My Brother Hits the Big 10K (Patent, that is)

I got an email from my brother, that a patent that he was one of the four researchers work­ing on (and now, awarded) turned out to be the 10,000^th patent by his com­pany, Microsoft.

I had visions of stream­ers, party hats and the like, but his boss at the time, one of the other peo­ple on the team, ended up get­ting most of the atten­tion. I guess that’s how the media cov­ers things. There was some CNET cov­er­age which only referred to my brother as a ‘col­league’ (Boo, Hiss!) and this press release from Microsoft itself which men­tions him in a cap­sule area, but only because he was also the co-recipient (with the same boss again) of the 5,000^th patent. (How crazy a coin­ci­dence is that?)

This patent (10,000) was for a User Inter­face idea for Microsoft’s ‘Sur­face’ com­puter, which I’ve actu­ally writ­ten about in my other blog. Accord­ing to the Microsoft press release, the patent:

…applies to sur­face com­put­ing tech­nol­ogy and out­lines how users can place real objects — any­thing from cell phones to their own fin­gers — on the computer’s table­like dis­play and the com­puter will auto­mat­i­cally iden­tify the objects and track their posi­tion, ori­en­ta­tion and motion. This allows the objects to be asso­ci­ated with data or media, like a spe­cific col­lec­tion of music or photos.

The really big coin­ci­dence is that this past week, at the Inter­ac­tion Design Association’s IXD09 Con­fer­ence that I attended this past week in here in Van­cou­ver, there was indeed a Sur­face Com­puter from Microsoft (along with the Project Man­ager for that prod­uct, Joe Fletcher), and we placed our badges on the com­puter, which rec­og­nized us by our 3D Bar­code or QR Code on the back of the badge (which I’ve scanned here):

When the badge was ‘rec­og­nized’ by the Sur­face, we could con­nect to another user who placed their badge on the com­puter by drag­ging from one badge to the other with our fin­gers, prompt­ing the com­puter to send an ‘I want to con­nect to you’ mes­sage on the IXD09 web site. Kind of silly, when you think of it, since you were usu­ally right in front of the per­son you sup­pos­edly wanted to con­nect with, but it was a fun demo, all the same. The strange sen­sa­tion of see­ing my badge sprout extra graph­ics under it when placed on the glass cof­fee table com­puter was like a real world ver­sion of Who Framed Roger Rab­bit, with car­toon or 2D ele­ments seem­ing to exist seam­lessly and inter­act with the real things around them. Now, know­ing that it was my brother’s patent that was behind this piece of techno-magic makes it even cooler.

So, I hope he at least gets a T-Shirt or some­thing ( Maybe it could say, “I Got Microsoft its 5,000 and 10,000^th Patents and All I Got Was This T-Shirt”). Maybe his own Sur­face Com­puter?  C’mon Microsoft, the guy(s) who hit the 5 and 10K mark for you in the Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty race deserve more than a press release!

Update: Happy to see that ZDNet did a bet­ter job rec­og­niz­ing his contribution!