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The other day, while reading Guy Kawasaki's weblog, I laughed when he wrote that “he was the author of 8 books, or, the same book 8 times…”. Having been an author myself, I thought that was pretty funny. Just for the record, it is 8 books, and great books they are.

Today while reading an article on the Little Springs Design website about physical world integration, I learned about a company called NeoMedia, and their product PaperClick — an interesting Mobile Marketing technology and product. But when looking closer at their website, more specifically their patent portfolio, I was reminded of Guy's comment, but this time it was one basic idea patented 12 times… OK, I might be exaggerating a bit on “one concept patented 12 times”, but all the patents feel very similar…

Now, I don't mean to pick on NeoMedia… but…

The main concept behind all of their patents is about based on one piece of information, retrieve another piece of information… In other words, a system that given “A”, find and retrieves “B”. “A” can be a code, or barcode or photo or pure words. For example, given a barcode, product information is retrieved.

The problem is that this has been done for years! for example, in Point of Sale (POS) systems. And adding a code to a document is no different from adding a code to a box of cereal… Done.

If the patent was about a method or algorithm to extrapolate physical information from an image to produce an accurate database query, or something like that, I wouldn't be writing this piece. Knowing handsets, and their capabilities, I will dare to say their image processing is being done on the server and the client only captures the image and transmit it, and that more likely the images are standard forms such as barcodes or other representation for “barcodes”, or numbers. I don't want to over simplify their solution, but I am trying to make a point. And what about searching based on words? Done – search engines have been doing that for a while.

Same with the mobility space — a camera on my phone is no different from a camera on my desktop. Hitting a URL from a handset is similar in concept as as doing it from the desktop.

I am not really attacking NeoMedia here — good for them that they were issued those patents… But this is an example of how our patent officers lack common sense, and fail to know about what is already out there, about the history and background of technologies, of properly defining levels of abstraction, and properly identifying and separating concepts, and uniqueness and innovation.

That said, I think PaperClick is pretty cool…

ceo