FTSE 7, Nikkei 29, Read full article. Alan Boyle. September 11, , PM. Intellectual Ventures' Principia Hall. Image: Difference Engine. A close-up shows the Difference Engine's gears. GeekWire photo. H-1 rocket engine. This sculpture on display at the lab was inspired by the linear accelerator designed for the Manhattan Project. A panorama shows one of the lab work spaces at the Intellectual Ventures research facility.
Oxygen delivery tests. IV office space. Fabrication tools fill the lab's instrument shop. Credit: Intellectual Ventures. Among the items made in the instrument shop were the metal plates that went into this simulated dinosaur tail.
Made in the instrument shop. Intellectual Ventures' Wayt Gibbs generates a spark by turning a crank on a modern re-creation of a 19th-century electrostatic generator. Research bread. Story continues. Recommended Stories. Motley Fool. Yahoo Finance.
First, they're not as vulnerable to counter-claims of patent infringement because, well, they don't make anything that could be stepping on someone else's intellectual property. Second, because these companies are built for litigation, they're not afraid of its costs.
Sue Google, and its executives are drawn away from product development, hiring and firing, and all the sorts of things you'd expect from an executive. They have to provide testimony, hand over e-mails, delay product launches, and interrupt the entire company's day-to-day work in order to meet discovery requests. But at an NPE, discovery costs are much lower because there are no products. That's roughly a quadruple jump from just six years earlier. And it wasn't just big companies getting sued.
And any sort of patent litigation can be deadly to startups. That's just to fight the lawsuit. It doesn't include what it could cost to pay to settle which is usually what happens or if the defendant goes all the way to court and loses.
And there are other costs, which Meurer refers to as the other half of "social impact. Before we go any further, let's acknowledge there's a certain hypocrisy in the tech industry's open disdain for Intellectual Ventures.
Apple and Samsung, for instance, are engaged in a multibillion-dollar court fight in San Jose, Calif. Patents have become just another hammer to throw at competitors, knock them off their game, or maybe even knock them out of the game.
IBM has been enforcing its patents for decades. And other companies -- yes, including industry darlings such as Apple, Google, and Facebook -- are spending billions to acquire patents.
True, some say they are strictly for defensive purposes you sue us, we'll sue you right back. But that's merely a promise. It's not exactly a legally binding contract with the public.
And as the Apple v. Samsung case proves, they're hardly squeamish about heading to court to enforce their intellectual property rights.
So why the disdain for Intellectual Ventures? Here in the company's offices, executives shrug at the question and say it's mostly because they're misunderstood. As Myhrvold uncomfortably put it at the D conference:.
I wasn't a popular kid in school and I guess I'm not here. If I want popularity, I go to a chef's convention. Things that are important aren't always popular at first. The brainstorm It's a typically rainy morning here in Bellevue, and Casey Tegreene, an executive vice president at Intellectual Ventures as well as its chief patent counsel, is reminiscing about the company's first "invention session.
Tegreene, who looks like he's dressed for a hike in the surrounding mountains rather than a courtroom, has an unusual background in law and product development that isn't so unusual at Intellectual Ventures. That's a pretty typical pedigree here at Intellectual Ventures.
When Intellectual Ventures isn't buying up patents from others, it creates them in-house. The first session was held in a converted auto body shop in August, Tegreene says these closed-door brainstorming events are a lot like locking up people in a room with one another, and not leaving until inventions come out.
On the docket for that first session were camera sensors, something near and dear to Myhrvold. He wanted to bring some of the low-light sensor technology people were using to enhance stargazing in electronic telescopes into the tiny sensors and lenses found in consumer-grade cameras. The team, which Tegreene described as a "diverse" group of people, proceeded to spend more than eight hours throwing around ideas and proposing solutions.
In the end, they came away with an idea for a specialized low-noise circuit, along with several other ideas that resulted in more than patent filings and 50 patents. Tegreene says that number varies from session to session, depending on who is there and what ideas are being thrown around. Over the years, the company has come up with patents and 4, patent applications from these sessions the company now averages about 30 new patents per month. Those sessions now take place in a conference room inside the company's main lab in Bellevue.
Here, whiteboards and monitors are affixed to nearly every wall, though popping your head in, you might simply think this is where the lab's staff has its every-day meetings.
The inventors' network Most of Intellectual Ventures' growth took place between and , says Brown, the company's president and chief operating officer. Brown joined the company a year after that boom in , leaving her spot as the President and CEO of Honeywell's transportation division. She says part of her job has been to structure the company in a way that "moves the needle without always adding heads.
One of the ways Intellectual Ventures does that is by using outsiders to drum up ideas that the company can choose from and invest in.
In other words it outsources some of the grunt work of turning ideas into patents and other intellectual property. It has done that by creating a network of 3, inventors at universities, and more than companies and research institutions.
But before Intellectual Ventures even taps that group, the company puts together a proposal called a "request for ideas" -- a play on the old request for proposal or RFP -- for what it wants. This page document is the result of putting together one of the company's technologists, a business development specialist, and a lawyer together to try and find trends that are going on in any particular field.
Londergan wouldn't share what one of these proposals looks like, and those who are a part of its network are sworn to secrecy. That includes how much they get if their idea is the one that gets picked, something Londergan says includes an up-front cash payment and royalties. Gregory Phelan, managing partner at Seattle Polymers and an associate professor of chemistry at State University of New York, is one of those inventors. He and his company, which has five employees give or take, have been working with Intellectual Ventures for more than three years.
He won't talk about the financial terms of his work with Intellectual Ventures, but he says he's never been asked to take part in "troll" activity.
In fact, he says Intellectual Ventures as a bodyguard of sorts, a big threat to companies that would happily step on his intellectual property. This is a small group," Phelan says, " And the temptation might be for someone to say, "Fine, we'll see you in court.
Intellectual Ventures as a protector of ideas rather than an exploiter of patent law? To Phelan, that's exactly what they are. The coolest bug zapper ever Drive a few zig-zagging miles through Bellevue's suburban sprawl and you come across a set of nondescript warehouses that house the labs of Intellectual Ventures. It's raining hard now, and Geoff Deane, vice president of engineering and the labs' chief, is handing out giant golf umbrellas to a small tour group walking between buildings.
Like the lobby of the main office, the artifacts of scientific quirkiness are proudly on display. Walk through the door at the labs' main facility you're greeted to a skeleton wearing safety goggles and a lab coat with the name "lab intern" on a metallic name badge. To fight these insects, Intellectual Ventures developed the Photonic Fence prototype in the photo , a laser-based system that electro-optically tracks and shoots down insects in midair.
Eric Johanson pictured on the left , a research scientist at the Intellectual Ventures Lab, explains how the Photonic Fence electro-optically tracks mosquitoes and agricultural pests and shoots them down in midair. Every year, insects spread deadly diseases to humans, like malaria, and cause heavy losses to farmers worldwide by destroying crops. Pneumonia kills more children than any other infectious disease, particularly in poor countries where hospitals lack access to therapeutic oxygen.
To solve this problem, the Intellectual Ventures Lab is designing a mask that conserves the amount of oxygen delivered to a patient. The research team designed and built an anatomically correct, 3-D printed infant face and trachea models shown here to evaluate mask performance in preparation for a field trial.
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