Tag: PATENT

An ingenious idea: Let those with "incongruous" dating appetites admit their kinks and quirks quietly, and, when no one is looking, have a match service pair them with potentially like-minded weirdos mates. Microsoft filed a patent in 2009 -- but made public last week -- for its own online dating service, with an algorithm into which users can secretly enter "private affinities," thus matching up ...

Hide your sexts, hide your pics -- Apple's patenting everything up in here! The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just approved a 2008 application from Apple to patent a parental control system, which can halt "objectionable" text messages from being either sent or received. The patent states that the control application uses "objective ratings criteria or a user's age or grade level" to filter ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. This week saw ...

With hopes of preventing traffic accidents, IBM's latest patent could actually take control of your engine. As scary as that sounds, according to Engadget, the patent application is for a stoplight system that tells a car when to stop and go by sending remote signals to its engine. When you roll up to a red light, IBM would send a "stop-engine notification" to your vehicle. We're assuming there ...

Share Warner Bros. is notorious for its attempts to squash piracy, which have included suing popular music search sites and hiring interns whose sole purpose is to find pirated content and issue takedown notices. The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, ...

All your virtual billboards are belong to Google. Plans are in the works for a possible new advertising system through Google Street View, in which virtual spaces will be auctioned to the highest bidder. Software will identify points of interest in "panoramic or 3-D mapping environments" such as billboards, buildings, and banners, and put them up for auction to potential advertisers. In the ...

Further increasing its dominance over everything Web-related, Google received a patent Tuesday for the design of its home page, according to Gawker. One might ask, "What is there to patent?" After all, the design is minimalist at best and plain at worst. Well, it means that Google owns the idea of having a home page with a search box placed in the middle (where else?), two buttons underneath that ...

Motorola has created a new cell phone technology that could warn users when a disaster occurs, even if most of the network is not working, according to NewScientist. Here's how it would work: In the event of disaster, a functional cell phone outside and nearby the disaster area is alerted. Using Wi-Fi, this phone creates a peer-to-peer network with another phone and passes along the alert. The ...

As Wired reminded us on Tuesday, it was 28 years ago this week that the first ever patent on software was granted to Satya Pal Asija for 'Swift-Answer,' his software package that provided "full text, free-form, narrative, information input, storage and retrieval." The app was actually created 40 years ago, in 1969, but it took six years and a law degree for Asija to successfully navigate the ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Elan_sues_Apple_for_multitouch_patent_infringement'; Remember all the fun everyone had watching Palm and Apple's legal wordplay regarding multitouch patents? If you missed it, Apple delivered a very thinly veiled threat to Palm, flouting how it had touch-sensitive intellectual rights up the wazoo to protect itself from the competition. Apple, though, may be ...

A new Apple patent has been found that will assuredly warms the hearts (and hands) of many iPhone users currently enduring a cold winter. Originally filed a day before the iPhone's June 28, 2007 launch, it details a glove with a thin, electrically conductive, "anti-sticky" inner layer that is able to function with a capacitive touchscreen. It also suggests the glove could have apertures on the ...

It's a beautiful autumn day, and you're out in the wooded path beyond the railroad tracks just taking it all in and killing some time. Hey, what's that? Why, it's the cutest bunny rabbit you've ever seen! Time to pull out that 8-megapixel C905 and... oh, this sucks, you actually have to press a button to zoom in and out! Screw this noise -- you're a visionary photographer, not a manual laborer. ...

Here's one straight from the far left corner of left field. Microsoft has not only filed for, but actually received a patent that essentially amounts to Page Up / Page Down functionality. More specifically, the patent covers a "method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments," and it goes on to cite an example of "pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key / button ...

Trying to divine what Apple's up to from patent applications is never easy, but every now and again the diagrams actually make it obvious -- and it looks like Steve and his elves are hard at work on large-format touch interfaces, possibly for a tablet Mac of some kind. The latest touch-related filing is some 52 pages long and details everything from working with multiple finger inputs to ...

Perhaps it's just that nostalgia for the ThinkPad 701 but there's something about this dual-display reference design that's causing optical interrupts all over our editorial staff. It's certainly not as elegant as some other dual-display laptops we've seen, but what it gives up in looks, the Electronic Keyboards, Inc. design makes up for in practicality. The company is currently pitching it to ...