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Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

Man, the worst part is that Intellectual Ventures Lab works on some really cool stuff. Maybe a little impractical, but really cool and innovative nonetheless.

I'd totally go work for them if they weren't backed by one of the worst corporations on the planet.

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Do they actually work on really cool stuff though? As far as I can tell, they think up something that could possibly exist and patent it without actually making it, or if they do make it, they only do it halfway (aka not doing the actual difficult parts).

My understanding is that they at least work on some token projects so they can say to legislators "look, see, we do!"

Most of the time they don't even do the thinking part, they just buy bulk patents from others on the cheap.

They have something like 50,000 patents, only a very small fraction of which they came up with internally, most were bought.

So I went to the IV dog and pony show. There was maybe 1 project that was actually interesting out of ~dozens. They don't have the technological research base to actually finish a project in house, so I think they tend to spin stuff out. Example (with dubious prospects): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

IV hasn't gone after the little guys yet, so I find the Lodsys-type guys a lot scarier.

Isn't Lodsys strongly linked to IV? As in, they're playing the shell game?

From what I have read from other hacker news threads, there is no evidence of that (and Lodsys apparently denies it).

Digging around, the only connection I could find was IV selling Lodsys some of its patents. Not much evidence for an actually connection, much less shell game.

They spin out developed technologies in new companies. For example, IV spin-out Kymeta just closed a $50 million series C: http://www.intellectualventures.com/insights/archives/kymeta...

Is this just a MEMS antenna array?

Ah, I hadn't even considered that - I just remember reading a few articles about their projects but it didn't occur to me that it might be complete vaporware.

That's the problem indeed. With great intellect and ability comes great responsibility and these very smart guys (hence the lab) have only he intellects, not the depth of intelligence to realise that their own individual corner is not all that matters in the bigger game. They're the tagger that ruins Banksy's artworks, the despot who sends out the first nuke...

You have bought into their marketing. Their main business is not inventing cool stuff: that's just a hobby that looks good. It represents a small fraction of the money.

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