Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Pregnant Patent Pause Passed

I just got notification that the first of a whole suite of patents that my team filed when I was working at Sprint on the Mobile Portal and Wireless Application Manager platform was approved last week - US Patent 6987987. The listed inventors are me, Martin Geddes (before the Telepocalypse their was hope that the rebels would deliver the platform for future profits), Daniel Vacanti (the guy who demoed the working prototype live in Las Vegas in October 2001) and Todd Conley (the man behind the curtain). This patent defines a viable micropayments (transaction and subscription model) for Internet and Web content. It’s very Web2.0 and yet it is four and half years old. I really believe that if Sprint had pursued this technology they’d be in the frame as a serious Web2.0 player with eBay, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft but they didn’t and they’re not. I wonder what WAM would have done to their stock price five years down the road? [rhetorical] Now that the patent has been approved, it will be interesting to see if the do anything with it. Will it stimulate a WAM revival as they realize they have some Web2.0 intellectual property? Hmmm. When the current advertising driven Web2.0 expansion starts to reach its limit to growth, and the market turns to transactional and subscription models to supplement the go-to-market strategy for web services, who ya gonna call?