Posts Tagged ‘patents’

By now most of us are familiar with the concept of social networking. Basically, social networking is an agreement between two people to share information with each other, and the means for sharing is by one entering information to be shared in an application, with that information consolidated on one web page that is commonly [...]

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Mobile credit card payment startup Square, whose card reading service works with a nifty magnetic card reader that plus into a mobile device’s headphone jack, is missing a very important piece: The patent for the hardware.

Square, Inc. and founder Jim McKelvey filed a complaint against Robert Morley, Jr., an associate professor of electrical engineering at Washington University, claiming that he neglected to list McKelvey as co-inventor of the device.

According to the story told McKelvey, a glass artist and entrepreneur, he came up with the idea for a mobile card reader in 2009 after losing a sale because he couldn’t accept credit card payments. He then teamed up with friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and they decided to use a mobile phone’s headphone jack as a way of interfacing with a card reading device. McKelvey then turned to friend Morley to help design the prototype hardware.

The three reportedly had discussed obtaining a patent once the prototype was finished, but Morley filed solo in June 2009, and a patent in his name for the card reader device was granted on October 12, 2010.   Read more

What’s the next logical step for Apple’s iTunes? Why selling concert tickets of course, and a new patent filing by Apple referring a system called “Concert Ticket +” directly addresses that step.

Have you ever promoted a website via a tweet or a Facebook status update? If Aardvark’s latest patent application for “Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing of a Web Service Using Personalized Invitations via a Status Messaging Service” is granted, you may soon be prevented from building such promotional features into your own website.

Hothand Inc. has been awarded a broad patent, covering not just location services but also mobile advertising. It’s a patent that could affect mobile platforms widely, and not just for ad networks such as Google’s AdMob or the one Apple is rumored to be revealing soon, possibly today.

If you’re a fan of Apple’s 3D-visual “cover flow” method of browsing computer files, then you might be happy to know that a US patent was published for a similar method of browsing social network contacts on an iPhone. The coverflow ability already exists for viewing album covers in iTunes on all platforms, including iPhones [...]

The USPTO just granted Apple a patent for iGroups, a mobile social networking application that could have immense value in this arena, especially if the relevant features are released as part of a public API for the company’s mobile devices – namely iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Social Times takes a look at some of [...]