Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital has a good post on the value of patents after fighting for 8.5 years to get one of his granted. His Half.com (Ebay.com) patent received six rejections, half of them final, before it was allowed. I explain this to clients, particularly software startups, on a daily basis – good patents are often very hard to get, you will receive many rejections, and it will be very expensive to respond to those rejections with no guarantee that you will ever be granted a patent. Fire your patent attorney if he fails to explain that to you.
Postulated in 1971, a fourth passive circuit element called a memristor has been invented by a team from HP Labs. Circuit theory books, which will have to be rewritten, teach the existence and use of three passive circuit elements: the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The memristor, short for memory resistor, changes its resistance based on the history of the flow of charge through the device. It essentially behaves like a non-linear resistor with memory. The device improves in performance the smaller it is made. The memristor can be used as both a digital and an analog device, depending on how current is passed through it. The applications are astounding, including computers that do not need to boot up, the elimination of disk drives, more energy efficient devices, and analog computers that can remember and associate patterns in the same way as the human brain.
I recently won U.S. patent no. 7,344,086 for the inventors of an innovative lottery ticket having features that prevent theft. The patent also claims methods for preventing lottery ticket theft. Major lottery ticket suppliers are considering licensing the patent.