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Essential Is Getting Sued For Allegedly Stealing Wireless Connector Technology (gizmodo.com)
"Keyssa, a wireless technology company backed by iPod creator and Nest founder Tony Fadell, filed a lawsuit against Essential on Monday, alleging that the company stole trade secrets and breached their nondisclosure agreement," reports Gizmodo. Keyssa has proprietary technology that reportedly lets users transfer large files in a matter of seconds by holding two devices side by side. From the report: According to the lawsuit, Keyssa and Essential engaged in conversations in which the wireless tech company "divulged to Essential proprietary technology enabling every facet of Keyssa's wireless connectivity," all of which was protected under a non-disclosure agreement. More specifically, the lawsuit alleges that Keyssa "deployed a team 20 of its top engineers and scientists" to educate Essential on its proprietary tech, sending them "many thousands of confidential emails, hundreds of confidential technical documents, and dozens of confidential presentations." Essential ended this relationship after over 10 months and later told Keyssa that its engineers would use a competing chip in the Essential Phone. But Keyssa is accusing Essential of including techniques in its phone that were gleaned from their relationship, despite their confidentiality agreement. Central to this lawsuit is one of the Essential Phone's key selling points: the option to swap in modular add-ons, made possible thanks to the phone's unique cordless connector. In short, if Keyssa's claims hold water, then one of the phone's defining factors is a product of theft.
When there is enough idea, one should totally list the known-range-of-list.
Lemme guess. They're using this super-secret technology from our ancestors in Middle Earth...
So two suppliers, Essential sees both, chooses one, the other supplier sues claiming theft of trade secrets.... but not the other supplier, it sues the customer who didn't choose their product.
Nuisance lawsuit.
Do you know how we bypassed wifi and bluetooth? We just directed our infra ports towards each other and the magic happened.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
This sort of thing really hacks me off. Keyssa's technology is just an extremely short range radio link. Being short range, they immediately gain massive channel SNR improvements while still remaining within RF regulatory limits. This naturally (as in, the fundamental laws of physics) allows them to push more data through the channel compared to a similar long-range, omni-directional RF link, and they will just be using a standard modulation scheme - possibly even a very inefficient one - to do that.
All the magical claims they make on their website are a direct consequence of physics - not some stupidity on behalf of the WIFI developers.
There is nothing magic about this. There is not even anything novel about this. At best they would have done some measurements/sims of the channel and applied an appropriate bunch of standard signal processing techniques to best deal with the channel characteristics, though I imagine that since the channel is so well defined (their system even slots together to mechanically hold the antenna in position) they barely even had to do this.
Why do we put up with this sort of junk as a society? There are plenty of companies that do not have particularly protectable technology (e.g. the numerous GPS chipset vendors) but compete and make money by having high quality, easy to use products that are more desirable than their competitors, or by offering better support. I'm sure that if Keyssa had a better product then their competitors at the right price they would be in the Essential phone right now.
...the company and Their phone are both a crawl and bad joke anyway
Google is accused of the same thing on a large scale. I guess the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?
Actually that really exists in the real world.
Car keyfobs are an everyday example (and ob /. car analogy) :
- There's a mechanical connector that grabs and holds firmly the key fob/card on the dashboard's receptacle.
(e.g.: Volvo, Mercedes Benz, Saab, Renault, etc.)
- There are no electrical contact at all. All transmission happens over wireless (most) or by infrared (some older Mercedes), charging/powering is done wireless by induction (most).
It's literally a wireless connector.
This has the benefit of making a perfect alignment between the fob/card and receptacle and thus insuring perfect alignment of the wireless inductor and antennas, which guarantees best possible data transmission and power efficiency.
Similar problems have been solved by Palm's Touchstone to optimize wirless charging of Palm/HP's Pre smartphone by aligning them magnetically.
(And by unreleased HP Touchstone by aligning the NFC antenna too).
Similar problem ARE NOT currently solved by Qi, which relies to be just vaguely in the correct position but is a lot inefficient as a consequence.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Tooth brushes use literally wireless charging cables (e.g.: BRaun's Oral B)
There's a *cable* bringing power to within a receptacle in the tooth brush.
Inside the receptacle, the power transmission doesn't use any contact, only *wireless* charging.
As I've mentioned in my car analogy, this has the benefit of aligning everything and insurance best possible power transmission efficiency.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Congratulations, you figured it out in 30 seconds when it otherwise took a team of 20+ engineers a considerable amount of time to come up with a working solution.
He didn't even need to *figure out*.
Using mechanical coupling to increase wireless charging power efficiency or better data transmission has been used for ages in car's keyfob and some (non-QI) smartphone charging docks or toothbrush wireless charging cables (yep, it's a cable but it charges wirelessly. Because fuck everything).
This thing is litteraly something that has been already known and even actually used in production.
The company suing each other haven't invented something revolutionary and never though of.
The wireless engineer were probably paid to make incremental improvement (better protocol and signal processing) and these micro-improvement are probably patentable (in 2017 technology, you can probably achieve multi-gigabits !)
But if their sole "secret sauce" relies on "holding to things close to each other to achieve fast wireless transmission" : Sorry guys there's so much prior art on this, a lot of which is so old that their respective patent has expired by now.
In other words :
- if their technology is "by applying XyZ modern variation of CODFM on our Wireless Connector, we can finally reach 20Gbit/s !" - yes, it could be considered business intelligence.
- if their technology is "we have a Wireless Connector Technology" - fuck you, the late 90s have called, they wanted their fancy car keyfob technology back.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Prior art:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransferJet
I think Toshiba had a similar technology with a different name.
Having been an early adopter of new phones since the early Motorola flip phones I was a little sceptical about this phone but I can that it is without doubt and by a long margin the best phone I have ever owned.
You're not going to get paid for astroturfing if nobody believes you. Try: using a registered account, including some product details (more than zero is a good start) and tone down the superlatives a bit. Every product has a downside, but by mentioning those and minimizing them people will tend to believe your ads more.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not enough details supplied to gauge merit of either sides position. Curious what kind of arrangement was agreed to allow 10 months of collaboration then take a hike we are pursuing a different direction. Was KEyssa gullibly over selling or Essential negotiating in bad faith , or other? âoeEssential ended this relationship after over 10 months and later told Keyssa that its engineers would use a competing chipâ Did Essential pass tech to the competitor ? Would expect the competing chip Co also to be involved in the litigation. Anyway need to see how the lawyers and courts sort out. Even if Keyssa able to fully justify their claim The damages will probably be small proportional to the low volume of devices sold but might help deter others from trying to save $ and circumvent Keyssa. Will Essential be able to afford a legal fight? Maybe another consideration of Keyssa tactics.
They would have put in a 3.5mm audio jack. Kind of glad they're being sued for something since they didn't put in still used port.
This isn't about patents. It is about trade secrets. If Keyssa had been able to obtain a bunch of useful patents (even a bunch of BS ones) on all the work they did, they would have an injunction by now. That they didn't have that protection should set some alarm bells off regarding their claims that their tech is novel and hard to do.
Trade secret litigation is the new frontier of IP protection. It was traditionally much more limited in scope, but also less well defined compared to other forms of intellectual property, but lawyers are working hard to use this fuzziness to expand the boundaries. If you are an engineer, then I would suggest you look into this more, because the end game is to basically to own all the technical skills currently contained in your head. If you are a manager, then I expect you would welcome this chance to create indentured servants out of all those expensive tech workers.
so think twice before you try to go to court and sue over things you stole yourself.
Since the Essential phone implements, "Wireless USB."
I'm not going to get paid regardless of what I write. I don't have a registered account and see no reason to sign up for one. Just sharing my opinion. The reader can freely choose to believe or not, I've done my bit either way. :)