Douglas G. Richardson

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Douglas G. Richardson — entity profile

Overview. Douglas G. Richardson is a private individual, not a corporation: a professional photographer and videographer based in the Austin, Texas area (records list his business address in Dripping Springs, TX). He is the founder of Cinegif, an Austin startup he formed around 2006 to commercialize his animated-image technology; it operated as a cloud-based DIY GIF/animated-image marketing platform, raised roughly $500K in a 2013 seed round (Baylor University, Houston Angel Network, Texas Halo Fund), and at one point reported three employees plus two contractors. Startup databases now list Cinegif as inactive/deadpooled. No public ticker exists; no reliable current revenue or headcount figures are published for Richardson or Cinegif.

Products / operations. Richardson's work centers on "Cinegif" imagery — still images containing a small isolated area of motion — which he produced for advertisers (Jaguar Land Rover of Austin, Maserati of Austin, Keller Williams, Chick-fil-A, Kraft, John Deere, among others) and attempted to commercialize through the Cinegif app and platform. His patent family (notably U.S. 7,388,587; 7,629,977; 8,035,644; and 8,487,939) covers "Method for Embedding Animation in Electronic Mail and Websites" — layered-image animation stored as web-enabled graphics files such as GIFs. He is an individual inventor/proprietor who asserts his own patents; per Unified Patents, the same portfolio was later held by Cine Graphic Solutions LLC, characterized by Unified as an NPE and subsidiary of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC.

Litigation posture. Plaintiff-only. In our tracked data, Richardson appears in a single case as plaintiff and zero as defendant, consistent with an individual patent holder asserting rights rather than an operating company defending against NPE suits. The tracked suit, Douglas G. Richardson v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., was filed in the Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division, Judge Rodney Gilstrap) — a historically plaintiff-friendly patent venue — and closed in August 2018 after a stay for dismissal papers, consistent with settlement. Stanford's NPE database classifies the asserter here under "Individual."

Context. Public docket records outside our tracked data show related assertions over the same family, including Richardson v. Adobe (S.D.N.Y., filed 2022; Judge Gardephe granted partial dismissal in September 2024) and Richardson v. Pond5 (S.D.N.Y. 2022), while Cine Graphic Solutions LLC asserted the patents against Motorola Mobility (N.D. Ill. 2021). Unified Patents ran prior-art (PATROLL) contests on the '587, '977, and '644 patents, noting prior assertions against Motorola, Samsung, and Fujifilm. Technology focus across these matters is animated/GIF-format image delivery in email, web, and messaging.