An Interesting Patent “Pure Play” — Internet Patents Corp

My article about Internet Patents Corp (Nasdaq: PTNT), an operating company that converted in 2011 to a patent “pure play,” just published on Seeking Alpha.  See Internet Patents Corp.: A Patent Pure Play Poised To Make A Big Splash.

One of the more interesting aspects of PTNT is that its portfolio includes an important characteristic for a low-volume patent play: broad, cross-industry patent reach.  With only a handful of patents to its name, PTNT needs a broad volume of licensing candidates in order to be successful. From the article:

While many of PTNT’s patents, by their own description, relate to the insurance industry – hardly a surprise given the company’s history-one of PTNT’s more interesting patents, US Patent No. 6,898,597, exhibits this horizontally oriented characteristic, broadly describing a process for keeping a network access log. The patented invention, filed in 1999, describes:

An event logging system for capturing event information associated with activity occurring in an application running on a server computer system configured to provide information to at least one client computer system, the event logging system comprising:
an event identification routine operable to identify the occurrence of an event during the execution of the application and to transmit context information associated with the event;
a database operable to receive and store the context information, wherein the database is a relational database utilizing a structured query language (SQL) and
a database interface operable to transmit and receive the context information.

Read more at: Internet Patents Corp.: A Patent Pure Play Poised To Make A Big Splash.