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Making TV

There’s growing amount of rumors that Apple is working on an actual TV. They of course already have the Apple TV hockey buck and it’s a good piece of technology and one of the best ones out there, but still a little limited in its current form. One might wonder if anyone can create a similar or better experience?

Let’s say you take care of the hardware and we design the service concept, experience and software for it. We’d work with industrial designers to merge the hardware tightly with that hardware. Could it be as good as any Apple TV? For sure. You’ll just have to witness the patent lawsuits we’ve been involved with Apple in 2010. Not to mention the recent UI patent case with Google (more about that below).

What’s more current than patents already invented years ago, is our current work. A quick calculation reveals that we’ve worked on more than ten (!) different TV projects within last few months. These include online & company strategies, applications, online TV, video-on-demand, web services, startup sparring and even a concept for an interactive TV show. All this for six different clients, both in Finland and US. What’s great is that these projects and clients are in different parts of the value chain and don’t overlap. We don’t work for competing companies/products, but as it happens we’re getting pretty good at pairing large corporations together for new business ventures.

Got Patent, Google?

A method for unlocking a touch screen device includes providing a touch screen device in an idle mode. An area or region displayed on a screen of the device in the idle mode is contacted or activated to reveal at least one application icon associated with an active/unlocked state of the device. The region is moved, expanded or dragged to an edge of the device to change a state of the device to an active/unlocked mode and activate the revealed application.

That’s what the abstract says about a recent patent that was handed to a nice guy called Phillip Lindberg (ex-Nokia) and our Creative Director Sami Niemelä.

What this is in real life, is a handy slide-to-unlock feature for mobile phones (and other touchscreen devices), where the user can select which application to launch directly from the lock screen. Fairly recent Nokia Bubbles thing was one implementation of this but the actual patent was submitted already in July 2007 so the work was done in 2006-2007.

What’s interesting is that the idea has been copied to another platforms as well, in fact Google tried to patent this in 2011. The Nokia Blog has details on that and the whole story how Nokia eventually, and rightfully so, got the patent for this.

So congratulations to Phillip and Sami for this patent!

For added irony, here’s the original patent in Google’s Patent web service.

Enjoy the spring. Until next time.