Invention
I am an inventor and this is all about my inventions. A large part of my professional focus is developing intellectual property. Some of my work has resulted in the patenting of my ideas. As these patents move from provisional to full international filings the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), publishes them to their database. And, as they "go live," I will post them here.
I chose not to to simply include the patents in the work section of my site because being an inventor is something that makes me unique as an innovator in the digital marketing space. Also, I am very passionate about the subject matter and wanted to share it with more depth.
Apparatuses, Methods, And Systems For Code Triggered Information Querying And Serving
Sounds fancy huh? Here is a link to the actual patent at the World Intellectual Property Organization. I explain a little bit about this work in the following paragraphs:
Physical World Connections
One focus of my inventions has been Physical World Connections. Simply, a Physical World Connection can be thought of like this - imagine your mobile phone as a computer mouse. And, every time you encounter an object in the physical world that you want more information about, you point your mobile device at that thing in the world and "presto!" information about that thing becomes instantly available to you. That information could be anything - the cost, how to assemble it, where to buy it, who else has bought it, how old it is, if it's safe to eat, where it has been, where it is going, the possibilities are limitless really.
So, as you might imagine, I have done extensive work with mobile technologies, computer vision, image analysis, and near field communication technologies. Like my above example, the core concept of my work is about allowing mobile users around the world to access contextual information and data for any physical world object by somehow engaging with that object. Sometimes, this notion is considered "object hyperlinking."
As an inventor, a big part of my work was expanding and improving on this ability. So, I invented a method whereby there is no need for special software to be loaded on a camera enabled phone or device. Everything happens auto-magically on the "back end." I also made it possible for this method to work with human readable images not just machine readable Data Matrix (2D Matrix Codes), or Bar Codes.
Additionally, I added contextual relevance to the Physical World Connections by incorporating location-based services facilitating contextual inquiry and enabling the return of highly relevant and targeted information based on the fundamental principals of space-time (which is pretty cool).
Synthetic Worlds
I know an awful lot about Synthetic Worlds. In their simplest form, Synthetic Worlds are multiplayer video games that have persistence - meaning when you stop playing the game the game itself does not stop. There might still be millions of other people "playing," or inhabiting that synthetic space. About ten years ago, when I was at LAUNCH (now Yahoo!), we built a pretty amazing synthetic world. And, I have also spent the last three years producing a documentary film all about Second Life called Ideal World Movie : the Virtual Entrepreneur.
So, given that experience it was pretty natural for me to extended the patent work I have been doing beyond the basic informatics for Physical World Connections. I also explored both augmented reality and synthetic world environments. By employing the same fundamental principals for the physical world objects I developed methods and systems that work in Synthetic Worlds - in particular Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG's) so that the barriers between the physical and the synthetic can be punctured.
Watch This Space
So, keep on eye on this area of the site in the coming months for the patents themselves. If you are interested in learning more about my work in this areas of Physical World Connections, Synthetic Worlds, Augmented Reality or Machine/Human Readable Codes please do not hesitate to contact me.