Friskit, Inc.

Friskit, Inc. was a San Francisco–based streaming-media technology company founded in 1999 by George Aposporos (a former Amazon VP of business development) and inventor Aviv Eyal. Its headquarters were listed at 699 Mississippi Street, Suite 124, San Francisco. Friskit was a privately held venture-stage startup, not a public company or subsidiary; CB Insights records a founding year of 2000, while litigation filings and contemporaneous press say 1999. The company is now defunct, and no reliable current employee-count or revenue figures are available.

Operations. Friskit built a streaming-media search and playback system — a search engine that located free, web-hosted audio and video and fed results to a media player for automatic, continuous "playlist" playback, effectively a personalized internet radio service. It released a beta around 2000 and claimed more than 100,000 beta users. Facing the music industry's legal climate, it shifted from a consumer service to a technology-licensing model, seeking to license personal-media technology to portals, labels, and content-delivery providers. Its patent portfolio (e.g., U.S. 6,389,467; 6,484,199; 6,519,648; 6,721,741; 6,735,628) covers search, playlist generation, continuous streaming playback, and later continuation filings.

Litigation posture. The tracked data shows Friskit as plaintiff in both of its appearances and never as a defendant — a pure patent-assertion posture, though it originated as an operating company that later pursued licensing and enforcement after its service failed to commercialize. Both tracked matters are the same dispute: Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. et al. (N.D. Cal., filed June 27, 2003) and its Federal Circuit appeal.

Notable cases. Friskit sued RealNetworks and Listen.com in the Northern District of California, seeking over $70 million. In July 2007 Judge William Schwarzer granted RealNetworks summary judgment invalidating four asserted patents as obvious, applying the then-new KSR v. Teleflex standard; the Federal Circuit affirmed (306 F. App'x 610, 2009). Friskit also reportedly litigated with Microsoft, settling confidentially in 2011. Its patents were later assigned to Texas-based Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, which asserted continuation patents against Pandora.