{"id":396,"date":"2010-02-02T16:30:04","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T21:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technologists.com\/notes\/?p=396"},"modified":"2022-07-02T16:03:37","modified_gmt":"2022-07-02T21:03:37","slug":"avistar-props","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/2010\/02\/02\/avistar-props\/","title":{"rendered":"Avistar props"},"content":{"rendered":"

After years of skepticism about Avistar’s patent licensing and litigation pursuits, I feel obligated to express admiration for Avistar’s transitioning away from those pursuits, as announced last week: Avistar Communications Monetizes Its Patent Portfolio and Closes Transaction with Intellectual Ventures Management, LLC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My skepticism dates back to first reading some of the patents in 2004 and the press releases Avistar produced regarding Microsoft’s requests for re-examination of some of the patents (see\u00a0public display of dis-affection: Avistar patents & Microsoft<\/a> and\u00a0AVSR vs. MSFT: numbers of patents or patent numbers?<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In hindsight, it seems that Avistar chose to change course about the time that it brought Bob Kirk in as CEO last July<\/a>. After that time, Avistar said little publicly about the patents, seemingly not saying anything<\/a> about U.S. PTO actions or licensing progress. January 19, two days before the Intellectual Ventures transaction<\/a>, Avistar sold a license to Skype for $3M. \u00a0If this had happened a couple of years ago, there would likely have been significant publicity. The only Avistar publicity about the Skype transaction appears to be the SEC 8-K filing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the January 26 press release, Bob Kirk is quoted as saying “This also removes what has been a significant distraction for the team and our operation in general, while providing us the capital to more aggressively invest in our business.”<\/p>\n

It is difficult to say more without speculation. Avistar had announced licenses with many potential licensees, but, as far as I can tell, had not succeeded in negotiating licenses with Cisco, Hewlett-Packard or Microsoft \u2014 it is hard to imagine easy negotiations with those companies. I find it easier to imagine that those companies are some of the investors<\/a> in Intellectual Ventures and receptive to this latest news. [Update February 26:<\/strong> Verizon Patent Case Marks a First for Intellectual Ventures<\/a> lists both Cisco and Microsoft as Intellectual Ventures “members”.]<\/p>\n

After years of skepticism about Avistar’s patent licensing and litigation pursuits, I feel obligated to express admiration for Avistar’s transitioning away from those pursuits, as announced last week: Avistar Communications Monetizes Its Patent Portfolio and Closes Transaction with Intellectual Ventures Management, LLC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8c9uP-6o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2175,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions\/2175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}