I Use to Bunk with These Guys
Here’s an interesting article in the Austin paper the Austin American-Statesman about a tech company called Forgent and their sue-everyone-for-patent-infringement business model. Their revenue for the past few years have almost totally comprised of patent settlement money based from a single patent that claims to cover the JPEG compression algorithm, but that whole process is now starting to lose steam.
Why am I talking about this? I know these guys. When we were still our own company and no more than nine employees, Metreos squatted in their offices. We actually took up more of their office space than they did - there was only an administrative assitant and two or three executives. The whole time I was there, though, I had no idea what they did. I just think it’s interesting that all of this was going on in the background of where I was working for a while.