Posts Tagged ‘patent’

Google has just been granted a patent that describes a possible switch from a car that is driven by a human to an autonomous driving mode. The patent was written by a group of engineers that includes the winners of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Photos that look just as good after 10 years as they did on the day they were taken is a circumstance we are used to in times of digital photography. However, historically, it is questionable at best and plain incorrect in most cases. Environmental influences degrade the quality of your printed picture over time. IBM believes that digital images should follow suit and has filed a patent for an automatically aging file system.

How trivial is the operation of a data center today? Does the data center itself, in its common form, still provide room for patents? Would the supply of electricity if it came from a wind turbine that is connected to the data center, in its simplest form, qualify for a patent? Apparently so.

A patent filing by Google sheds light on the company’s speech recognition technology in Android and provides at least one clue why the engine works better on mobile than on desktop platforms and why it has a clear lead over the iPhone: Google uses a secret, predictive pre-recording approach which has an ingenious component to it, but may upset users for invasion of privacy.

Four Silicon Valley heavyweights are being sued by Auto-Completion Solutions (ACS), a company which recently acquired the rights to a field auto-completion technology and apparently has been founded with the sole purpose of collecting license fees.

An IBM patent filing sheds light on the architecture of the upcoming BlueGene/Q “Sequoia” system, as well as a potential successor, which is could become the first 100 PFlop supercomputer: The system will have almost 8.4 million compute cores which will consume almost 16 MW.

Apple just filed a patent for a simple, but rather ingenious invention that could cut overall power consumption in any electronic device that depends on a power supply unit (PSU). Apple thinks of a much more complex PSU for the future, which will effectively cut the power draw to zero from a PSU when an electronic device is shut off.

IBM has been granted a patent that describes an idea how to manage every move you make and every word you say with the purpose of storing that data in an environment that resembles the walls of your digital life. Of course, IBM has not invented this technology: It simply had an idea how it could look like if someone were to invent it.

Microsoft has been granted a six-year old patent idea for “virtually infinite reliable storage” that functions across a distributed storage environment. It is not a new idea per se, but Microsoft’s patent adds a twist that could make this invention an enticing feature for the Windows OS. The environment configures itself into one giant hard drive.

Your phone could use more memory or extra CPU horsepower? No problem, if it runs with Microsoft’s just patented internal wireless bus. Simply use the memory and the CPU in your PC. There is just one tiny problem.

Intel, Freescale and Marvell have been sued over a common power management system in modern processors that allows the control of power usage in an integrated circuit.

Mozilla’s idea to stop tracking Firefox users for advertising profiling purposes sucks (from an advertisers view and from the view of those who are selling advertising – for example Yahoo.) There is already an anti-do-not-track movement underway and Yahoo is first to patent its idea. The question is: Can your privacy be bought?