“I never was a popular kid in class,” the Intellectual Ventures CEO and former Microsoft executive said at D10 on Wednesday. “I’m not going to be popular in this class. If I want popularity, I go to a chef’s convention.”

Although Myhrvold’s company does some of its own inventing — working on things like a new type of nuclear reactor and a broadband antenna — the company is best known for amassing a huge number of patents invented by others and then seeking to license those patents or else pursue revenue in court.

Myhrvold made the case to the crowd, though probably unsuccessfully, that his company serves a purpose similar to that of venture capital or private equity in the process of aiding innovation.

Myhrvold also quoted his own past statement at an earlier D conference, saying, “If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

That’s how Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, described the company he founded, when he last appeared on the D stage, in 2008. While Myhrvold likes to tout IV as a company that “invests in invention,” the truth is that it is often viewed quite differently by the very industry it professes to support. For IV, “investment in invention” has meant amassing an enormous patent portfolio — the seventh-largest in the U.S. and the 15th-largest of any company in the world — and licensing it. Aggressively. So aggressively that IV is often maligned as a “patent troll.”

Onstage at D10 this morning, Myhrvold disputed that characterization, saying IV is just like a venture capital company or private equity group.

“We believe it’s important for there to be a liquid capital market around any valuable asset,” Myrhvold said. “And we think there’s a lot of value in people investing in stuff and realizing a return. Think about the way venture capital and private equity revolutionized the economy. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re an ‘invention capital’ firm. We invest in invention. We feel inventors should get rich. They should get funding. We should have more invention.”

And we should protect it. Which is a big part of IV’s business model. As Myrhvold conceded, “Sure, we have sued some people.”

But does buying up patent portfolios and using them to squeeze licensing fees out of companies really help innovation and creativity?

“If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing,” Myrhvold said. “In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.”

To many, that view is contentious. And it has generated a lot of animosity toward IV, particularly in Silicon Valley. Does that bother Myrhvold?

Not at all.

“Look, this is a year when the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are doing exactly what I do. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They’re doing what I’m doing!

“So if you have animosity to me, that’s fine. I was never a popular kid in school. I can handle it. I’m not ashamed of suing people.”

So IV’s role is to monetize things that aren’t really products?

Not quite.

The company does have a few products in its portfolio that it is hoping to monetize: A super-high-bandwidth mobile broadband antenna, and a new nuclear reactor.

“Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel,” Myrhvold said. “So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It’s the reactor of your dreams.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

The latest evidence came Monday, as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures teamed with chipmaker Nvidia to buy approximately 500 patents from IPWireless.

The patents include some related to 3G and 4G technologies, including LTE, the companies said. Terms of the deal, which closed at the end of last month, were not disclosed.

Ownership of the patents will be split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia getting license to all of the patents it didn’t get to purchase.

Intellectual Ventures has already sued several major carriers over patents. In Febuary, it sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, and last week it added U.S. Cellular to the proceedings. (Verizon Wireless, not named in the suit, is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures.)

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

The Seattle company sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, alleging infringement of more than a dozen patents.

The suit, filed Thursday in Delaware District Court, seeks unspecified damages.

“The carriers have wireless communication networks that are vast and are integrated,” said Melissa Finocchio, chief litigation counsel for Intellectual Ventures, in an interview. “We have many patents that cover various aspects of that telecommunications system.”

AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile representatives declined to comment.

The fourth U.S. carrier, Verizon Wireless, is not named in the suit and is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures’ technology, Finocchio said.

Finocchio said that the company went to court after several months of discussions failed to lead to a business deal.

“Our first and strongest preference is to have a business relationship with the companies that are using technology covered by our intellectual property,” she said.

This is not the first time that IV has gone to court. In December 2010, it sued memory-chip makers Elpida and Hynix, and also has separate pending actions against several programmable chipmakers and with a number of security software makers.

The company, led by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, has also sued Motorola Mobility.

Some of the best known companies are those that have built up huge war chests of patents and then go after companies that refuse to license their technologies. In this group of “non-practicing entities” are companies like Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures; and NTP, the company that successfully sued Research In Motion.

There are other patent-collecting companies that use their patent power to help companies that are already the target of patent litigation. And, of course, there are the armies of attorneys to litigate all the various disputes.

One lesser-known approach is the one taken by Article One Partners, a firm that helps companies being targeted for attack by seeking to invalidate the patents being asserted. Article One does this by tapping a global network of contributors that search for similar ideas that predate a patent — so-called “prior art.” Article One gets a flat fee or subscription from those who seek its services, while contributors that find prior art are given a monetary reward.

While Microsoft has publicly said it is tapping Article One’s services, most of the company’s more than 100 clients prefer not to advertise their association with Article One. That said, the demand for its services is huge, according to Ray Felts, who is president of the company’s North America practice.

“We are assisting clients in the middle of just about every major litigation out there,” Felts said in a recent interview.

To expand its practice and be closer to the majority of its customers, Felts has relocated to Silicon Valley, and Article One has opened an office in Palo Alto.

Although the company’s clients tend to be in high-tech circles such as Silicon Valley, Felts said those that that ferret out prior art have come from all over the world. Some $2 million in rewards has been paid out, he said, with one person in the Southeast U.S. having taken in more than $100,000. The privately held company has been doubling its revenue year over year, Felts said, without disclosing numbers. Its backers include Marshall Phelps, the lawyer that built up the intellectual property licensing businesses at Microsoft and IBM.

Much of Article One’s work is around protecting the makers of products against suits by the nonpracticing entities, such as Lodsys. However, more and more, the company is seeing disputes from one manufacturer suing another.

“You have what we call the circular firing squad of operating companies killing each other,” Felts said.

The mobile industry in particular has seen a surge in such litigation. Of the 250 patent studies that Article One has done for clients, more than half have been in the mobile and wireless areas.

“It’s driving our growth,” Felts said.

The patent amassing firm, which was started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, said it has filed suit in Delaware federal court.

“Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time,” Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach agreement on a license.”

Finocchio said the company’s preference is to negotiate deals rather than head to court, but Thursday’s move shows its willingness to do the latter.

“We have a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license,” Finocchio said. “Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business.”

Of course, Intellectual Ventures is far from alone in filing mobile patent lawsuits. Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing HTC and Samsung (and vice versa), Microsoft is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble, to name just a few of the court actions under way.

Unlike those businesses, though, Intellectual Ventures doesn’t make products of its own, making it tough to countersue them for patent infringement. For more on the company, check out our coverage from 2008, when Myhrvold appeared at D6.

IV vs. Motorola

Late Monday, IV filed suit against Hynix Semiconductor and Elpida Memory alleging the two companies have infringed several of its patents related to DRAM and Flash memory. Also named in the suit: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Logitech, Best Buy and a handful of other companies that make or sell devices running on Hynix or Elpida chips. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.

According to the complaint, IV approached Hynix Semiconductor in 2008 and Elpida in 2009 in an effort to negotiate licenses for the patents at issue here, but was rebuffed. “Despite Intellectual Ventures’ good faith efforts to negotiate a business solution, [Hynix and] Elpida [have] failed and refused to license Intellectual Ventures’ patents on reasonable terms and continues to use those inventions without permission,” IV explains in its complaint. “[It] has been irreparably harmed by Defendants’ acts of infringement, and will continue to be harmed unless and until Defendants’ acts of infringement are enjoined and restrained by order of this Court.”

The suit, IV’s fourth since it was first established, confirms once and for all that the company is willing to litigate to win the patent licensing deals on which its business depends. And that has wide implications for the tech industry. As IP attorney Bijal Vakil said last year when IV sued a handful of security software outfits, “It’s a pretty significant wake-up call for Silicon Valley companies that the threat of this type of massive litigation is real and it’s not going away anytime soon.”

[Image credit: Jan Tik/Flickr]

“The space is just out of control,” Dashwire CEO Ford Davidson said in a phone interview with Mobilized. “You can’t even keep track of who is suing whom.”

Google, for example, said this week that it is bidding $900 million to acquire a pool of patents from bankrupt Nortel, citing the increased mobile litigation over Android as a motivator.

While much of the attention is on moves by big players such as Nokia, Microsoft and Apple, patent disputes among less well-known firms are also becoming more common. Dashwire, for example, is facing a suit, filed in January, from rival Synchronoss.

In the wake of that suit and with all of the other patent litigation in the industry, Davidson said Dashwire started conversations with Intellectual Ventures that ultimately led to the licensing pact. RIM also recently signed a licensing deal with Intellectual Ventures, a patent firm started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.

“All of these things were coming together,” Davidson said.

Davidson said, as a small company with about 25 employees, he’d like to be focused on building products, not dealing with litigation.

“In starting a tech company these days, one of the realities is that at some point you are going to get hit with an infringement suit,” Davidson said.

For its part, Intellectual Ventures said it has seen an increase in mobile-related patent activity, particularly now that the smartphone has taken center stage.

“You’ve seen a lot of patent assertion and patent licensing and also litigation from all size companies,” Intellectual Ventures Vice President Joe Chernesky said in a phone interview. “There’s been such a massive integration of technology in mobile phones.”

Whole sectors that used to be separate, like the PDA, are now just one feature of a smartphone. “All of that technology has been merged into one product,” Chernesky said.

What’s more, the industry is filled with start-ups, many of whom haven’t built up much of a patent portfolio to fend off litigation, particularly since patents can take years to acquire.

“We’ve actually gained a lot of customers who develop and sell products in the mobile space,” Chernesky said. “They are all facing significant intellectual property threats and patent threats.”

Among the start-ups it has signed deals with is Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass., provider of voice-to-text software for smartphones.

Although mobile has always been an area of interest for Intellectual Ventures in terms of both invention and patent acquisition, Chernesky said the company will probably be investing even more now that its customer base is growing.

“We tend to focus acquisitions and investment based on actual customers,” he said.

The closely held firm was co-founded by former Microsoft Corp. chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, who had avoided litigation for years but never ruled it out.

Intellectual Venture’s lawsuits focus on patents in the fields of computer security and semiconductor technology. One suit names Symantec Corp., McAfee Inc., Trend Micro Inc. and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s a trio of super-nerds at Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures in the Seattle area–Bellevue, Wash., actually–trying to best the efforts of Cisco (CSCO) intern Greg Justice, who imperiously dubbed himself “The World’s Most Interesting Intern.”

BoomTown will be honest in admitting I do not understand anything this group of interns is saying, but I like their gumption, especially the one with the skewed baseball cap.

And extra points for the lab coats!

Enjoy the video:

Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle firm known more for acquiring patents than dispensing with them, announced a deal this week to sell rights to a large portfolio of satellite communications patents to Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian joint venture that recently won a contract to supply a new fleet of satellites to Iridium Communications. Where did the inventions come from? Mainly the original Iridium project.

The man who can explain this circular-sounding process is Vincent Pluvinage, a veteran in patent-trading circles who runs a unit of Intellectual Ventures in Silicon Valley. His six-person team focuses on what he calls “strategic” acquisitions–pools of patents costing $10 million to $50 million or so–that can be repackaged and bring a return to the firm widely known as IV.

A key focus for the group is large technology-development efforts that churned out a large number of patents, whether or not the companies developing the technologies were successful. “If we find a situation like that, what we ask ourselves is, what other assets could we assemble that would be synergistic–then where could we redeploy the assets and create a return,” he says.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But there’s one more company at the end of that oblique line of ownership: Intellectual Ventures, an “invention capital firm” or patent troll, depending on your views on innovation and intellectual property.

Over the past few days, multiple sources with knowledge of the patent have told me it is owned by Intellectual Ventures. And now Intellectual Ventures has confirmed this. The company operates Memscom LLC, which operates Durham Logistics LLC, and through Durham, owns patent #7,679,604.

According to intellectual property consulting firm Avancept, Intellectual Ventures is linked to some 1,110 shell companies and affiliated entities. Evidently, Memscom and Durham Logistics are two of them.

Patent #7,679,604 is just one of many that Intellectual Ventures owns through that pair of LLCs. The U.S. Patent and Trade Office lists 29 patents and patent applications assigned to Durham Logistics (see list below; click to enlarge), all of which were first developed by ArrayComm, the wireless communications software company founded by cellphone pioneer Marty Cooper.

Among them, #6,834,249, a motion-control patent nearly identical to #7,679,604, that was granted in 2004 after a 2001 application and would seem to predate many of the motion-sensing smartphones currently on the market.

What does Intellectual Ventures intend to do with these patents? Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Said an Intellectual Ventures spokesperson: “We don’t currently have specific plans to announce regarding any asset(s) in particular, but we are actively talking with customers about licensing our invention portfolio on fair and reasonable terms.”

COMPLETE COVERAGE:

• New Motion Control Patent Could Shake Up Smartphone Industry
• Smartphone Motion Patent’s Authors Are Google, Apple Engineers
• Confirmed: Intellectual Ventures Owns Smartphone Motion-Control Patent

Toshiba said it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Mr. Gates. Intellectual Ventures, based in Bellevue, Wash., is run by a former Microsoft Corp. executive, Nathan Myhrvold.

Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said the two sides were talking about how they could collaborate on nuclear technology. He said the discussions were still in early stages and that nothing has been decided on investment or development.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here is a video of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures.

In it, Mossberg wrangles with the former Microsoft (MSFT) CTO and research guru over his controversial company, which is assembling a large body of patents and inventions.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece earlier this week about Myhrvold’s efforts, discussing how he is “using that clout to press tech giants to sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.”

The video of the interview is in three parts.

In this third part, Myhrvold takes questions from the audience, including about whether Intellectual Ventures is making a patent land grab, putting resources behind inventions to make actual products, patent abuse and making research into a profit center.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080919/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-3-of-3/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080918/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-2-of-3/ http://allthingsd.com/20080918/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-2-of-3/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:13:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3984 We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here is a video of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Nathan Myhrvold, Founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures.

In it, Mossberg wrangles with the former Microsoft (MSFT) CTO and research guru over his controversial company, which is assembling a large body of patents and inventions.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece yesterday about Myhrvold’s efforts (and did not use our D6 video covering the exact same topic, but we happily link to the Journal’s article anyway!), discussing how Myhrvold is “using that clout to press tech giants to sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.”

The video of the interview is in three parts.

In this second part, Myhrvold talks about legendary inventor Thomas Edison and the history of patents and inventions, “invention capitalism,” the patenting of software and its abuse by tech giants, multi-touch technologies and where innovation will come from next.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080918/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-2-of-3/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080917/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-1-of-3/ http://allthingsd.com/20080917/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-1-of-3/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:42:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3916 We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here is a video of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Nathan Myhrvold, Founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures.

In it, Mossberg wrangles with the former Microsoft (MSFT) CTO and research guru over his controversial company, which is assembling a large body of patents and inventions.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece today about Myhrvold’s efforts (and did not use our D6 video covering the exact same topic, but we happily link to the Journal’s article anyway!), discussing how Myhrvold is “using that clout to press tech giants to sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.”

The video of the interview is in three parts.

In this first part, Myhrvold talks about exactly what Intellectual Ventures is–essentially, supporting inventors before they invent–discusses the importance of patience in the inventing business, gives examples of inventions in arenas like energy and defines what a “patent troll” is (not him, he insists).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080917/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-1-of-3/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080528/video-nathan-myrhvold-highlight-reel/ http://allthingsd.com/20080528/video-nathan-myrhvold-highlight-reel/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 23:30:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/video-nathan-myrhvold-highlight-reel/ Here are a few video highlights from the D6 interview of Nathan Myhrvold, Founder and CEO, Intellectual Ventures, conducted by conference co-host Walt Mossberg.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080528/video-nathan-myrhvold-highlight-reel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080528/myhrvold/ http://allthingsd.com/20080528/myhrvold/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 22:45:34 +0000 John Paczkowski http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080526/myhrvold/

After retiring from his position as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft (MSFT), Nathan Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures, a company that is assembling a large body of patents and inventions. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University and worked with Professor Stephen Hawking on research in cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation. Dr. Myhrvold himself holds more than 20 patents and has nearly 200 patents pending. He is currently working on a cookbook surveying the science, technology and techniques used in modern cuisine. It is expected to be completed in late 2009.

• Walt welcomes Nathan Myhrvold to the stage, noting that it will be a nice change of pace to talk about something other than hostile takeovers and ill-starred mergers.
• Myhrvold starts out by explaining his business. “We invest in inventions. We invest in the creation of ideas.” But, he asks, how do you invest in companies that don’t exist yet? Myhrvold says he recruits inventors, funds and nurtures them and then takes ownership of their inventions: “It’s like Baby Mama, with me as the mama.”

  

• What sort of ideas has your company created so far? asks Walt. Myhrvold prefaces his answer by saying his company’s process requires patience: “We have a very long pipeline. We file 500 patents a year …” Walt follows up, asking for an example of a product or service the company has created. Looks like there aren’t any. Myhrvold says they have a few licensing deals.

• Again, Walt asks for an example of one of Intellectual Ventures’ inventions. Myhrvold finally responds, saying the company has developed some sort of nuclear reactor that “rethinks nuclear power.” Walt asks Myhrvold to explain. You really want me to start talking physics here, says Myhrvold. Looks like he’s going to dodge again. He serves up a bunch of jargon wrapped in a “swing for the fences” cliche.
• How do you invest in companies that don’t exist yet? (Honestly, I’m not sure Myhrvold even knows. Perhaps he can recruit an inventor to answer that question and this dubious business model he’s talking up…)
• Moving on … What’s in this for the inventors? A fee and a portion of the returns on any licensing deal Intellectual Ventures manages to secure, Myhrvold says.
• Walt: And how do you manage these deals? You don’t go around dropping letters on CEO doorsteps notifying them of patent infringements, do you? Myhrvold says the company has never done anything like that, but can’t say that it never will. There are some very positive ways you can create value from intellectual property. (And they are …?)

• Moving on …. Walt: This kind of company you’ve set up, is there a precedent for it? Sure is, says Myhrvold: You need only look back to Thomas Edison. A charismatic inventor-genius with an invention-oriented company.
• One thing Myhrvold is good at inventing: new buzzwords. Drawing parallels between venture capitalism and what he does, Myhrvold, it seems, is an “intellectual capitalist.”
• Walt asks about the patent system, specifically with regard to software. Is the patent system broken? Myhrvold acknowledges that the patent office has granted some patents that it shouldn’t have, but notes that it’s been doing a pretty good job of vetting them recently. He says that historically the software industry gas given the patent industry a bad rap.
• Big boys play rough, says Myhrvold. They play rough with copyright and with patents.
• Walt asks, “What do you think about this multi-touch stuff?” Myhrvold says it’s an interesting idea, but not a huge one–it’s a medium-size idea. Gestural interfaces, on the other hand, are a big idea.
• What’s the current state of R&D? Myhrvold says there’s a lot of great work being done at places like Microsoft and Apple, but adds that the current environment isn’t as rich as it was back in the day at PARC.
• Will gestural interfaces inspire lots of patent litigation, asks Walt, noting that Apple CEO Steve Jobs specifically mentioned the company had filed a number of patents around the iPhone’s IP. Myhrvold says that’s tough to say, but he bets that a lot of the early work done on multi-touch was done at places other than Apple and Microsoft, and may well be in the public domain.
• “Don’t let the secret recipe die with the inventor,” Myhrvold says.
• Moving on to the Q&A: First question from Jason Calacanis, who notes the distaste some entrepreneurs have for Myhrvold’s business because of the number of patents he files. Would Myhrvold ever considering winnowing that list down to, say, 250? Myhrvold dismisses that assertion, noting that very few of the patents he files ever amount to anything. Calacanis says that the media has made it appear that Intellectual Ventures has been filing thousands of patents a year. Myhrvold says that’s not the case. Walt jumps in and asks how many patents Intellectual Ventures buys each year. Answer: thousands.
• On to another question about how corporations look at inventions, Myhrvold answers: “No CEO ever says, ‘Damnit, we need to increase research!’ I want to encourage them to do that.”

For more coverage, see The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Tech Trader Daily.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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