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AvantGo Gets a Patent
AnElder writes: "Yahoo's Daily News Technology section is carrying a story reporting that AvantGo has received a patent for its synchronization technology. And here's an excerpt: "In legal jargon, AvantGo said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had issued it patent No. 6,341,316 covering the system, method and computer program product for synchronizing content between a server
and a client." Why didn't I think of this?" In all fairness, the patent doesn't seem to be as bad as many that have been issued. It cites many other patents as references (which helps ensure that AvantGo is doing something *different*), and is rather specific about the process - I would expect that there are many ways to "synchronize" data that wouldn't run into this patent.
Yeah, lots of references were cited, but the application also pended for less than 2 years. It's not uncommon for a software application to wait longer than that just to get a first action from the PTO. It looks like Sterne, Kessler really buried them in prior art right off the bat and pushed this one through; I'll bet the legal fees for this one were huge. As broad as the claims are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a related submarime application still pending.
There is another program out there for syncing content to PDAs - Mazingo. It's focused on Pocket PCs for now.
It supports rich media, meaning you can get video, sound, or any other file type when you synchronize. It also has a lot of the same types of channels as AvantGo, though they're admittedly fewer in number. Good quality, though, which is something that can sometimes be hard to find anymore on AvantGo.
Jenova_Six
While I was in college I did a co-op with a company that makes software to sync a certain popular PDA with Office. At the time, the company was really small and there were established competitors who were a lot larger than my employer. They, too, had a patent on a particular algorithm of synchronization, but we my bosses (one of whom was the developer of our software) weren't concerned. Our software was so much faster than theirs, the algorithm couldn't possibly be the same.
Imagine our surpise when our biggest competitor sent a "cease-and-desist" letter claiming we infringed on their patents. My bosses denied it, of course, but our competitor would have none of it. They had to see our code for themselves to verify that we weren't in violation of their patents. I don't quite remember exactly how it was resolved - I left soon after this became a big issue - but I'm sure it had something to do with my employer striking a deal with the manufacturer of the PDA.
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that, sure it might not seem like having this patent is a bad thing or over-reaching. And, used responsibly, it's probably not. But don't be surprised to see AvantGo try to get the drop on a potential competitor if they can use this patent as leverage.
My sigs always suck.
I should add that it took eight people to invent this and most of their references are their own press releases.
Zarni Maung should be ashamed of himself.
I wonder if we can query the patent database by primary examiner? God knows what else this guy is letting by.
Actually I don't think it's that complicated, but it is clever. What they've done is turn the orgy of do you have the latest version of this, no, here it is, ask for the next one into this:
It looks like the client sends a doc to the server that looks like
<sync>
<item id='identifier>fancy_hash</item>*
</sync>
and gets back
<update>
<new_item id='identifier> content </new_item>
</update>
The clever part is the fact that only have 1 round trip to sync your device, important for high latency environments (read internet), and the synchronization request is simple enough to generate on an anemic palm
Yes, you can search the PTO by primary examiner.
:-)
Maung also granted a patent on Melodic alerts for communications device.
Not as broad as it sounds, but they have managed to patent their protocol for sending a snippet of song as numeric digits. I suppose the business model here is to get companies to adopt this specific tune encoding and then be able to collect royalties.
I could certainly encode a melody more compactly without infringing this patent, so innovation can't be the driving force behind this one.
My personal favorite of Maung's Greatest Hits is Internet weight reduction system. It involves dieting by sending pictures of yourself to a computer to analyze your outline to verify the information you enter into the computer run diet plan.
Marimba did this back in 1996. I am sure that many others have done it too. For all I know, Marimba has patent on this too.