Google has some happy news as it has received one of the best Christmas gifts it could have received for now. The Santa Claus here is IBM, from whom the search engine giant has acquired 217 patents on December 30. These patents might have been bought for a number of reasons such as to defend Android, shield its partners from the likes of Oracle and Apple, and many more reasons. But the patent lot includes one specific patent, which will help the search engine giant to get a new tool for Google+.
SEO by the Sea, was the first to report the patent exchange. It was further noted that these patents would serve two purposes potentially. One was to provide avenues to develop new products, and the other to provide ammunition in litigation. However, expectedly, the patents would cover many different technologies, but would mainly deal with data services like email management, online calendars and transferring web apps between devices.
Last year, Google had bought more than 2,000 patents from IBM. The main reason for the same was that the search engine giant was surrounded by a number of patent related lawsuits, especially linked to Android. Apple, its biggest competitor, was successful in winning a number of lawsuits against many companies involved in building devices for the Android platform, including Samsung, HTC, LG, and Motorola. A few are still pending.
Apart from buying patents from IBM, Google has bought Motorola too for its patents mainly. The deal is still under investigation, but once cleared, Google will have a really strong patent profile. The $12.5 bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility, will give Google approximately 24,000 patents, including a few pending ones.
Talking about the current patents, three of those are quite important for Google. They are:-
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U.S. Patent 7,865,592: ”Using semantic networks to develop a social network.”
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U.S. Patent 6,442,548: “Database interface for database unaware products,”
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U.S. Patent 7,831,632: “Method and system for reconstruction of object model data in a relational database.”
The first patent mentioned here would keep the social-media watchers on their toes, while the remaining two patents noted above relate to mobile telephony applications.
For the social network, this patent is important, as the patent’s summary describes, “A method, apparatus and program product are provided for identifying common interests between users of a communication network. … [Interests] may be determined, for example, by calculating a ratio of the number of words in a content source to the time spent viewing the content.”
A notable example for the same would be, if a user wants to find someone knowledgeable about real estate in a specific neighborhood to ask for buying advice, but cannot find the right person may not list that as an “interest.” This is not an easy task, as possibly the user would not be able to easily find them in your expanded network (which includes friends of friends). So it would definitely benefit Google+.