At a mobile device, a method for generating a displayable icon that indicates the mood or emotion of a user of the mobile station, the method comprising: providing an emoticon key that is to be selected by a user of the mobile station in generating the displayable icon, wherein the emoticon key is provided on a physical keypad of the mobile device, and wherein the emoticon key is labeled with a known emoticon; in response to the emoticon key being selected, displaying a collection of graphical displayable icons that the user may select from, wherein at least some of the graphical displayable icons from the collection of graphical displayable icons indicates a mood or emotion; and in response to a selection of one of the graphical displayable icons from the collection of graphical displayable icons, generating the one of the displayable icons for display on a display component of the mobile station, wherein the selection of the one of the graphical displayable icons is made using one or more navigation keys and selection keys on the physical keypad, and wherein the one of the graphical displayable icons is displayed in association with a textual message to be sent by the user using the mobile station.
Who cares, it is sooo narrow. The rest of the claims are for the method, device, and apparatus to do this thing. Not very exciting. They want to put emoticon buttons on their phone.:-O (Yawn)
Sorry, too many slashes in the link in my previous post.
Here is the direct link to the patent:
USPTO link
Applications publish 18 months after their submission date. Likely, nobody has even looked at this yet.
Now read the claims in the patent. Everything else is just informative (mainly).
To save you the trouble, here are the only independent claims. All the others just narrow them down. When you read them, they are nothing exciting. They are just trying to patent the method that their phones use for customers to insert multimedia emoticons by choosing them from a list using some specific button pushes. Since the patent was only filed in 1994, these guys might still be out of luck trying to get this patent.
Note that these claims are long, but all of the items are "and'ed" together, making them very narrow. Basically, they probably paid some designers a lot of money to design something that they think is really great and a signature of how they want their service to work. With the patent, they can tell their vendors to build phones and software to work that way, without risking having a competing network just telling their vendors to copy that method.
As someone else mentioned, if this provides a barrier to people sending animated emoticons in their mobile IMs, all the better.
CLAIM 1
A method of customizing a multi-media message with emoticons, the multi-media message being created by a sender for a recipient wherein the multi-media message comprises an animated entity audibly delivering a text message, the method comprising:
storing emoticons related to actions associated with the animated entity;
providing to a sender at least one button option for choosing emoticons to insert into the text message at a location of a cursor; and
upon the sender choosing an emoticon using one of the at least one button options, inserting an emoticon into the text message at the location of the cursor, wherein when the animated entity delivers the text message, the animated entity exhibits the actions associated with the inserted emoticons beginning at a point corresponding to a first predetermined number of words before a respective one of the emoticons and ending at a second point corresponding to a second predetermined number of words after the respective one of the emoticons, wherein
the first predetermined number of words and the second predetermined number of words are associated with respective word lengths of words before and after a position of the respective one of the emoticons within the text message.
9. A method of customizing a multi-media message by choosing emoticons from a group of stored emoticons, the multi-media message being created by a sender where text typed by the sender is presented to a recipient using an animated entity in the multi-media message, the method comprising:
providing to the sender at least one button option, each button option of the at least one button option associated with an emoticon is associated with an emotion displayed by the animated entity during delivery of the multi-media message; and
upon the sender choosing an emoticon using one of the at least one button options, inserting the emoticon into the text typed by the sender, wherein as the multi-media message is delivered to the recipient, the animated entity displays the associated emotion beginning at a point corresponding to a first predetermined number of words before the emoticon and ending at a second point corresponding to a second predetermined number of words after the emoticon, wherein
the first predetermined number of words and the second predetermined number of words are associated with respective word lengths of words before and after a position of the emoticon within the text message.
OK, I'll bite. Where is this supposed patent? I'd like to RTFP, but US2006015812 is not a US patent number. A quick search of Cingular's patents doesn't come up with it either.
This actually saves government money by cutting down on fraud originating in their locality. It puts the burden on the consignor and his bonding agency to prove trustworthiness. That $5,000 bond will cover the petty rip-offs without involving the the cops. Bonding also puts up a barrier to keep out crooks and stolen-goods fences. I bet the auctioneer classes will pretty trivial and will teach sellers what kinds of activities are illegal.
My guess is that online courses and bonding would quickly be set up by eBay to help out.
I'm not a big government guy, but why should online hocks be exempt from the basic rules that all other resale business owners have to deal with?
Basically he installed a small PC into a Mac G3 case. Perhaps someone thought that the Apple demons would somehow prevent it from "Windows or Linux". But there is not much to see here.
Relevant job experience outside of the University is absolutely necessary. That is a big check mark. If you get good grades at the state school and line up some recommendations, you can go far.
If this doesn't take you where you want to go, spend big money for a 1-year MS/M.Eng at a top school. These are not that difficult to get into (if you have experience and recommendations) but will open many doors (and save you paying those big bucks for four years).
If you are hoping for a research job, that could be harder to come by without a top-shelf degree.
The problem is that there are 2,000 workers busting pipes that the county has to fix. Even if the county can bill Verizon later, the county certainly doesn't have the staff to play cleanup to Verizon's contractor.
This is probably a great deal for the diggers; the cost of paying the county to fix the breaks is probably less than preventing them. Therfore, the only stick that the county has is to say STOP! No more digging until you clean up your act!
Ahh, tie-in to the "creepy desktop search" might be the ticket.
Of course, you can select "leave on server" but POP client software really can't take advantage of all that stored email. Desktop search, or even an online Google search, while logged-in, could draw from all of those old emails even while you filed and deleted to your heart's content with your local copy in your POP client.
Very sneaky indeed!
Again, this only works because Google is golden. If MS or AOL announced that they were going to keep a permanent record of all of your email, whether you deleted it or not with your client, would raise a firestorm!
It seems like it would map better to IMAP. POP is more of a download to client and delete-off-server thing.
This certainly would crush the webmail competition if Google can find a way to profitibably do this!
I have a Roomba and it is great...but I have to pick up the floor before I use it. It does not like my miles of network, phone, and A/V cables strewn about.
Now if iRobot came out with an un-Packbot would open the UPS boxes that stream in containing the latest semi-cool gadgets found on Techbargains, and put them away, that would really be cool!
Even better, it would fill out the rebates and recycle the boxes and packing peanuts!
This is just an alternative to the method used for the previous decade or so. "Indies" are paid by record companies to promote a song to radio stations and then the Indies pay the radio station. One small degree of separation and all is legal.
The ClearChannel method is even sneakier...ClearChannel owns the concert venues and billboards too. If you want your album played, you'd better use their venues and ad media.
Read more than the intro paragraph (it is BS), the detailed analysis is quite interesting.
The big argument is that even though the Gmail account holder agreed to have their email profiled, the other party(ies) did not.
"
Google could in just a few years be sitting on the richest direct marketing database in the world. It is impossible to imagine, outside of the world of science fiction, a more intimate source of direct marketing information.
"[...]With respect to Google's current expressions of good intent, what history teaches is, if there is personal information available, someone will want to use it for marketing.
"
Now one has to think! If MS tried this, we would cry foul. But Google is one of the good guys...but guess what, they are going public! In a few years, they might be owned by Bill Gates, The Home Shopping Network, or the Direct Marketing Association.
HP really should of replaced that with a "Just Print My Darn Document, you smart-ass metricly-challenged printer" button.
They FINALLY put a cancel button on their inkjets that actually cancels the whole job so you don't keep getting the remaing 500 pages of PCL interpreted as text.
Boy do I miss InitGame. That was the day when Gopher was king, Moria was more fun than homework, MIT had guest external guest accounts, and Initgame could waste a whole night!
Ahh. The good old days.
Maybe this is good (in a specific way...)
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The full story is that the industry wants to get away from the flat-rate price. They want, for example, to charge $3 for a new mega-hit (especially from a band who's other songs suck). Perhaps this would encourage people to look at other, non-TRL music?
I was amazed that they ever used the flat-rate-pricing. Who would pay the same price for Picasso as some amatuer work (regardless of merit). Or in young lingo, the same price for a T-shirt by Abercromie or by K-Mart.
Slashdot Mirror
Cocktail table computer
I think you have to put quarters in it...
What I posted above is the old ATT patent on this, filed in 2001 and just granted. Very narrow anyway.
The one referenced in the article is application #20060015812 which is even narrower!
link
This new one is just for:
At a mobile device, a method for generating a displayable icon that indicates the mood or emotion of a user of the mobile station, the method comprising: providing an emoticon key that is to be selected by a user of the mobile station in generating the displayable icon, wherein the emoticon key is provided on a physical keypad of the mobile device, and wherein the emoticon key is labeled with a known emoticon; in response to the emoticon key being selected, displaying a collection of graphical displayable icons that the user may select from, wherein at least some of the graphical displayable icons from the collection of graphical displayable icons indicates a mood or emotion; and in response to a selection of one of the graphical displayable icons from the collection of graphical displayable icons, generating the one of the displayable icons for display on a display component of the mobile station, wherein the selection of the one of the graphical displayable icons is made using one or more navigation keys and selection keys on the physical keypad, and wherein the one of the graphical displayable icons is displayed in association with a textual message to be sent by the user using the mobile station.
Who cares, it is sooo narrow. The rest of the claims are for the method, device, and apparatus to do this thing. Not very exciting. They want to put emoticon buttons on their phone. :-O (Yawn)
Applications publish 18 months after their submission date. Likely, nobody has even looked at this yet.
Now read the claims in the patent. Everything else is just informative (mainly).
To save you the trouble, here are the only independent claims. All the others just narrow them down. When you read them, they are nothing exciting. They are just trying to patent the method that their phones use for customers to insert multimedia emoticons by choosing them from a list using some specific button pushes. Since the patent was only filed in 1994, these guys might still be out of luck trying to get this patent.
Note that these claims are long, but all of the items are "and'ed" together, making them very narrow. Basically, they probably paid some designers a lot of money to design something that they think is really great and a signature of how they want their service to work. With the patent, they can tell their vendors to build phones and software to work that way, without risking having a competing network just telling their vendors to copy that method.
As someone else mentioned, if this provides a barrier to people sending animated emoticons in their mobile IMs, all the better.
CLAIM 1
A method of customizing a multi-media message with emoticons, the multi-media message being created by a sender for a recipient wherein the multi-media message comprises an animated entity audibly delivering a text message, the method comprising: storing emoticons related to actions associated with the animated entity; providing to a sender at least one button option for choosing emoticons to insert into the text message at a location of a cursor; and upon the sender choosing an emoticon using one of the at least one button options, inserting an emoticon into the text message at the location of the cursor, wherein when the animated entity delivers the text message, the animated entity exhibits the actions associated with the inserted emoticons beginning at a point corresponding to a first predetermined number of words before a respective one of the emoticons and ending at a second point corresponding to a second predetermined number of words after the respective one of the emoticons, wherein the first predetermined number of words and the second predetermined number of words are associated with respective word lengths of words before and after a position of the respective one of the emoticons within the text message.
9. A method of customizing a multi-media message by choosing emoticons from a group of stored emoticons, the multi-media message being created by a sender where text typed by the sender is presented to a recipient using an animated entity in the multi-media message, the method comprising: providing to the sender at least one button option, each button option of the at least one button option associated with an emoticon is associated with an emotion displayed by the animated entity during delivery of the multi-media message; and upon the sender choosing an emoticon using one of the at least one button options, inserting the emoticon into the text typed by the sender, wherein as the multi-media message is delivered to the recipient, the animated entity displays the associated emotion beginning at a point corresponding to a first predetermined number of words before the emoticon and ending at a second point corresponding to a second predetermined number of words after the emoticon, wherein the first predetermined number of words and the second predetermined number of words are associated with respective word lengths of words before and after a position of the emoticon within the text message.
16. A method of pr
This just published and is years from becoming a patent. This is just a laundry list of claims that they want, not that they will get.
You can see it here: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html/
OK, I'll bite. Where is this supposed patent? I'd like to RTFP, but US2006015812 is not a US patent number. A quick search of Cingular's patents doesn't come up with it either.
Withdrawal doesn't work. Some little windows will get out and soon you will have lots of illegitimate windows running around.
My guess is that online courses and bonding would quickly be set up by eBay to help out.
I'm not a big government guy, but why should online hocks be exempt from the basic rules that all other resale business owners have to deal with?
http://cms.graztourismus.at/cms/beitrag/10004630/4 7303/
Basically he installed a small PC into a Mac G3 case. Perhaps someone thought that the Apple demons would somehow prevent it from "Windows or Linux". But there is not much to see here.
...The creators certainly did!
mmmm, mmmm, Get perpendicular, mmmm, mmmm
(I just can't stop)
If this doesn't take you where you want to go, spend big money for a 1-year MS/M.Eng at a top school. These are not that difficult to get into (if you have experience and recommendations) but will open many doors (and save you paying those big bucks for four years).
If you are hoping for a research job, that could be harder to come by without a top-shelf degree.
His book has a bit of puffery, but it was also very insightful.
This is probably a great deal for the diggers; the cost of paying the county to fix the breaks is probably less than preventing them. Therfore, the only stick that the county has is to say STOP! No more digging until you clean up your act!
That what you get when some jr. programmers make the adjunct software in a company where it takes forever to purchase anything!
Of course, you can select "leave on server" but POP client software really can't take advantage of all that stored email. Desktop search, or even an online Google search, while logged-in, could draw from all of those old emails even while you filed and deleted to your heart's content with your local copy in your POP client.
Very sneaky indeed!
Again, this only works because Google is golden. If MS or AOL announced that they were going to keep a permanent record of all of your email, whether you deleted it or not with your client, would raise a firestorm!
It seems like it would map better to IMAP. POP is more of a download to client and delete-off-server thing. This certainly would crush the webmail competition if Google can find a way to profitibably do this!
Maybe this famous father figure
or this popular strongman
Now if iRobot came out with an un-Packbot would open the UPS boxes that stream in containing the latest semi-cool gadgets found on Techbargains, and put them away, that would really be cool!
Even better, it would fill out the rebates and recycle the boxes and packing peanuts!
That excuse is years out of date.
If $400 is cost prohibitive, then you shouldn't have such a nice TV. Heck, $400 only buys you 6-9 months of crummy cable TV.
MSNBC on Indies
How-stuff-works on Indies/Payola
The ClearChannel method is even sneakier...ClearChannel owns the concert venues and billboards too. If you want your album played, you'd better use their venues and ad media.
Read more than the intro paragraph (it is BS), the detailed analysis is quite interesting. The big argument is that even though the Gmail account holder agreed to have their email profiled, the other party(ies) did not.
Now one has to think! If MS tried this, we would cry foul. But Google is one of the good guys...but guess what, they are going public! In a few years, they might be owned by Bill Gates, The Home Shopping Network, or the Direct Marketing Association.
They FINALLY put a cancel button on their inkjets that actually cancels the whole job so you don't keep getting the remaing 500 pages of PCL interpreted as text.
-- Homer Simpson, "The Internet King"
Ahh. The good old days.
I was amazed that they ever used the flat-rate-pricing. Who would pay the same price for Picasso as some amatuer work (regardless of merit). Or in young lingo, the same price for a T-shirt by Abercromie or by K-Mart.