“I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple,” Bob Cringely blogs for I, Cringely. “His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.”
Cringely writes, “All this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google. Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.”
Cringely opines, “I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You know why Cringely’s eyes are brown? ‘Cause he’s full of…
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
.. he’s full of … ZUNES!
Exactly!
Excite@Home directors: “Holy cow, Cringely’s right! We totally forgot that was in our patent portfolio!”
How likely? Not bloody likely.
More likely is “So that’s how Siri works. Looks like what we’ve already done.”, since nobody has written, to any extent, as to how it does it’s magic…
Sorry, since there is no BOD, and creditors are less likely to monitor IP infringement due to IT ignorance, who’s responsible?
I come home from Sunday School and I read this. My face turns a whiter shade of pale.
Siri!
Deploy Parrot AR.Drone. Arm.
Retrieve Cringely coordinates.
Lock on.
Nice 🙂
Cringely has punked another team of lawyers – this time ones working for one of the most recognizable names in tech! From IP that “sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago”. How is it that a man with so much knowledge is wasting his time posing as a blog-writing hack?
Exactly.
I wonder if M$’s Stevie Balmy is paying ‘I Cringely’ to spread BS i.e. FUD about SIRI. Sure looks like M$ strategy.
“MacDailyNews Take: You know why Cringely’s eyes are brown? ‘Cause he’s full of…”
Gee, that was an intelligent response. I’ll bet it took a committee at MDN to come up with it.
When is MDN going to start treating its site as nothing more than a digital National Inquirer?
Never, you have missed the whole point in coming here.
Go away Gregg…
Really? This is how Bob Cringely describes himself on his website “…The sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and adventurer continues to write about personal computers and has an active consulting business in Silicon Valley, selling his cybersoul to the highest bidder.” Not making this up. I say the MDN summary is kind actually.
I looked up a few of your posts from times gone by. Your track record here is so poor, you’re best described as “brown eyed” too.
(stating ATT had an exclusive, 5 year contract “expiring in 2012” looks pretty silly, considering Verizon has had the iPhone for nearly a year)
You all know that Mr. Hankey is Bob Cringely’s father right?
Heidi Ho, neighbor!
WHo is this guy anyways? He isn’t a real journalist, let’s face it… he “blogs”, which is nothing more than an overused outlet to write a journal… or realistically.. a DIARY, that is made public, because when people are done reading on Facebook how you ate a muffin, or did something that nobody cares about, now the fun begins.. please… let us read your blog now.. sheesh
Bob has announced he is retiring the blog later this year. God bless him. I hope he enjoys spending more time with his beautiful family.
and Siri may infringe on Kitt from Knight Rider And of course Hal 5000
So, after reading this I went to the Excite.com search engine (which still exists but now uses Google, Yahoo and Boink) and entered this phrase:
“Cringely idiot”
Below the first entry, which of course was the ‘I, Cringely’ site, was an article from 2002, a decade ago, entitled ‘Robert Cringely is an idiot’ at sifry.com. It describes when Cringely decided that “Wi-Fi is dead”, surpassed in usability by HomePlug, where you plug all your networked devices into your home electric outlets. 😯 The title of his 2002 article was “Plug Me In: Ever Hear of a HomePlug Network? You will”
Enough said.
He was an idiot a decade ago. He is a cretin today. He may not even exist, ‘kept as a revolving door of shady paperback writers doubling as stokers. Been outed before. Uses people like kleenex and eats the snot.
I call FUD. If you go to USPTO and search for the alleged inventor, Graham Spencer, you only find four patents that list his name:
“Electronics Assembly with Cooling Arrangement” (Sun)
“Production of phenols” (Burmah Oil Trading Limited)
“Production of phenols” (Burmah Oil Trading Limited)
“Production of phenols” (Burmah Oil Trading Limited)
Unlike Cringely, I’m no patent lawyer specializing in speech recognition technology, but none of those sounds much like Siri.