Invention
This area of the site is about my inventions. A large part of my focus is developing intellectual property for my clients and my employers. Some of this work has resulted in the filing of patents. As these patents move from provisional to full international filings the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), publishes them to their database. This process generally takes six months from the time of filing. 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 you in more depth.
Physical World Connections
Predominately, the focus of my inventions in the past few years, 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 the object and "presto!" that information becomes instantly available to you.
As a result, I have done extensive work with mobile telephones, computer vision, image analysis, and near field communication technologies. Like my example, the core concept is about allowing mobile subscribers around the world to access contextual information and data of any physical world object by somehow engaging with the 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 phone or device. Everything happens on the "back end." I also made it possible for this method to work with human readable codes 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 spacetime (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. I will post them here as PDF's as they publish to the USPTO database. Until then, 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.