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Google Wants Patent On Splitting Restaurant Bills

Posted by timothy on from the steak-eater-picks-the-pocket-of-the-salad-man dept.

theodp writes "In a classic example of parody coming to life," writes GeekWire's Todd Bishop, "a newly published patent filing reveals Google's ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal." In its patent application for Tracking and Managing Group Expenditures, Google boasts that the invention of six Googlers addresses 'a need in the art for an efficient way to track group expenditures and settle balances between group members' by providing technology that thwarts 'group members [who] may not pay back their entire share of the bill or may forget and not pay back their share at all.'

1 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. "Innovation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These kind of bullshit patents spring up when a company incentivizes it's employees to generate as much IP as possible during their day to day development, so as to mine the path for any other company trying to reimplement the technology and follow the same (obvious and non-innovative) path.

    I don't know how Google does it, but my company offers a 2000$ monetary bonus for each submission that reaches the filling stage, the vast majority of which are accepted by the patent office. That's right, anything from inventing public key crypto to splitting the bill is patented and squirreled away in the defensive portfolio. The innovatory aspect does not even matter any more, it's all about quantity, they set up all sort of "innovation targets" that entail reaching a certain number of patents. A patent per year is required for any senior wanting to get a good year-end rating.

    This is the most anti-competitive, anti-science and anti-progress way to do R&D that I can imagine.