Patents: From a Personal Media Channel to Video Browsing to Phishing Detection: A Busy Few Days for Patents & Patent Applications @ Microsoft
A busy week or so for Microsoft in the patent and published patent application game. Here are a selected few. We’ve also included an interesting published app from Yahoo.

Patent Awarded
Event driven system and method for retrieving and displaying information
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: April 25, 2000
“A system and method are provided for dynamically creating a communications channel at a local computer in response to selecting an element, such as a word or phrase, that is being displayed on an HTML page. A container also is created on the page in response to the element being selected. Data indicative of the selected element and containing environment is submitted to an Active Server Page at a server computer for retrieving information related to the selected element. The retrieved information is sent to the communications channel at the local computer and then displayed in the container on the original page.”

Published Patent Applications
+ Personal media channel
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: December 2, 2004
“Exemplary systems, engines, and methods allow a multimedia service subscriber to upload personal media content to a multimedia service. The personal media content is then distributed to selected recipients over a personal media channel that is offered only to the selected recipients.”

+ System and method for video browsing using a cluster index
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: December 8, 2004
“A “Video Browser” provides an intuitive user interface for indexing, and interactive visual browsing, of particular elements within a video recording. In general, the Video Browser operates by first generating a set of one or more mosaic images from the video recording. In one embodiment, these mosaics are further clustered using an adjustable similarity threshold. User selection of a particular video mosaic then initiates a playback of corresponding video frames. However, in contrast to conventional mosaicing schemes which simply play back the set of frames used to construct the mosaic, the Video Browser provides a playback of only those individual frames within which a particular point selected within the image mosaic was observed. Consequently, user selection of a point in one of the image mosaics serves to provide a targeted playback of only those frames of interest, rather than playing back the entire image sequence used to generate the mosaic.”

+ Phishing detection, prevention, and notification
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: May 13, 2005
“hishing detection, prevention, and notification is described. In an embodiment, a messaging application facilitates communication via a messaging user interface, and receives a communication, such as an email message, from a domain. A phishing detection module detects a phishing attack in the communication by determining that the domain is similar to a known phishing domain, or by detecting suspicious network properties of the domain. In another embodiment, a Web browsing application receives content, such as data for a Web page, from a network-based resource, such as a Web site or domain.”

+ Automatic generation of taxonomies for categorizing queries and search query processing using taxonomies
Assignee: Yahoo
Filed: December 6, 2004
“Systems and methods for processing search requests are provided, including automatic generation of taxonomies and query processing using those taxonomies.” Note: X-referenced with five other applications.

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