Ric Richardson

It is a great privilege to have visited the US Patent office to support some legal proceedings surrounding one of my patents. You know, for me, I always thought of the US patent office as one of my first investors… I didn’t pay someone to examine my patent… yes there was a fee but no way could it cover the many hours it takes to search for relevant patents and make a decision about allowing the patent or not… All that effort was given to me and my company as an investment in my future giving me the opportunity to go out and try and make good on something I invented by protecting my ability to do that without competition for a decent period of time…. To stand in front of these people and to say thanks to them was a real highlight and one I’ll not quickly forget.

For over a year now I have been chewing over how to consolidate all the expertise, goodwill and intellectual horsepower that is willing to support Australian inventors. Well after just a few phone call this afternoon, it is clear that there are some really good people at our Universities and in State Government who want to see this happen for Australia. After just one day of ringing around for help I am already half way to finding sponsors who are willing to work along with me in setting up a home for the Australian Invention community. The project has been tentatively called The Incubator and if you would like to know more there is a wiki page discussing the project here .

Below is one of many attempts to come up with a solution to a problem that has been nagging at me for years, namely the waste of driving cars around designed to transport a whole family when most of the time you only need the car to transport one or two people… This modular approach may not be the most streamlined or pleasing to the eye but hopefully you will see that it is very practical. The rear wheels swivel up out of the way so that the front tires of the module behind tucks into the the module in front. The flush front surface fits neatly into the back of the module in front and the windscreen glass retracts down into the space below as does the rear screen of the module in front to allow communal travel space and for mums and dads to make sure the kids seat belts are in place! The work page for this project is here .

Guess what? I moved house last week, which became a treasure trove of problems to solve and invention opportunities. I haven’t had time yet to check if something like this has been done before, but short of a prior art search I’m pretty sure that the idea is pretty fresh. The basic idea is a two trolley system. The main trolley is like a traditional moving trolley but it has the ability to suspend the scoop tray at the bottom 2” higher. An additional single wheel trolley with the ability to swivel goes at the other end of the item being moved. I could have used this invention last week. Work page for this invention:  http://r2labswiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Furniture_and_large_object_trolley_moving_system

Mark Cuban is better known as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks Basketball Team in Texas than for his role in building Broadcom and selling it to Yahoo in 1999. But there is no denying it. Mark is a very smart man. Which is why I am delighted to see that Mark has chosen to become a major investor in a spin-out from Uniloc called BlueCava . It looks like he may even be sitting on the companies board which means I will have a legitimate reason to meet him some day soon. I am so pleased for the guys at BlueCava. They have been working hard and making strong headway. I hope to get to say hello to them all when I go to the States in a few weeks for some business in Washington DC.

Co-founder of Uniloc, USA at Newport Beach October 19th getting tubed. Craig Etchegoyen is one of the most hard charging, determined and smart businessmen I have ever met. And he’s a good mate. But I’ve always felt guilty that he has taken by far the brunt of responsibility for day to day operations at Uniloc ever since we started working together back around 2003. Well it’s great to see him enjoying a real love in his life.. surfing. And great to see things settling down for him at Uniloc.

After seeing Wall Street 2 I was inspired to re-think my next home office setup and opted for something along the lines that appear about 3 minutes into the movie. A trader setup of 6 x 20” monitors and; Wire display boards for project and information display. At any given time I am working on over a dozen projects and being able to scan them all in a flash really helps to get an overview of whats next… Seb and I are moving to a new office so it’s an opportunity to experiment. The work page for the project is on our wiki. Have a look if you want.

Last week I had a fantastic experience working with one of the most dynamic companies in the world, at one of the most interesting places in the world… a red dirt surface mine in the Pilbara of Western Australia. The week of work was truly amazing. I don’t know how Andrew Forrest has placed his mark so heavily on the culture of the company, but he has. Mines are dangerous places, so safety is a priority. So you’d expect everyone to be walking around cowering under the watchful glare of a safety monitor. Not Fortescue! Their mantra is “when you do something, think of your mate his mrs and their kids before you do something..” simple but powerful. With BHP as a competitor Andrews mantra of “think with your head, not your wallet” means that the two year old operation is catching BHP and Rio Tinto at an incredible rate. I had the privilege of meeting lots of great people, hard workers, clear and open thinkers and enthusiasm to burn.. and not a single naysayer amongst them…. I’m ...

For the students who I spoke to at Sydney Uni last Friday I promised Id show a simple example of a patent to give them an idea of how it all works… this patent was abandoned after finding prior art but it show you how simple the provisional can be… in this case the drawings were hand drawn and very quickly processed… If this patent went to full application I’d use PowerPoint to redo the drawings in a more presentable way but basically the text would remain the same: This is for the patent  text This is for the patent drawings What I liked about this patent was that the time from final drawings to filing was about 14 hours. The above pdfs were from the actual filings with the USPTO.

The following presentation was done for some students from Sydney University who I spoke to about the importance of Intellectual Property to start up businesses. The audience was smart but a lot more business oriented than invention oriented and the enthusiasm for invention and protecting great ideas just wasn't as important to this group as to most groups Ive spoken to.... this is not to say that there was not a lot of potential in the group. The course is being put together by Matt Barrie from Freelancer.com and Bill Bartee from Southern Cross Ventures so it is a serious education opportunity and i wish them both success in the future as they try to build the profile of the course over the coming years. Intellectual Property and Startups on Prezi

n. pl. mo·men·ta (-t ) or mo·men·tums 1. Symbol p Physics A measure of the motion of a body equal to the product of its mass and velocity. Also called linear momentum . momentum = mass x velocity In business terms this means the same thing. Bringing weight of experience and resources to bare (mass) with speed of execution (velocity). This lesson was classically illustrated today. I met some really smart surf tech types today with my mate Bob McTavish. They have a really great product and idea but were ginger about committing. They even have a patent but are all cautious and wary. What they have come up with is probably of real importance to the surf industry and they need to be careful that they are not run over by bigger players, but that is what the patents for. The meeting nearly went nowhere as they have limited resources and could not even give a sample to Bob to try out… then the breakthrough… the momentum. I convinced the guys to give Bob all the gear they had...

Recently I started using a tool I've called "2 sheeters" to help get a message across quickly and visually. In a recent business meeting I went through 5 fairly complex iPhone app concepts in about 20 minutes, mostly because I had a 2 sheeter for every concept... what do you think of the idea?

I can now talk about it because Uniloc’s CEO just announced that the total companies Uniloc has sued besides Microsoft has gone up to 60 now with 20 companies taking a license with the company. “The company, with U.S. offices in Irvine, California, has sued 60 companies and reached licensing agreements with more than 20”, Chief Executive Officer Brad Davis said in a telephone interview .

Just got word that another of my patents has been granted in the US. This one has been assigned to Uniloc and covers the use of the imperfections in optical fibre to uniquely identify the location and identity of a device on a fibre optic network… Its pretty cool stuff if I don’t say so myself…. For those of you into the technicalities here is the patent application info as I don’t think the patent database has been updated with the granted number yet… http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=18&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=ric&s2=richardson&OS

Last week the Appeal Court in the US had it’s hearing for arguments from Uniloc and Microsoft regarding the appeal against Judge Smith’s reversal of the jury verdict in favour of Uniloc. The panel of three judges asked a wide range of questions ranging from the technicality of the subject matter to justifying the settlement figure. For those of you following the case closely you can listen to a recording of the case online at: http://oralarguments.cafc.uscourts.gov/Audiomp3/2010-1035.mp3 The appeal court judges final decision can take weeks or months so I have no idea how long the wait will be at this stage.

I have been asked by dozens of people to consider writing a book about the process I use for my own projects. This mind map can be edited if you want to add some questions of notes so feel free... please comment on anything you would really love to see covered.

For those of you who I work with I have included a little mind map that you can help me edit to keep updated. Use tab to create a new sub node and return to add a new peer node. Please note: This is by no means complete but will become more comprehensive as my team members and the people I am working with fill in the blanks over time...

I was looking through some videos that were returned to me after the Australian Story episdoe (they asked me for any video I had that may be relevant) and found this... a segment from the 7.30 report done a few weeks after the Uniloc patent was filed back in 1992... it was a pretty exciting time.

Sorry to drag my readers through an unproven experiment but hopefully the following will actually work… I have done a little experiment to see how search engine robots work and have planted hopefully a unique term “Testaramarizer” in such a way so that it is clear how the technology works. Before writing this article a search for the term at this search url: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Testaramarizer Delivered no results… but hopefully after the Google Robots visit there will be at least two results… one for this article and the second to show the results of my test where the search results actually point at a video from my YouTube account… The link that triggers all this is: http://ric.r2labs.com/redi/FMPro?-db=redi.fp5&-format=main.htm&docid=1&-find Hopefully by morning this will all be working…. I have also included the following test do to ensure I know if the Google robot is being detected improperly… http://ric.r2labs.com/redi/FMPro?-db=redi.fp5&-format=main...

Had a great time at Tech23. Caught up with some of the people I met last year and a lot of new people… had 11 meetings starting 7.30am! Here we go: First up at brekky met Ryan Junee a young fellow who has successfully sold his business to Google.. power to him Bit of circulating talking to a few of the guys that will be presenting to my panel later in the day then… 10am Peter Fox, the guy who turned Home and Garden into a web aware TV/ Magazine show and I discussed a new technology to allow kludging of online video into other projects and tracking royalties and rights at the same time… that was fun… 11am met with Bill Bartee from Southern Cross Ventures. What an open enthusiastic gentleman.I’m looking forward to matching his funds needs in the future and having him up to Byron for a visit. 12 noon. Steve Berry - Global Head of Business Management at Macquarie Bank also old mate and friend caught up.. talking about one time use credit cards, a new transaction mo...