I have distinctly mixed feelings about software patents. Many egregiously bad patents have been granted and patent trolls are a real threat to innovation.
On the other hand, there are also ideas worth protecting. I won't judge which categories the following ideas fall into, but when you work at large companies
like Apple and Google, you often end up with patents. Here are some of mine:
- QuickTime Player (Apple) I led the engineering team that built Apple's first "brushed metal" application. This was the application that started Apple's "skeuomorphism" cult.
The team, including Steve Jobs, were awarded three patents for the user interface: media playback timeline,
- SmartMatch (Guru/Unicru)An intelligent search engine that was able to match job candidates to jobs, using a hybrid of ontologies and machine learning.
- Squared (Google)Google's first semantic search engine - it extracted hundreds of millions of objects and their attribues from the web and was able to do attribute search across them.
- Blueprint (Google)A proposal to build an easy to use database system with a HyperCard-like user interface