Not everything Intellectual Ventures does relates to patent trolling.

Intellectual Ventures also has an applied science laboratory that's even spun out a startup, Kymeta [1], in which Bill Gates invested.

Kymeta is a very cool company; they're developing revolutionary satellite transceivers using metamaterials [2].

[1] http://www.kymetacorp.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterials