Lost in all the news about Apple’s earnings yesterday was a development in the $360 million patent-infringement lawsuit against it and other co-defendants (including Skype, Comcast, and AT&T) by Klausner Technologies. One of the co-defendants, SimulScribe, settled. SimulScribe offers its own competing visual voicemail for Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones, which it just started selling (prices begin at $10 a month for 40 voicemail messages). Visual voicemail turns your voicemails into text with headlines so you can manage them like e-mail and listen to them, or read them, in any order you choose.
So that’s one down for Klausner. Apple has much deeper pockets and more to lose than SimulScribe, but can a settlement be far behind? Or will Apple drag this out in the courts? If the NTP-RIM trial is any precedent (in which RIM lost on a flimsier case and had to pay more than $600 million), Apple might be better off settling now. the strategy Klausner seems to be pursuing is to line up settlements with the other co-defendants first to put more pressure on Apple.
In celebration of settling his portion of the lawsuit, SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff is offering a free one-month trial (wipe brow now, James).
I am not able to understand eactly what is this case about. If any one knows about it then please put your views in the comments, else any links (apart from the 1 given in the post) regarding the case will be really helpful.
Thanks in advance
I hope this doesn’t change SimulScribe in anyway! I’ve been an avid user; they have been a total life saver given all the calls I get on a daily basis!
In regards to what the case is about. Klausner Technologies has 2 patents which basically are the raw components of visual voicemail. Without getting too legal (I am definitely not a lawyer) the patents cover any voicemail sound file that is displayed with information from the voicemail, this can be through email, web interface, etc. These patents are not on our core transcription service but in order to deliver that service in the visual way that we think is best for our customers we had to license the Klausner patents.
And in response to SHELLX, thank you for your very kind post, if you have any suggestions for us please email me anytime at jsiminoff@simulscribe.com, we will continue to make the product better and better.
James Siminoff, CEO
SimulScribe
I’ll bet they let him settle for a song so Klausner Technologies (patent troll) could go dance with Apple having set precedence. Really this is an obvious patent with plenty of previous art. voice to text software has been in use since the 70s. The fact that this gets the voice to convert into text from your voice mail (as opposed to other pre-recorded sources) should have nothing to do with it. This is just a patent that never should have been granted,
We need patent reform desperately in this country.
CodeCrunch, I agree with you on patent reform, things need to be looked at in our patent system.
However, this patent has nothing to do with the voice to text part of our business, you are correct there is a lot of prior art in that area. This has to do with how a voicemail is displayed visually when it is accompanied by a sound file.
Before I met Judah Klausner I had similar feelings as you, however after meeting him and understanding his business and the incredible way in which he is able to think way into the future, I have a lot of respect for him.
Dont know much about the lawsuit, but I love Simulscribe!!!
HOW DO YOU PATENT A LIST OF MESSAGES? LOL! These people are NUTS!
OMG! these crooks are getting more and more desperate. Why don’t these people just go steal some big potted plants from Apple’s lobby in Cupertino and then be done with it. Slobs.
hey guys no offense but your grammar is getting bad – vooicemail, wordscombinedwithnospaces… i love you guys but neaten it up a little
Patent issues aside, visual voicemail is just a dumb idea, imo. Then again I don’t have to wade through massive amounts of vmail.
But I can tell from the first two seconds of one whether I want to listen to one. If not I skip.delete.
*shrug*
Simulscribe has been a major asset to my business. The amount of time saved not having to listen to my client’s voicemails is incredible.
Il y a environ un an j’ai acheté le plateau à huîtres personnel du champion français d’ouverture d’huîtres à la brasserie Lorraine à Paris pour 100 Euros.
Le mec arrive à ouvrir 216 huîtres toutes les 5 minutes.
Un an plus tard je me demande si j’aurais fait mieux d’acheter la souri du pire des employées de chez Google, juste pour une question de productivité. Regarde un peu :
- le modèle de revenu chez Google est d’employer des cons pour les faire clicker le plus rapidement possible sur des liens sponsorisés par des loosers.
- sur un effectif de 16.000 employées il y en a 15.998 qui font ça du matin au soir.
- ils font un chiffre d’affaires d’environ 4 Milliards de dollars.
- avec un prix moyen par click d’environ 0.20$ l’employé type de cette étrange boite clicke pour environ 65 fois toutes les 5 minutes, bien inférieur à la performance de l’effort humain et intellectuel du meilleur ouvreur d’huîtres de France.
La dernière frontière du travail c’est bien aux USA. Travailler moins pour gagner plus.
Et pendant ce temps, comme par hazard, le cours de l’action monte.
Software patents should all be illegal. Software should be protected by copyright only. Just about every software company in the world could be sued by a Judah Klausner.
Many people get touchy when discussing so-called “software patents”, but unless you specifically read them you don’t really know. So, here are the relevant documents.
http://patft.us...p;RS=PN/5572576
http://patft.us...p;RS=PN/5283818
@8 – Get over it – this is a blog. These guys are putting up 15+ posts a day and digesting tons of information for all of us. Give it a break.
the biggest problem with the patent system when it comes to IP is the lack of request to have a working model at the time the patent is reviewed in order to really determine the context of the patent.
What I mean is, you should NOT be able to just sit there and say ” A system where … ” and just type up an idea a decade before it could even be executed. Thats just an idea patent … If you made someone show in application the execution, it would eliminate 90% of the silly patents granted.
my0.02
I totally agree with codeCrunch. “A system where…”… I want to patent “a system where people sit on their asses and watch moving pictures”… we call this TV. I am hoping to sue Panasonic, Sony, etc. Software patents are just silly. When I was an engineer at Apple we patented software ideas because Apple paid us like $5000 for the application/$5000 for the award. That’s why we did it! And a resume builder…
Dear Codecrunch,
I suggest you read the Klausner patents and you will see that they are very well documented as to how the “system” is supposed to work. Most patents that are in this area and in this league have a tendency to be before their time, in terms of economical, commercial application. For that reason the patent inventor typically has to promote the idea to manufacturers and wait many years to collect on licenses and/or royalties. Such is the case with this one. FYI – Judah Klausner is not a patent troll, he is the patent inventor, the real thing. This is not his first and only major patent, he was also the patent inventor of the electronic organizer aka Rolodex, Wizard, Palm, Newton, etc.
John,
You are 100% correct. In fact I found it very cool to be with the guy that has invented so many incredible things. He is not a troll, that is for sure and this is not a bullshit patent.
Thanks for taking the timme to look at the patents as we obviously did.
Jamie
95% of the voice mails that I receive contain only the message: “this is XXXX, call me at NNN-NNN-NNNN.” The only thing that I really need is the return phone number.
For the other 5% that contain some other content, it is a waste to convert it and have to listen to it. When you call the sender, the 1st thing they will do is repeat the message that they left.
The voicemail-to-text seems like a great idea until you think about the reality of voice mail messages.
What am I missing?