Home field advantage, that is all it is, I am telling you that they are going after misuse for more damages (Patent Infringement) and to get the old contract ripped up.
It not like the geotargeting aspects of adwords and adsense are critical to either, or that the development of a similar system that would avoid the patent problems is beyond Googles capabilities . Would Adwords fold up tomorrow if Google announced that it would no longer be able to offer geotargeting due to this suit? On the other hand what would the geotargeting technology be worth if Google dropped them? The key element of adwords is the display of ads on pages relevant to the ads, not the ability to also geotarget those ads. The technology used to determine the relevancy of the pages is the CIRCA software and they own that company.
Also, anyone can geotarget based on country. I'll give Google my country geotargetting database if they really want it (can be found at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/ ). The tougher part is geotargetting to specific states/regions or cities. That's a little more difficult... and that's what Google is paying for. But either way, you are right... it wouldn't put much a dent in Google if they didn't geotarget AdWords... or even pulled it back to just countries (since that's free and easy). There are MANY other full service geotargetting service providers out there besides Digital Envoy, many of which would probably PAY Google to use them just so they can say Google uses them.
Shawn, on another forum a very smart man said that you can use the components of the Digital Envoy Patent but not the Process. So you better start coding man, this is your opportunity. What did you think of the Patent?
I left a link to the patent on this thread, I have been asking you for two days if you had a look at it yet?
The patent itself is nothing special... not one that would hold up in court if they tried to enforce it against another geotargetting company. Every geotargetting company does what that patent talks about. I could code something in an afternoon that does what their patent does. It would never hold up in court because it's very vague, and there isn't another way to do it (they didn't invent the process... it's just "how it's done"). It's like someone holding a patent on "reading a book". Patents themselves aren't worth much these days. The patent/trademark office hands them out like candy, and has no bearing on whether or not they are enforceable.
Yes its not a very sophisitcated patent, and its the process that is patented not the individual components. There are many places you can find that will provide the location of a site based on its IP address, (such as dnsstuff.com) but since the IP address is not really too definitive when it comes to location (I recently geotracked an IP address to a city in Australia, when actually the site was in Hong Kong, as a result of the leasing of a block of IPs) it is the combining the traceroute information with the IP address that gives the process the patentability. But since there are other engines that use other processes to do geotargeting it may be that Digital Envoy have shot themselves in the foot by taking on Google, perhaps thinking that by hitting them in the pre IPO period, they would be more sensitive to legal actions. This does not seem to be the case however as Google today got a judgement to move the case to the California courts, which seems to imply that it is considered as a contractual dispute. http://news.com.com/Judge+rules+to+...4651.html?type=pt&part=inv&tag=feed&subj=news
Mel, the story is from June 2nd, but thank you for posting it. I checked out www.dnsstuff.com and it is a good set of tools, thank you again for posting these things.