bragging rights? Did the company file the patent for you? I have qite a few ideas that appear to be patentable (i.e. I've found no other similar ideas in the patent database, and wondered if you had experience with the actual patent process? (BTW (little plug), I'm also a fellow hobby winemaker, and just started a winemaking knowledge wiki at http://www.wineknow.info)
jerry • 2004-03-08 04:16pm

Hi Eric!

Yeah, nothin' but bragging rights. Unless MS decided to be generous...nah! My patent filing experience is pretty limited.

Thanks for the wineknow link (that's a pretty funny domain name).

Jeff Doyle • 2004-03-22 04:38pm

Hi Jerry. Nice site!

Bragging rights are tricky things. Keep in mind that a patent isn't really a certification that the idea was in fact originally conceived by the listed inventor. It's more of a technical, legal assignment of that status for the purposes of economic exploitation. Just like being found 'innocent' or 'guilty' in a court of law doesn't mean that you did or did not in fact commit the crime in question.
jerry • 2004-03-22 04:56pm

Howdy Jeff!

I think what you are saying is that the idea was yours in the first place?

True, true.



Scaled composites, founded by the same Rutan brothers who designed and flew the Voyager airplane around the world, have a couple of cool projects underway. There's Space Ship One, an craft designed for sub-orbital manned space flights. The other is Global Flyer (thanks Space.com for making captions a URL field!). They sure make nice looking aircraft.