For any entrepreneur starting their company, the reward for a lot of hard work is typically a great new product that hopefully leads to customers, sales and wealth. Of course, the end goal also often includes an exit strategy. Generally, the exit strategy has been to be acquired or to have a successful IPO. The [&hellip
One of the biggest debates leading up to the passage of the America Invents Act, the patent reform law that was signed by president Obama in October, 2011, was its effect on small businesses. Many worried that the first to file provisions of the new patent act would disadvantage small businesses by forcing them to [&hellip
Business Insider did a feature looking at the “The 20 Most Innovative Startups in Tech.” I became curious how many of these startups have IP assets, so I took a look at the USPTO assignment databases. Details are below
I received an e-mail this morning asking me what the job posting for a patent counsel on the Dropbox website means. Dropbox currently has no patents or published patent applications at the USPTO or at WIPO. The single patent that appears assigned to a Dropbox Inc at the USPTO assignment database is clearly a different [&hellip
Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and Twitter are four of the most important startups of the past few years, so their patent portfolios are worth monitoring. How many patents do these four companies have? This morning, the popular Twitterer @counternotions made the following inaccurate tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status
Social Networking patents always seem to stir up controversy. One of the most successful social networking portfolios was the Friendster portfolio, which was bought by Facebook last year for almost 40 million dollars. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at what other early social networking portfolios are out there. As is [&hellip
Glympse, a location sharing startup, allows contacts to share their geographic location with each other for a preset period of time. The company was started in 2008 by Microsoft alums Bryan Trussel and Steve Miller. Th Glympse App is available for Android, iPhone, WinPhone7 and Blackberry. With the recent release of Apple’s iOS5, Apple introduced [&hellip
Twitter is arguably one of today’s hottest companies. In its early days, Twitter suffered from frequent outages due to spikes in demand. However, these problems appear to be well in the rearview mirror. The company launched in July 2006 and so it would be expected that within the past five years Twitter has amassed an [&hellip
If you haven’t yet heard of Bitcasa, you probably soon will. Bitcasa provides limitless cloud storage for only $10 per month and has received $1.3 million in investment from such heavyweights as Andreeson Horowitz, First Round Capital and Pelion Venture Partners. The company is currently a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. What’s most interesting about Bitcasa is [&hellip