John Paczkowski

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Smartphone Motion Patent’s Authors Are Google, Apple Engineers

March 25, 2010 at 1:00 am PT

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A quick follow-up on that broad motion-control patent I wrote about Thursday. I haven’t been able to turn up any information on Durham Logistics, the limited liability company to which the patent is assigned, beyond learning that it is managed by another obscure Las Vegas LLC called Memscom. But I have uncovered a bit more about the inventors who wrote it. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is an engineering director at Google (GOOG). And the second?

He’s a hardware engineering manager at Apple (AAPL) working on the iPad.

Which is interesting, right?

Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) are both playing, aggressively–and in Apple’s case, litigiously–in the mobile space in which this patent could become a factor. That the two engineers responsible for it ended up in their employ years later seems more than a little ironic.

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Tagged with: Apple, digital, director, Durham Logistics, engineering, Google, hardware, innovation, Internet, inventors, John Paczkowski, Las Vegas, limited liability company, LLC, manager, Memscom, motion control, patent, search, telecom

comments so far. Add yours.

  • helena kaspar

    the application is very Appreciable

  • Anonymous

    I don’t think this patent is valid. Many people were doing this experimentally before the 2001 priority date of this patent.

    I saw Howard Samuels of Analog Devices demo a Palm outfitted with an accelerometer in 1999. The application written by TIll Harbaum was a marble on a tilting board. We discussed screen rotation specifically at that demo but the Palm hardware has a square display, so we talked about adapting it to Apple Newtons! We also talked about turning the pages of electronic book by “flipping” the device and opening a cell phone call by a motion similar to the old Star Trek communicator. Howard was very gracious in giving out samples of the accelerometer chip for people to try out on Palms and Newtons.

    See this link for the software and construction notes:

    http://www.harbaum.org/till/pa.....index.html

    I think this work got a small write-up in Pen Computing or that other pen-based magazine with the tan cover whose name escapes me, so I believe it was published.

    Someone with the money and the desire could likely invalidate this patent.

    –Brian

  • http://www.hasport.com brianathasport

    This will be an interesting story as it unfolds. My knee-jerk reaction is someone is in violation of their employment contract. Very curious.

  • http://blog.macb.net macbeach

    They went to work at those companies AFTER the invention. That's the way I read it.

  • bkobkobko

    There is a bunch more prior art:

    A Sony tilting interface prototype published in 1996:

    http://www.sonycsl.co.jp/perso.....ers…

    I guess this just proves how truly broken our patent system is.

    –Brian