Google, the world’s largest search engine and the owner of the world’s largest online advertising platform, has been granted a major U.S. patent for “determining and/or using location information in an ad system.” In other words, Google now owns a key patent for location-based advertising…

The US Patent & Trademark Office just published Apple’s latest trademark application for ” Magic Trackpad “—and, looking at a bit of history, we think it could be one of two new products. Possibility #1 Back in July 2009, Apple was granted a patent on their multi-touch Trackpad. However, many …

A new patent awarded to Facebook this week could have some big implications for the entire social media industry. The world’s largest social network now own the patent for the news feed. Patent #7,669,123 , first unearthed by All Facebook , credits Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and seven other current and …

Well, here’s a bit of an odd one. A recent patent application from Sony has not only revealed an LCD-based game controller (which would be notable enough in itself), but an LCD-based, universal game controller that’s designed to work with more than one game console. As you can …

Dell’s puzzled the world for quite some time with its outlandish Mini 5 — at first glance it’s just another Android-based MID , but a quick fiddle with it reveals the full-fledged 3G phone inside. So will it fit in a pocket? Can we carry it around like a normal phone? Is this the future…

Apple might have finally released the iPad , but the rumor mill is already on to prognosticating about the next rev — and as usual, Apple’s patents and patent applications are everyone’s favorite place to start. (And for good reason, really — that very first design patent we inititally noticed way back in 2004 …

Oh, Symbian, you tease ! For an organization as committed to openness and sharing its roadmap (and its code) as the Symbian Foundation , it’s pretty unusual that they’d be counting down to a big unveiling of anything — but sure enough, they’ve been tweeting decreasing numbers with the hashtag “#symbiancountdown” starting back on…

Rambus , a company that has been in a long, drawn out legal battle with Nvidia over five patents for what seems like ages now, had some good news delivered to it late last week. A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission issued a preliminary determination finding that Nvidia had…

We know it’s been tough with the dearth of Apple-related speculation as of late, but it looks like we now finally have a few more clues about what the company might be up to courtesy of a pair of recently published patent applications. The first of those is a new …

It’s not often that we genuinely like what these big corporations are doing, so you’d better pay close attention here. We’ve caught wind of a Verizon patent covering the logistics of setting up and running a GPS-based classifieds service, which matches potential buyers and sellers of goods on the basis of…