Microsoft offers surplus IP for sale

By Steve Malone

Posted on 6 May 2005 at 10:06

Microsoft has opened the doors to its research labs a little and is offering what it says are 'hundreds' of innovations which can be licenced by start ups and venture capitalists.

The announcement of Microsoft Intellectual Property (IP) Ventures was made to a gathering of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

'Our research labs and efforts across the company have created a large portfolio of innovative technologies that extend the reach of personal computing today, with much of it going into Microsoft products,' commented Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. 'At any given time, there are hundreds of projects under way at Microsoft. IP Ventures provides yet another vehicle for extending this reach and delivering innovations to customers in a variety of areas.'

The IP however, comes at a price. Microsoft is willing to discuss terms which can be a mixture of royalties or stock options, but says it is flexible enough not to deter the bankers.

Microsoft's move is in contrast to a similar opening of the patent portfolio by IBM. At the beginning of this year IBM released 500 patents to royalty-free use. While IBM initially drew a lot of praise for the move as a sign of its commitment to the open source community, a closer look showed that many of the patents were of little value. Microsoft, by charging money for its IP at least has the incentive to make sure the technologies on offer are worth paying for.

Not that Microsoft is giving away the crown jewels: the code to Longhorn remains behind closed doors. Among the intellectual property on offer is software for facial detection and tracking, personalised facial sketching and cartoon generation, various multimedia tools such as distance conferencing and collaboration and data visualisation tools for databases.

Perhaps the most interesting is 'Wallop', which is said to be a social network for sharing photos and blogging. Given that Microsoft's competitors are racing to develop similar tools in the expectation that such collaborative features will appear in Longhorn, presumably either Microsoft is not building in these functions after all or has something better.

An initial 20 or so technologies are available at present. Microsoft says that many more will be added as it rummages through the archives.

A full list of the IP on offer is available at Microsoft IP Ventures.