Wednesday, September 28, 2005

5,714 Patent Search Results Yield Surprises for Microsoft and Google

So this is what Microsoft is working on these days! :) Space elevator wireless networks anyone? Or maybe someone just got tired of losing their wifi connection in the elevator.

Vertical roaming in wireless networks through improved quality of service measures

A system and method for improved vertical handoff between different types of wireless network. Network allocation vector occupation and packet collision probability are used as quality of service measures, enabling vertical handoffs to be delayed until actually beneficial to quality of service. Improved wireless network cell boundary detection in vertical handoff scenarios is achieved with a Fourier-based technique in conjunction with an adaptively determined minimum operating signal strength threshold. Improved wireless network cell boundary detection enables vertical handoffs from high quality of service networks to be delayed as long as possible. Together, practical wireless network quality of service measures and improved detection of wireless network cell boundaries in vertical handoff scenarios reduce the rate of unnecessary vertical handoff resulting in higher overall quality of service experienced by a mobile computing device roaming between wireless network types.


This patent search tool lets you search various patent fields to find patents. Searching by the city where a company's head office is located should work well, when the city is dominated by that company. Think Wal-Mart, GE, Texas Instruments, State Farm for some interesting ones.

Of course we could be looking at some of Amazon's patents here too.... or other companies based in Redmond, but under the technobabble there is some interesting reading.

Let's see what Google is up to! Where is their head office again??? Mountain View, CA.. good luck trying to weed their patents out.

Here's one.

Address geocoding
A geocoding component generates geographic coordinate information, such as latitude and longitude values, for postal addresses. A table includes a number of rows, each corresponding to one or more addresses. The geocoding component can quickly locate a particular row in the table based on a number of input address identifiers as the intersection of the sets rows that correspond to each of the address terms. The geocoding component may operate on addresses that are received by the geocoding component or extracted from documents.

If anyone has any other company locations of interest, be sure to comment on them here!