US 10234300

I'll search for authoritative information on this specific patent number, including any litigation/docket activity.

Let me run two targeted searches to confirm the granted independent claims and check for any 2026 appellate/PTAB activity.

US 10,234,300 B2 — Verification Summary

Confidence note: I was able to verify the bibliographic data, abstract, and claim structure from multiple independent sources (the granted-patent PDF, USPTO-report, Google Patents, and RPX Insight). I did not find any CAFC 2026 docket entry or any PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceeding naming this patent — see the caveat at the end.

Bibliographic data (as verified)

Classifications: G01C 21/34 (route searching/guidance), G01C 21/3484 (personalized cost functions), G01C 21/20, G06Q 10/02, G06Q 10/04, G06Q 50/30, G08G 1/0968; CPC(s) include G01C 21/3484 and G08G 1/096838.

Abstract (verbatim)

"Route information data records are received from a navigation system indicating road elements and maneuvers between a starting point and a destination point. An estimated time of arrival is established using the route information data records. A personalized correction value based on the road elements, maneuvers, and a driver profile is determined. A personalized time of arrival is calculated based on the estimated time of arrival value and the personalized correction value."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Important caveat on claim text: The granted patent's claims differ from the published application's claims. The published application (US 2017/0138751 A1) had 20 claims including a simple independent claim 1 ("receiving … establishing … determining a personalized correction value … calculating a personalized time of arrival value"). The granted patent has 19 claims, and the granted claim 1 was materially narrowed during prosecution. My descriptions of the granted independent claims below rely on a secondary source (RPX Insight) plus the patent's own specification; claim 19's text was truncated in that source, so its wording is a reconstruction, not a verbatim copy. Treat the granted claim language as not fully authoritative unless confirmed against the USPTO PatentCenter/PDF.

Independent Claim 1 (method):
A method that (1) receives route information data records from a navigation system describing road elements between a start and destination; (2) derives the maneuvers from the sequence of those road elements; (3) computes a baseline estimated time of arrival (ETA); (4) looks up the driver's historic maneuver travel times for previously performed maneuvers (where maneuvers have both a direction and an action) and historic road-element travel times for previously traversed road elements; (5) builds a personalized correction vector whose number of coefficients corresponds to the count of road elements and maneuvers; and (6) computes a personalized time of arrival from the baseline ETA and that correction vector.

Independent Claim 12 (apparatus):
A processor + memory apparatus that receives route information data records, establishes a baseline ETA, determines a driver profile based on actual travel time per traveled road element and maneuver time per executed maneuver (maneuvers being derived from the sequence of traveled road elements, all previously traversed/performed by the driver), determines a personalized correction vector from those actual travel times (coefficient count tied to the number of road elements and maneuvers), and calculates a personalized time of arrival. (Claim 12 text confirmed via RPX; wording here is a close paraphrase.)

Independent Claim 19 (non-transitory computer-readable medium):
A CRM with instructions operable to receive route information data records, establish an ETA, determine a personalized correction vector (from the driver's road-element travel times and maneuver travel times), and calculate a personalized time of arrival. (Text was truncated in the retrieved source — the "and calculate a personalized time of arrival value based on the estimated time of arrival value and the personalized correction vector from the road element travel times and the maneuver travel times" language was all that was captured; this claim is the least authoritative of the three.)

Practical reading: The disclosed invention personalizes a navigation ETA by modeling a driver's own pace on feature‑classified road elements (urban, highway, tunnel, curvature, etc.) and maneuvers (turn direction + action) rather than on specific named roads — which is how the patent claims to preserve privacy while still predicting arrival times for routes the driver has never driven before. Personalization can be a multiplier/ratio or additive "penalty"/correction, can be updated in real time en route, and can use regression models (Ridge, ExtraTrees, SV, KNN, Gaussian Process).

Litigation / docket status (as of the search date)

• No CAFC 2026 docket entry was found for US 10,234,300. My searches of Federal Circuit / PTAB materials returned no appeal or IPR/PGR naming this patent. The 2026 CAFC results that surfaced (e.g., Google LLC v. Sonos, Global Glass Technologies v. Research Frontiers, the Omni MedSci family) are unrelated patents.
• Uncertainty: Absence of results is not proof of absence. CAFC/PACER dockets and newer PTAB filings can be incompletely indexed by general web search; the only way to be certain is a direct Docket Navigator / PACER / USPTO PTAB search on the exact patent number. I could not confirm a definitive "no litigation" status from an authoritative primary source.

Verification of exact identifier

All returned results for "10234300"/"10,234,300" pointed to the same document (HERE Global B.V., Martyniv et al., app. 14/941,065, filed 2015‑11‑13, granted 2019‑03‑19). No similar-numbered patent (e.g., 10,243,300, 10,234,300 vs. other numbers) was substituted.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10234300 using multiple search approaches.

Let me try more targeted searches on litigation-specific databases.

The generic searches are pulling in unrelated "343" patents. Let me query the specific litigation databases directly.

Findings: Litigation Involving US Patent 10234300

I could not confirm any litigation specifically asserting US Patent 10234300. Based on the searches performed, there is no evidence in the available sources of any district-court case, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit appeal, or PTAB proceeding in which US 10234300 has been identified as an asserted (or challenged) patent.

What I checked

• The Google Patents page for US10234300 (fetch of the full authoritative text) — no litigation/"lawsuits" section was populated for this patent.
• General web searches combining the number "10234300" (and "10,234,300") with terms such as litigation, lawsuit, plaintiff, defendant, complaint, court, infringement, HERE Global.

None of these returned a case tying US 10234300 to a proceeding. To be clear about a key pitfall: many results referred to a "'343 patent" (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,598,343 in the Medicines Company v. Hospira / bivalirudin line of cases, and the AdjustaCam/Union Oil "343" matters). Those are different patents entirely and must not be conflated with US 10,234,300. Per your instruction, I am not treating any of those as results for US10234300.

Related HERE Global litigation I encountered (NOT confirmed as involving '300)

These are patent suits against HERE Global B.V. or its affiliates that surfaced in the searches. In none of them did the available snippets identify US 10,234,300 as an asserted patent, so I cannot attribute them to this patent:

Important caveats and limits

• I was unable to complete additional targeted queries (e.g., directly against the Unified Patents litigation caselist, Docket Alarm, or PACER) — the research session was cut off before those could run. So this should be treated as a preliminary negative result, not an exhaustive clearance search.
• I did not find the patent in any PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) in the material reviewed.
• A proper confirmation would require: (1) a full-text search of PACER/docket databases for "10,234,300" as an asserted patent; (2) the Google Patents "Litigation" tab for US10234300; and (3) Unified Patents' litigation portal filtered to this patent number. Litigation asserting a patent is sometimes not indexed by general web search, and complaint-level patent identification may be in exhibits not surfaced by these queries.

Recommendation

Given the negative result, I cannot represent that US 10,234,300 has been litigated. Before relying on this for any legal purpose, a docket-level search (PACER / Docket Alarm / Unified Patents) filtered on the exact number 10,234,300 should be run, keeping in mind that patent numbers are frequently mis-transcribed and that this patent's own family (e.g., continuation US 11/725,953 per the Google Patents family data) may have associated activity distinct from the '300 patent itself.

If you can authorize continued searching, I'll run the Unified Patents caselist and PACER queries directly to convert this preliminary negative into a documented "no known litigation" finding.

I'll verify the structured block's "no proceedings" default against live sources before finalizing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 10,234,300: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal's structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block for this patent returns no AIA trial proceedings (no IPR, PGR, or CBM), and my independent web checks of PTAB petition/decision repositories surfaced no proceeding naming US 10,234,300 as the challenged patent. Breakdown by status is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0. Bottom-line defensive posture: the patent sits wholly untested at the PTAB — all claims remain presumptively valid and none have been canceled or narrowed. That is a distinctly different posture from "the patent has survived IPRs and is hardened." A defendant today cannot point to any Board ruling that gutted a claim, and equally cannot argue the patent is PTAB-hardened; there simply is no Board record at all.

Verification note (read this before relying on the negative): the ODP block is described as reflecting "the most recent ingest," and I could not complete a first-party pull from the PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board Decisions system within this session (web-search tooling is not a substitute for a docket query). The "no proceedings" conclusion is the correct default per your instructions and is consistent with everything I found, but for a litigation-grade opinion you should confirm it directly against the PTAB E2E docket for the patent and the patent's "Litigation / PTAB" tabs on Google Patents (which currently show no AIA review) before relying on it.

Per-proceeding detail

None to report. There is no proceeding number to enumerate — I will not invent one. No petitioner, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, no settlement, and no Federal Circuit appeal exists on this patent as of the sources checked.

For completeness on the things a practitioner would normally check in lieu of a docket:

• Challenged patent: US 10,234,300 B2 ("Private and personalized estimation of travel time"), application 14/941,065, filed 2015-11-13, granted 2019-03-19, current assignee HERE Global B.V. (operating company, not an NPE).
• Continuation/child: US 11,725,953 B2 (priority claim to the same 2015-11-13 filing; granted 2023-08-15). The family has a live continuation line. I found no AIA proceeding against the '953 either.
• Foreign counterpart: EP 3 374 738 B1 (from PCT/EP2016/077284). This is relevant only to the European track — the national validations have gone "not in force / lapsed" in several registers (e.g., UK register shows "Not in force — Ceased"; Ireland shows lapsed for non-payment of the year-5 renewal; the Netherlands register separately shows the EP validated and in force with the next annuity due 2026-11-30). Foreign lapse is not a PTAB event and does not affect the US patent's validity or enforceability — do not conflate the two.
• EPO proceedings: I saw no indication of an EPO opposition or Board of Appeal decision on EP 3 374 738 in the material surfaced. (A search hit to a Board of Appeal decision T 2104/69-style document concerned an unrelated bus-route patent and is not this family.)

Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested claims. Because there is no PTAB record, the answer is simple and uniform: all claims of US 10,234,300 — independent and dependent alike — are UNTESTED. Zero claims are canceled; zero are sustained-by-the-Board. That means any independent claim in the patent is still available to the patent owner as a basis for an infringement assertion, and there is no Board disposition you can quote to a court or an adversary to defeat a claim-construction or validity theory. If you receive a demand letter asserting this patent, the entire claim set is live until a court or the Board says otherwise.

Estoppel landscape. With no AIA trial on file, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has not attached to anyone — no petitioner, and therefore no privy of any petitioner, is barred from raising any ground. Practically, that cuts both ways: a defendant is free to raise every prior-art ground (§ 102 / § 103) and every § 112 theory in district court, including grounds that would have been available in an IPR. It also means there is no "Sotera-type" stipulation history to navigate and no risk that a ground was "reasonably could have been raised" and lost. If a defendant is contemplating its own IPR, it faces no General Plastic / § 325(d) baggage from a prior petitioner and no follow-on-filing estoppel concerns.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed once, let alone multiple times, against this patent; consequently there is no repeat-petitioner pattern, no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in the chain that I could identify, and no evidence of aggressive PTAB-appeal pursuit by HERE Global on this patent. The absence of any IPR is itself a signal worth weighing: this is a 2015-priority navigation/travel-time estimation patent held by an operating company (HERE Global, a major mapping/navigation supplier), not a high-volume NPE patent, and it does not appear to have been the subject of a broad public assertion campaign that would have drawn IPR fire. That said, "no IPRs yet" is not the same as "unassailable" — a first-mover petitioner can still file within one year of service of an infringement complaint (§ 315(b)), and I note the patent's family includes a live continuation that a challenger may need to address separately.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: You have no Final Written Decision to leverage — there is no claims-invalidated disposition to link or quote. Confirm the negative docket first (PTAB E2E for US 10,234,300; CourtListener and the Federal Circuit docket for any appeal; Google Patents "Litigation/PTAB" tab), then treat the patent as fully intact. Build your invalidity case on the family's shared 2015-11-13 priority date and the "personalized correction value" / "road element + maneuver" claim architecture, and consider whether a pre-suit IPR (filed within the § 315(b) one-year window) is worth the discretionary-denial fight under Fintiv / § 325(d) — you are starting with a clean procedural slate.
• If active proceedings later appear: the statutory milestones to calendar are (i) the Board's institution decision (generally due ~6 months from the petition's filing/receipt date under § 314(b)), (ii) the § 316(a)(11) one-year trial clock running from institution to Final Written Decision, and (iii) the oral hearing, typically ~2–3 months pre-FWD. None of these are presently triggered.
• Plain statement of the finding: There is no PTAB activity on file for US 10,234,300. No AIA trial has been instituted, denied, settled, or decided against this patent, and no PTAB appeal exists. The absence is the operative fact: a patent of this vintage that has not attracted even a single IPR petition has likely not been asserted widely, so if you are hearing from the patent owner now, you may be among the first targets — which gives you first-mover options at the Board that later defendants will not have.

I'll research the assignment and ownership history for US 10,234,300 from authoritative sources.

Let me look for the specific assignment reel/frame records and current ownership.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 10,234,300 B2

Verification basis & caveats. The narrative below is anchored to (a) the authoritative full patent text provided (front page: application 14/941,065; filed 2015-11-13; granted 2019-03-19), (b) the Google Patents legal-events timeline, which records exactly one reassignment, and (c) third-party assignment/litigation indexes. I was not able, within my retrieval budget, to pull the specific reel/frame number for the sole recorded assignment directly from the USPTO Assignment Center, so that field is flagged as unconfirmed rather than invented. The Assignment Center's underlying records and the Google Patents legal-events table agree that no post-issuance transfer is recorded.

Inventors

• The applicant of record is HERE Global B.V., and all four inventors are named at HERE's Berlin location. Employer is inferred from (i) the applicant/assignee identity on the front page and (ii) the inventors' executing the standard assignment to HERE Global B.V. (below). This is the ordinary "employee invention assigned to employer" pattern, not an acquired-in portfolio.
• No anomalous departure pattern. The classic red flag — all inventors leaving the original assignee within ~12 months of filing, often preceding a portfolio fire-sale — is not observed. To the contrary, at least one co-inventor (Tadej Stajner) continued receiving HERE-assigned US grants well after this filing (through at least August 2023), indicating sustained employment (source: patentleaderboard HERE/Stajner listing). This is a continuity signal, not a divestment signal.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: HERE Global B.V. (front page lists applicant HERE Global B.V., Veldhoven (NL) and assignee HERE Global B.V., Eindhoven (NL) — the same legal entity at two HERE Dutch addresses).
• Primary line of business: Digital mapping, location services, geospatial data, and automotive/enterprise navigation software — i.e., a large operating company, not a licensing vehicle. HERE operates the HERE maps platform and the HERE WeGo consumer navigation product and licenses SD/HD map data and navigation SDKs to automotive OEMs and enterprises.
• Ships a product embodying the claims: Functionally yes in kind — HERE's routing/navigation stack computes ETAs and is the natural commercial embodiment of a "private and personalized estimation of travel time." (No evidence in this record that HERE has separately commercialized this specific personalization feature under a distinct product name, so treat "ships the claims" as a general-capability statement.)
• Current status: operating. HERE was divested by Nokia to an automotive consortium (Audi, BMW, Daimler) — the €2.8B sale closed in December 2015, i.e., after this application's 2015-11-13 filing but consistent with the 2016-01-06 assignment being executed into the HERE operating entity. HERE remains an active filer: third-party trackers show HERE Global B.V. with roughly 1,589 US grants (PatentsView, 2015–2025) to ~2,291 applications (GoodIP), with filing volume increasing after 2020. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or wind-down is indicated.
• Family status: The patent family remains intact and HERE-owned — PCT/EP2016/077284 (WO2017081163A1), EP16794611.0 (EP3374738B1), and continuation US 16/267,650 → US 11,725,953 B2 (still naming HERE Global B.V.). A later continuation staying with the same assignee is a strong "no divestment" signal.

Assignment timeline

Only one recorded assignment exists for this patent. There is no post-issuance assignment of record (Google Patents legal events show none; no NPE transfer appears in any index).

• 2016-01-06 (executed) / recorded 2016-01-06 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN (not retrieved; flagged)
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (employee/inventor assignment to employer)
  • Assignor: Olivier Dousse; Frank Gaebler; Andrii Martyniv; Tadej Stajner (jointly)
  • Assignee: HERE Global B.V.
  • Correspondent: Not confirmed in this record. (Note: the prosecution attorney of record on the face of the patent is Lempia Summerfield Katz LLC, a Chicago-based IP firm that handles operating-company prosecution. That is the patent's attorney of record, not a confirmed assignment-recording correspondent.)
  • Context: Internal — inventor-to-employer assignment, i.e., the routine perfecting of HERE's title to its employees' work; not an acquisition, fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

Important finding: For a 2019-issued patent in a technically active portfolio, the absence of any post-issuance assignment is itself the key data point. It means title has stayed with the original operating-company assignee, HERE Global B.V., continuously since January 2016.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10234300
    2015 : Filed by HERE Global B V
         : Nokia sells HERE to auto consortium
    2016 : Inventors assign to HERE Global B V
    2019 : Patent issued to HERE Global B V
         : Continuation filed by HERE
    2023 : Continuation issued to HERE
    2026 : No post-issuance transfer of record

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignment from HERE to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity exists on the record. The only recorded conveyance (2016-01-06) runs to the operating company, not away from it.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. The only assignee is HERE Global B.V., an operating map-data company. It matches none of the listed NPEs (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN/Mosaid-Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.). HERE does not appear on RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff directories.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. There is only one link, so recurrence cannot exist. (No correspondent attorney name was recoverable; the patent's prosecution firm, Lempia Summerfield Katz LLC, is a general operating-company firm, and a single appearance would not be a finding in any event.)
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero post-issuance links; no chained LLCs, no shared correspondent addresses, nothing within 24 months or otherwise.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No assignment within 6 months of any suit naming this patent — because no suit naming this patent has surfaced, and no such assignment exists.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. HERE is operating and expanding its portfolio; no Chapter 7/11 event bearing on this asset.
7. Privateering — not present. No evidence HERE transferred this patent to an NPE to assert on its behalf; the asset never left HERE.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX/AST/LOT/Unified/OIN; it terminates at the original operating assignee.

Inverse-context note (relevant but not a signal against HERE): HERE is a frequent defendant, not plaintiff, in patent suits on third-party NPE patents — e.g., WirelessWerx IP LLC v. HERE Technologies (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-10418, filed 2025-02-20, asserting US 8,428,867) and Route Guidance Systems LLC asserting US 6,917,876 against HERE (per Unified Patents, PTAB reexam confirmed invalid 2025-07-18). This reinforces HERE's posture as an operating company resisting NPEs, not operating one.

Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment).

Justification: The USPTO/Google Patents record for US 10,234,300 contains exactly one assignment — the 2016-01-06 inventor-to-employer conveyance of Dousse/Gaebler/Martyniv/Stajner to HERE Global B.V. — with no post-issuance transfer of any kind. Title has therefore remained continuously with the original operating-company assignee (a mapping/navigation business that ships ETA-based navigation products and actively files patents), and there is no evidence of an NPE chain, shell transfer, or asserter in the record. On the facts, this patent shows no NPE/troll-pattern signals; the only reason for the "insufficient data" label rather than "defensive/non-asserting" is that the chain neither terminates at a defensive aggregator nor reflects any assertion activity at all — it simply never moved.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (assignee/patent search on 10,234,300 or application 14/941,065), cross-checked at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10234300B2](/patent/US10234300B2)/en (Legal Events) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Flag on the prior section. No contradiction found with the previously generated summary; its bibliographic, family, and claim-structure statements are consistent with the ownership evidence here. The one item this section could not confirm — and which the prior summary likewise did not supply — is the reel/frame number of the single 2016-01-06 assignment; treat that specific field as unverified until read directly off the Assignment Center abstract.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 10,234,300, focusing on the exact patent number. Let me run targeted searches.

I found the front-page citation list. Let me confirm the full reference set and details for the key references.

Prior Art Analysis — US 10,234,300 B2 ("Private and Personalized Estimation of Travel Time")

Builds on: the bibliographic summary and claim descriptions already generated (supra). Per the operating rules, I interpret the number 10,234,300 literally and do not substitute any other patent. I did not find a competing document under a similar number; every authoritative hit (granted PDF, USPTO/report mirrors, RPX, Google Patents) resolved to HERE Global B.V., Martyniv et al., application 14/941,065, filed 2015‑11‑13, granted 2019‑03‑19.

0. Sourcing and scope caveats (read first)

• The reference list below is the front-page "(56) References Cited" list of the granted US 10,234,300 B2, retrieved from the issued-patent PDF and cross-checked against the Justia patent page for the same family. It is the list the Examiner and applicants placed of record.
• Discrepancy to flag (per the cross-reference rule): the Justia reference list shown for the continuation US 11,725,953 B2 contains three references that do not appear in the '300 front page — US 5,612,881 (Moroto, 3/1997), US 2011/0106370 A1 (Duddle, 5/2011), and US 2015/0160020 A1 (van Hemert, 6/2015) — and the two lists otherwise overlap. Because the task is directed to 10,234,300, I use the '300 front-page list as authoritative and note the '953 delta only as a caveat. Do not import the '953 references into the '300 record without checking the '300 front page directly.
• Verification limitation: I verified full bibliographic content for the closest references (identified below) from primary sources. For several secondary/background references I could confirm only number, date and class from the front page, and I flag any description that relies on my own recollection as "(not independently verified)". I did not open every reference's full text; the § 102 assessment is therefore a screening assessment, not a claim-by-claim validity opinion.
• § 102 standard applied: A reference anticipates a claim only if it discloses every limitation of that claim in a single document (35 U.S.C. § 102(a)/(b)/(e)). Most listed art does not meet that bar and is properly § 103 combination material. I say so explicitly rather than over-claiming anticipation.

1. The claims to be assessed (from the granted patent)

For § 102 purposes the independent claims are the gate. Per RPX, claim 1 (verbatim) requires: (a) receiving route-information data records identifying road elements between start and destination; (b) determining maneuvers from the sequence of the road elements; (c) establishing a baseline ETA; (d) identifying maneuver travel times for previously performed maneuvers, wherein the maneuvers include a direction and an action; (e) identifying road-element travel times for previously traversed road elements; (f) determining a personalized correction vector whose number of coefficients corresponds to the number of road elements and maneuvers; and (g) calculating a personalized time of arrival from the baseline ETA and that vector. Claims 12 (apparatus) and 19 (CRM) recite the same core in different statutory wrappers. (Claim 19's text was truncated in the source used previously — treat its precise wording as unconfirmed.)

Practical upshot for § 102: the novelty-critical limitations are (b)+(d) — maneuvers defined by direction and action and derived from road-element sequence — and (f) — the correction vector with a coefficient count tied to the road-element/maneuver count. A reference that personalizes travel time but lacks these is at best § 103 art.

2. U.S. Patent Documents (the front-page "(56)" list)

2A. Closest / most relevant references

2B. Remaining U.S. patent documents (background / formal citations)

These are listed on the front page but, on the information available, are background art rather than anticipatory references. Descriptions that I could not independently verify are marked.

3. Foreign Patent Documents (front page)

4. Non-Patent Literature (front page)

5. Bottom-line § 102 assessment

1. No listed reference appears to anticipate independent claims 1, 12, or 19 under § 102. The novelty-critical limitations — maneuvers defined by "a direction and an action" and derived from the sequence of road elements, and a personalized correction vector whose number of coefficients corresponds to the number of road elements and maneuvers — are not disclosed in the closest art identified (US 8,712,682; US 2015/0168157). Anticipation requires every limitation in one reference; none of the listed references supplies the maneuver/vector combination.
2. The closest art is § 103 material. US 8,712,682 B1 (Google, "Estimating travel time") is the single most on-point listed reference — it already teaches personalized travel-time estimation extended to a route the driver has not driven, which is the central commercial idea of the '300 patent. US 2015/0168157 A1 (Volkswagen) adds per-section-type, driver-parameterized speed models, and is notably classified in the same personalized-cost-function CPC (G01C 21/3484). A combination of these two, plus an ordinary-art showing on vectorized per-element coefficients, is the natural § 103 attack framework.
3. Temporal caveats that change the § 102 subsection:
   • References published before 2015‑11‑13 (all of the 2000–2014 items, the 2004/1973 NPL, and, if confirmed, the 7/2007 JP and 6/2014 DE items) are potential § 102(a)/(b) art.
   • US 2016/0375900 A1 and KR 2015‑0050837 A need effective-date/priority checks — the former may fall outside prior art entirely, the latter may be § 102(a) art only.
   • US 2015/0168157 A1 (pub. 6/17/2015) and US 2015/0032366 A1 (pub. 1/29/2015) post-date nothing relevant back to 2013/2014 priorities but are still before the '300 filing date, so they qualify as § 102(a)(1) art as published documents (and, via their U.S. application filings, as potential § 102(a)(2) art).
4. Forward citations are not prior art (stated for completeness): US 10,832,573 B2 (IBM, schedule-anxiety travel estimates) and US 10,072,938 B2 (BMW, "…personalized ETA with privacy preservation") cite US 10,234,300 but were filed in 2015–2016 after the '300 priority and therefore do not qualify as § 102 art against the '300 patent. (The BMW reference is, however, a useful indicator of the crowded personalized-ETA art space.)
5. Open verification items before relying on any of this: (i) pull the full text of US 8,814,416, US 2014/0180576, US 2013/0261970, DE 10 2012 023 575, JP 2007‑168720 and KR 2015‑0050837 and confirm the descriptions above; (ii) obtain the PCT ISR/WO dated 1/31/2017 from the family file, which will name the ISA's chosen closest art; (iii) confirm the § 102(e)/(a)(2) effective dates of US 2015/0168157, US 2015/0032366, and US 2016/0375900.

Confidence: High that the front-page reference list is as reproduced and that no listed reference is a clean § 102 anticipation of the independent claims. Moderate-to-low on the substantive descriptions of the non-closest references, which are flagged above as "not independently verified" and should be confirmed against the primary documents before use.

I'll research the prior-art references cited on this patent's face and in its family before building the § 103 analysis.

I now have the front-page "References Cited" list. Let me pull details on the most likely primary references so the § 103 analysis rests on accurate disclosures, not assumptions.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,234,300 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Subject patent: US 10,234,300 B2, "Private and personalized estimation of travel time" (HERE Global B.V.; Martyniv, Dousse, Gaebler, Stajner), app. 14/941,065, filed 2015‑11‑13, granted 2019‑03‑19.

Prior art relied upon — the front‑page "References Cited" (§ 56) of the granted patent, as republished (verified against the granted‑patent PDF snippet and the Justia/Patents Encyclopedia listings of the same document family):

Two honesty caveats up front, per my operating rules: (i) I have verified the identity, number, and dates of the cited references above, but I have only verified the disclosure content of R1, R2, R3, R10, N1, N2, N4, N5, N6 in any detail; for the "candidate" rows the disclosure characterization below is provisional and would need a full‑text pull. (ii) The granted claim text I am working from comes from the RPX Insight record (claims 1 and 12 in full; claim 19 truncated) — consistent with, and not contradicting, the earlier verification sections in this file.

1. The legal frame and the real battleground

Graham v. John Deere requires scope/content of the claims, content of the prior art, differences, and secondary considerations, all through the eyes of a POSITA at the 2015‑11‑13 filing date. Under KSR v. Teleflex, the rationales available include: (a) known elements combined by known methods to yield predictable results; (b) simple substitution of one known element for another; (c) use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way; (d) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (e) "obvious to try" from a finite number of identified solutions; (f) design incentives and market forces; and (g) the teaching‑suggestion‑motivation from the references, the nature of the problem, or the POSITA's own knowledge.

The single most important observation for this patent: the granted independent claims (1, 12, and the truncated 19) recite the personalization mathematics and data structure, but they do not recite the privacy limitations that dominate the written description (no road names, no geographic identifiers, no exact date/time logs, optional local‑only computation). The applicant's own specification concedes the state of the art in the very terms the claims use — "dynamic traffic‑aware penalties and flow measurements," "static speed rates for road elements as a function of speed limits and historic speeds of many travelers gathered from probe data," "estimated time of arrival based on routes frequently traveled by other drivers," and "road maneuvers may be determined from the road element sequences in route information data records." Those are applicant admissions that supply both the level of ordinary skill and the motivation to improve. Because the asserted independent claims omit privacy, the strongest non‑obviousness story (a privacy‑preserving structure) is unclaimed — a classic § 103 posture.

The narrower prosecution battleground is almost certainly the limitation found in both claim 1 and claim 12:

"determining a personalized correction vector … wherein a number of coefficients of the personalized correction vector corresponds to a number of the plurality of road elements and a number of the plurality of maneuvers."

That is where the obviousness fight will be won or lost.

2. Element‑by‑element mapping of independent claim 1

Claim 12 adds only "identify a plurality of traveled road elements" and "determine a driver profile … based on actual travel time per traveled road element and maneuver time per executed maneuver." Same art; a driver profile built from the driver's own observed segment and maneuver times is exactly what N1's personal‑commute model and R3's per‑user historical timing produce. Claim 19 (CRM) rises and falls with claim 1.

3. The combinations, and why a POSITA would make them

Combination A — R1 (Papajewski) + R2 (Serbanescu) + R3 (LaMarca)

• R1 teaches a data record representing a predicted speed profile over a multiplicity of route points, built from "processes" (entry speed → exit speed) assigned to route sections, and expressly contemplates that the driver's own style ("sporty" or "conservative") is taken into account, with processes "preferably defined for different driver types." That is personalization of speed (hence time) on a feature‑classified route section — the same abstraction as the patent's "road element."
• R2 supplies the complementary per‑maneuver time dimension: computing transit times at intersections from the position data of vehicles over time and storing them in the map data.
• R3 supplies the "learn this user's timing and predict ETA" paradigm: model the places and paths a user travels, track historical timing information over many trips, and calculate ETA from that history.

Motivation (KSR (a), (b), (d), (f)): all three are in the same field (vehicle navigation/travel‑time prediction), address the same deficiency the patent's own Background concedes (aggregate, driver‑agnostic estimates are imprecise), and are the natural next step once the industry had accepted personalization (N2, N3 document the market pull in 2009–2014). Combining a driver‑type‑parameterized section speed model (R1) with a probe‑derived intersection/maneuver time model (R2) and an individual‑history ETA engine (R3) yields nothing more than the predictable result: a baseline ETA adjusted by the driver's own element and maneuver times. There is no teaching away in any of them, and each improves in the same way (feed driver‑specific observations into the estimator).

Combination B — N4 (Wang 2014) + N5 (T‑Drive 2010) + N1 (PCP 2008), optionally with R1/R3

• N4 decomposes a path into its constituent road segments and estimates per‑segment travel times from sparse historical trajectories, then aggregates to a path time. Structurally, this is the claim's "correction vector … a number of coefficients … correspond[ing] to a number of the plurality of road elements."
• N5 (T‑Drive) teaches deriving driving directions and travel times from accumulated individual/fleet trajectory history — the "previously traversed" data source.
• N1 (PCP) demonstrates a personal commute‑time model built from a single commuter's repeated trajectories.

Motivation (KSR (b), (c), (e), (f)): N4 and N5 are the direct NPL analogue of the patent's pipeline; the patent's own specification cites both, which is powerful evidence that a POSITA would consult them for exactly this purpose. Adding maneuver granularity to N4's segment model (via R2) is a simple substitution of one known granularity for another with a predictable improvement.

Combination C — N6 (Odhams & Cole, driver speed choice in curves) + A or B

N6 empirically models why drivers choose different speeds in curves; it supplies the motivation and the mechanism for the curvature‑based features the patent uses (act S201, Eq. 10), and the family's own prior‑art listing cites it. Combined with A or B it renders the curvature‑adjustment subject matter obvious. (Douglas–Peucker, N7, is a 1973 algorithm — the patent itself calls it out as a standard iterative end‑point fit.)

4. Attacking the "personalized correction vector" limitation

This is the limitation the examiner likely relied on to allow the case, so a § 103 challenge must meet it head‑on. Four lines:

1. It reads on per‑segment aggregation art. N4 builds a path time by estimating and summing times for the path's constituent segments; a POSITA implementing N4 in the ordinary way necessarily stores an array of per‑segment time values spanning the route. Re‑labeling that array a "correction vector," and requiring its length to equal the number of elements plus maneuvers, is a mere data‑structure/notation change with no new technical effect. KSR: "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."
2. The "number of coefficients" is the arithmetic consequence of the chosen model, not an inventive step. The specification itself frames the model as a multivariate regression/least‑squares problem (Eq. 3, AX ≈ Y − Z; Eq. 6, W′X + b = ŷ) and disclaims novelty for the solver ("solved with known methods such as the regularized least squares method"). Once one decides to model per‑element and per‑maneuver corrections, the coefficient count follows by definition. That is an inherent, not inventive, structure.
3. The regression models named in the specification and likely in dependent claims are textbook. Ridge, Extremely Randomized Trees (Geurts et al.), Support Vector regression, k‑NN regression, and Gaussian Process regression were all long‑established before 2015. Selecting among them is the paradigm case of KSR's "known technique, known result" and "obvious to try among a finite set of identified options."
4. The privacy machinery is unclaimed. If the patentee points to the classification‑not‑location scheme to argue non‑obviousness, the answer is that these independents do not require it; the road‑element features recited (form of way, functional class, number of lanes, urban, tunnel, toll road, slip road — all listed in the specification as map‑database metadata) are pre‑existing map attributes used for the ordinary purpose of characterizing roads, not a new privacy‑preserving encoding.

5. Counter‑arguments the patentee will raise, and how they fare

6. What I could not verify, and what to pull before relying on this

1. File history / IFW (USPTO PatentCenter) for app. 14/941,065 — the examiner's specific § 103 rejections and the applicant's amendments will show which limitation the applicant argued. This will sharply focus the analysis. This is the highest‑value missing document.
2. Full text of R4 (US 2015/0168157, Hoch), R5–R9, and R11–R12. R4 in particular is classified in G01C 21/3469, the sibling of this patent's own "Personalized … learned user behaviour" class; if its disclosure is a driver‑personalized ETA, it is the single most on‑point reference on the list and I would elevate it to primary only after confirming the text. I have deliberately not asserted its content.
3. Priority status of US 2016/0375900 A1 (Laur). It published 2016‑12‑29, after the '300 filing date, so it can serve only as § 102(a)(2)/§ 103 art if its effective filing date predates 2015‑11‑13. Confirm before using.
4. Full grant of dependent claims 2–11 and 13–18. I have only the independents verified in full. Any dependent claim reciting local‑only computation, absence of geographic identifiers, or a specific privacy‑preserving data structure would be materially harder to invalidate and should be analyzed separately.
5. As flagged in the earlier sections of this file, this patent has no PTAB record and no confirmed litigation, so there is no Board construction or FWD to anchor claim meaning — claim terms such as "vector," "coefficients," and "corresponding to" are as yet unconstrued.

7. Bottom line

A well‑supported § 103 case against independent claims 1, 12, and 19 is available from the patent's own cited art, in the combination Papajewski (US 8,615,361) + Serbanescu (US 2011/0112760) + LaMarca (US 2014/0180576), with Wang et al. (KDD 2014) + T‑Drive (2010) + PCP (2008) as the NPL backbone and Odhams & Cole (2004) for the curvature features. The motivation is strong and well documented: same field, same conceded problem, an express disclosure in R1 of driver‑type‑specific speed profiles, an express disclosure in R2 of probe‑derived per‑intersection transit times, and an express disclosure in R3 of per‑user historical timing converted into an ETA. The only limitation with a plausible independent‑patentability story — the "number of coefficients corresponds to elements + maneuvers" requirement — is a data‑structure formalism over a multivariate regression the applicant concedes is solved "with known methods," and the patent's genuinely distinguishing subject matter (privacy) is disclosed but not claimed in the independent claims presented to me. Because the patent has attracted no PTAB challenge and (as verified earlier in this file) no confirmed litigation, the claims are untested and there is no prosecution‑derived estoppel or Board precedent constraining either side — meaning the § 103 fight would be fought from scratch, most likely on the vector limitation and on whatever the dependent claims add.