In October 2000, I left IBM Research to form a company, First Intellectual that would build “patent walls” of hundreds of patents to protect financial service companies’ service offerings, create a tidy royalty stream, parry any future efforts by competitors to collect royalties and preempt many “patent trolls” from doing the same thing. This is common practice in technology businesses, but new to services. We did OK. We got some meetings with the heads of IP at ML, MSDW, Qualcomm, JP Morgan and a few others. They didn’t really want the service we were providing, but would buy IP consulting services. After a few months, we realized that to be freelancers we’d need a big war chest to file suits. That the war chest alone was a viable business and that invention alone was not. That is, that good patents are inexpensive. We also learned that financial services are a cooperative network because for an offering, one needs the customers of all entities to participate to make the float successful. Playing mean doesn’t work well. These aren’t the kind of folks that thought they needed protection. Certainly not from each other. Trolls had not yet arrived to break up their club. We closed up shop.

Fast forward five years. On December 30, the front page headline on the Financial Times is “US financial service groups rush to join patent stampede”. Sort of. 238 patents, while up 3-fold, is nothing. IBM gets 3000 alone in their sectors. It’s still early. If you want me to be your hired gun and file 500 patents in financial services and get $1 billion a year in royalties, give me a shout. But anyway, I was there over five years ago with the answer.

One gets more myopic with time, so maybe Space-Shot.com is only a few years ahead of its time. Certainly, we don’t need to spend $1,000,000 to stay open for five years waiting. It’s run mostly by robots. First Intellectual needed people. If one comes too early to the battlefield, there is only half a decisive win. As Sun Tzu puts it, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I knew the answer, but not the people who didn’t care for the answer I had. I suffered a defeat despite having the billion dollar business. My buddy who said next time I had a billion dollar business, I should let him syndicate it passed on this one. His loss. Life is a repeated game though.

Ever get a spam like this?

I have a patent pending from 2003 for visual spam that would parse this via OCR, then filter the text as usual. Call me 1-512-853-9123 if you want to license it. You’d be the first licensee so you’d get generous terms. Check it out at USPTO, it’s 20050050150. It’s just one step in the spam arms race. Next will be audio and video spam. Money paid to readers by mailers is the only way to halt spam, but it will take decades for that to get deployed. This patent is the only one that comes up if you search for “aural recognition” and “spam”.

Write to me if you want to buy it from me and patent it. $1,000.

Write me if you want to buy it from me and patent it. The question is how thick is enamel and how close is it to wearing through so people need crowns. $1,000.