There are some companies out there known as patent trolls, that basically don’t manufacture products, but instead they sue others for breaching their well kept patents. One such company is SurfCast, a patent troll from Portland, Maine in USA. We’re dealing with a company that has a few patents, but no real products.
Also, on the home page of the site we find that it handles “operating system technology”, without actually referring the products. Meanwhile, in the news section their only achievement is the lawsuit filed by SurfCast this week against Microsoft in the US District Court of Maine. The troll claims it has developed the concept of Tiles in the 1990s, a long time before Microsoft came up with it. Microsoft’s Live Tiles are the core of the Windows Phone and Windows 8 experience and they simply can’t do without them, so they would to anything to save them.
The SurfCast website has been around since 1999, but the layout has remained unchanged since 2003, as the company stood dormant. What’s funny is that the only recent changes to the site were made so that their technology would sound more like Microsoft’s. The concept here is “a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, that can refresh its content independently on the others”. So I guess that Microsoft is probably laughing at this right now, especially since SurfCast has no chance of winning this…
Related posts:
- Microsoft Courier Patent Brings Back the Dead
- Windows 8 Previewed During D9 Conference; Uses Tiles and Shows Love for Touch (Video)
- Microsoft Planning to Demo Windows 8 App Store This Week Supposedly
Source : androidtabletblog[dot]com
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