Microsoft Research licensing IP

I spent the day with Microsoft IP Ventures group. This new group is focused on licensing out technology created in the Microsoft Research Labs that Microsoft product groups have no plans to productize. These technologies will jump start whole new companies, or add innovative features to existing products.

The Emerging Business Team, the group I work in, will be negotiating license deals with VC's and start-ups to create new products and businesses. There is a growing list of technologies available now with plans to add at least 10 more each quarter.

Only about 10% to 20% of pure research actually makes it into a shipping product. But when it does it is usually revolutionary innovation.  The other 80% to 90% produces lots of patents and published technical papers. This is not uncommon in the pure research world. In the past I worked at Digital Equipment Corp research labs in Palo Alto and found the same conversion rates of research to shipping product. DEC labs produced technologies like AltaVista, the first search engine, the Alpha chip which was the first 64 bit chip, and amazing database sort algorithms which at the time held world speed record.

Microsoft is building a business around licensing IP that will not be used. The intent is not to identify instances of  patent infringement and threaten lawsuits. To my knowledge Microsoft has never sued any company for patent infringement. The idea is to stimulate innovation in the Microsoft ecosystem by leveraging the huge backlog of research and patents from the past several years.

The available technologies include things like a bio-metric ID system that encodes photos, finger prints, and text data from say a drivers license or passport onto tamper resistant ID cards. There is lots of technology behind the image and data compression that creates an encrypted digital signature bar code that is printed on the ID card. Cool stuff.

I saw another technology for dynamic image display for variable bandwidth teleconferencing. This technology continually detects the available bandwidth and continually adjusts the image for clearer shape, smoother motion, and shorter latency.

The most sophisticated technology I saw was Digital Media Fingerprinting.  It puts tamper proof digital watermarks in media clips. It can be used to prevent the illegal copying of unlicensed media content, as well as to prevent the playback of pirated clips. They showed a demo of all the ways people try to change or distort digital media to thwart DRM technology...pretty amazing stuff. This technology survives all attacks and provides unique traceability back to the offending source.

There is a lot more technology available for license, and the list will continue to grow as more of it gets packaged with well written descriptions and demos. Contact me if you are interested in learning more.

Comments

[Ryan Glenn]

This stuff sounds so interesting... if only I was older and had a job coming up with new ideas. I come up with ideas all the time, but I never have the resources/ability to act on them.