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March 29, 2006

Google's Wi-Fi Patent May Face Wayport Challenges

By Glenn Fleishman

Google’s patent application revealed last week by ClickZ may face challenges from pre-existing patents issued to Wayport: Google hasn’t been granted the patent that includes a number of specific claims for delivering advertisements based on a wireless access point’s location, the entity running it or in which it’s located, and customer behavior at the hotspot. But former Wayport CTO Jim Thompson let me know there are a pile of applicable and issued Wayport patents that overlap. Prior art means that a technique was in circulation rendering a patent’s original idea less original; an existing patent is an even higher bar, of course. (Thompson said he has no remaining financial interest in Wayport.)

I spoke this afternoon to current Wayport CEO Dave Vucina who has overseen the hotspot operator’s growth from a few hundred locations to several thousand, including locations it manages for SBC. Vucina said that the founders and early Wayport employees had remarkable foresight in where the market would develop, especially around location. “You invent these things early and then you wait for an industry to mature,” he said.

Vucina said Wayport’s intellectual property (IP) portfolio in patents were focused on location-based advertising, location-based services, digital certificates (that’s identity confirmed through cryptography), and multiple applications over one Wi-Fi network (virtual networks).

Vucina wouldn’t be pinned down on specifics about how the company might or might not react to Google’s filings, noting that Wayport is in discussions with what he described as very large players that circle around location-based technology. Because deals haven’t been made, Vucina wouldn’t comment on which firms were involved. He did say that the company is oriented towards applying its patents in collaborative partnerships.

Wayport clearly owns a large part of the location-based Wi-Fi IP space. Vucina said, “If you read our patents, they’re pretty clear on what we have.”

Obviously, Google could be defined as a very large company, and Wayport certainly would have a great motivation to license or work cooperatively with Google as that would benefit both firms. Vucina wouldn’t provide any direction on this front, although no conclusions can be drawn from that. Vucina would only say that generally with “fairly large companies” that “We’re having some pretty interesting discussions.”

These are two of the most significant patents issued to Wayport:

#5,835,061 (granted in 1998): “A geographic-based communications service system has a mobile unit for transmitting/receiving information, and access points connected to a network. The access points are arranged in a known geographic locations and transmit and receive information from the mobile unit. When one of the access points detects the presence of the mobile unit, it sends a signal to the network indicating the location of the mobile unit and the information requested by the mobile unit. Based on the signal received from the access point, the network communicates with information providers connected to the network and provides data to the mobile unit through the access point corresponding to the location of the mobile unit.”

#6,452,498 (granted Sept. 2002): “A geographic-based communications service system has a mobile unit for transmitting/receiving information, and access points connected to a network. The access points are arranged in known geographic locations and transmit and receive information from the mobile unit. When one of the access points detects the presence of the mobile unit, it sends a signal to the network indicating the location of the mobile unit and the information requested by the mobile unit. Based on the signal received from the access point, the network communicates with information providers connected to the network and provides data to the mobile unit through the access point corresponding to the location of the mobile unit.”

Wayport also has a small host of other patents that tie together geography and wireless.

Posted by Glennf at March 29, 2006 3:14 PM

Categories: Hot Spot, Legal

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