Another Follow Up
Monday evening, after having spent the day immersed in IDC patents, the owner of the office that I am borrowing came in and we began to chat. As we were talking, I allowed my mouse to wander to the PTO site. I was curious how many patents had issued to Ericsson and Qualcomm and typed their names in. Ericsson showed nearly 2500, Qualcomm - it appeared - only had 8.
Right away I suspected there had to be an explanation for the low number, but wasn't prepared yet to look into it further. One explanation could have been that Qualcomm acquired a company, as did IDC. Perhaps Qualcom changed their name, as did IDC. I even considered the possibility that Qualcomm formed a separate technology division having a different name. For what ever reason, it appeared at the time that only 8 patents had issued directly to Qualcomm. (You see, entering a company name in the "Assignee Name" field on the PTO web page will not return a list of patents currently assigned to that company. I will only return patents which were assigned to that company at the time of issue. This is why you cannot obtain an accurate listing of IDC patents from this database.) It hadn't occurred to me that I simply misspelled the name.
Had this been a "for fee" research project, or had I been assigned the task of analyzing IDC for forward-looking purposes - as one might have expected Motley Fool to have done - incomplete, preliminary results would not have been reported.
The relative values of IDC and QCOM are based on the strength of their intellectual properties, as well as the ultimate direction of the wireless industry. Perceiving that the general understanding of patents to the average message board contributor was limited, and the fact that competing companies holding patents on the same technology was causing confusion in the minds of many, the purpose of my post was to demonstrate that IDC owns bragging rights to TDMA. Others may obtain patents utilizing the TDMA technology, but they won't be permitted to manufacture or sell the same without paying the gate-keeper. IDC has also scored a coup with broadband CDMA, which is technologically distinct from narrow-band CDMA. I hope that the analogy of the electric iron and the electric iron with a thermostat helped many of you to see the importance of IDC's core TDMA and broadband CDMA patents. This was the ultimate goal of my post. I hope you can not only see this fact, but that I have given you the facility to prove this to yourselves first-hand.
The most valuable information I have learned about 3G, and about IDC as a company has been gleaned from message boards. But, I have several million dollars invested in IDC, and have no intention of relying on much of the hype that is also circulated on message boards. As well intentioned as Corpgold is with his IDC infosite - and I genuinely commend him in his efforts - one ultimately needs facts. I am in the process of pursuing them.
My deepest personal regrets to Interdigital for the damaging hype that my error may have caused.
Renntech
PS
Would someone kindly link this to Raging Bull. Thank you.
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