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Patent MarketPlace: Social Media Patents for Sale

Multi-Network, Multi-Website IM and Networking (Popflyz): U.S. Patent No. 10,680,840

We may think we are all connected, but we really are not. Yes, we can send and receive an email from or to anyone anywhere in the world, but when it comes to real-time social networking, with whom you can IM (instant message) or otherwise communicate is limited by what social network you signed up for and which social network you are using at any point in time. If Emily is on LinkedIn, and Andrew is logged into Instagram, and Sarah is using Twitter, and Aiden is at Tumblr, there can be no immediate, real-time communication between and among them.

In a truly inter-connected world, we should be able to communicate in real time with anyone on any social network. That is exactly what this patent does! It enables a user to chat with a person, group of people, or groups of people who are logged in to a variety of different instant messaging applications or social networking websites using a single app. Users of the application created by this patent can chat with any contact on any of the user's contact lists across multiple different IM or social networks!

U.S. Patent No. 10,680,840 for a “System for integrating multiple IM networks and social networking websites” is both disruptive and foundational. The patent has a 2008 Priority Date, but the patent is valid and enforceable through 2030. And…it has 135 Forward Citations. The acquirer of this patent can create the first and only totally inter-connected instant messaging service!

A Better Search Engine (Peer Belt): U.S. Patent No. 8,352,464

What are Veronica, Jughead, Jumpstation, infoseek, EINet Galaxy, and Aliweb? They are the search engines that preceded the launch of Yahoo! in 1994. Today’s leading search engine, Google, did not launch until 1998! There’s been a bunch of search engines that just did not make it. The challenge of creating and operating a search engine is to give users what they want, and it is not easy to figure out exactly what that is. How many times have you done a search, but received responses that were not what you were looking for?

This patent takes search engines to a whole new level by ranking a heterogeneous set of articles while giving priority to the articles people like most. It defines "like” as an implicit thing tied to article interaction time by the user and/or special actions executed by the user while reading the article. No special actions – like upvoting or clicking on a “Like” button – are needed for the articles to be ranked correctly.

The invention covered by this patent takes a giant step forward in the measurement and use of time as a key factor. How long it takes a reader to fully understand an article and any deviations from that are measured. It uses those variations to organize videos, pictures, music, and text into a single, unbiased-by-article-type index. Additionally, within the homogeneous-by-type articles, no two articles are the same. Texts have different lengths, pictures may depict different sets of objects – sometimes interacting with each other – and videos will differ in length. The result is a more responsive search and content prioritization engine, a search engine at which users spend more time, and that means more revenue for the search engine operator!

A content-recommendation engine based on the invention measured an up to 25% clickthrough rate when applied to a social mobile application with user time in the app nearly doubled. In yet another integration, a crowdsourced video platform with 100M videos seen each and every month, measured a 54% increase on top of the site’s homegrown baseline and, as with the previous example, user time on the site nearly doubled.

U.S. Patent No. 8,352,464 for a “System and method for ranking documents through human assistance” would be a strategic acquisition for a second-tier search engine or social content app that is ready to dramatically improve its functionality, usefulness, and degree of user-friendliness, as well as its revenue. This patent would also be a smart acquisition for any vertical search engine that addresses a specific industry, enterprise, or societal sector.

Measuring Conceptual Proximity among People in Social Networks (Poltorak): Four U.S. Patents and Application

Jeff and Sarah both like hiking, camping and the outdoors, but Jeff is a steak-eater and Sarah is a vegan. Sam and Megan are both church-goers and play tennis, but Sam drives a bus and Megan is a clinical psychologist. Matching people with similar – but also dissimilar – characteristics and interests is a challenge for any social networking or dating site. And it is an equally daunting challenge for advertisers who need to put their messages in front of prospects with exactly the right demographics and interests.

This patent portfolio creates a dataset for an individual – age, gender, race, religious beliefs, political affiliations, location, income, education, interests, and other factors. Based on that dataset, the individual’s location is determined within a multi-dimensional space in which each dimension represents one of the factors in the dataset. In essence, each person is plotted on a multi-dimensional grid that reflects all of that person’s characteristics, traits, and interests. Distances between that person and other people who have also been plotted based on their characteristics, traits, and interests are computed. Intelligent decisions can then be made regarding each individual as a friend or date suggestion, and advertisers can make more precise selections regarding prospecive customers for their products and services.