US 8611920

I'll search for authoritative information on US 8611920, including any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

Let me check specifically for any litigation or Federal Circuit activity involving this patent.

Let me check the IpVenture v. FedEx litigation and any docket references to this patent.

US Patent 8,611,920 — Analyst Summary

Sources consulted: Full patent text at Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8611920/en), Justia Patents (https://patents.justia.com/patent/8611920), Unified Patents portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-8611920-B2), USPTO publication records via uspto.report, and targeted docket/litigation searches (RPX Insight, Docket Alarm, CourtListener, Finnegan).

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1. Bibliographic Data

Priority chain (as recited in the patent's own "Cross Reference" section): continuation of Ser. No. 10/397,472 (now US 7,218,938, "Method and apparatus to analyze and present location information"), which is a CIP of Ser. No. 09/797,517 (now US 7,366,522, "Method and system for location tracking"), which claims benefit of provisional 60/185,480. Ser. No. 10/397,472 also claims benefit of provisionals 60/444,198, 60/418,491, 60/404,645, and 60/375,998.

Family (downstream continuations): US 8,886,220 → US 9,219,988 → US 9,723,442 → US 10,652,690 → US 10,827,298 → US 10,873,828 → US 11,368,808 → US 11,418,905 (per the Google Patents "priority to" timeline).

Small discrepancy to flag (interpreted literally, not auto-corrected): the Unified Patents portal lists the priority date for US-8611920-B2 as 2000-02-27, while the patent's own text and Google Patents give 2000-02-28 (the provisional 60/185,480 filing date cited in the specification). The one-day difference is most likely a time-zone artifact in the third-party database; the patent text is controlling.

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2. Abstract (verbatim)

"Method and apparatus to analyze and present location information in an easy-to-digest manner are disclosed. In one embodiment, each piece of location information can include a piece of location-designating information and a piece of location-related information. Location-designating information is primarily for identifying location. Location-related information is information related to location-designating information. The location-designating information and the location-related information can be supplied by a mobile device. With the help of location-related information, each piece of location-designating information can be more accurately transformed into a label to help identify a location. The amount of location information can be reduced. All of the location-designating information pertaining to a given area can be consolidated into one piece of location-designating information related to the label. Consolidation of some of the information may not occur if a piece of location-related information changes by more than a preset value. To better present location information in an easy-to-digest manner, location information can be compared to standards. Presentation can be on a display with respect to a reference location."

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3. Plain-Language Overview of Each Independent Claim

There are seven independent claims: 1, 17, 26, 33, 34, 43, and 49. They all share the same core technical idea — use GPS to get an approximate fix, then use a second, non-GPS source of location information to narrow the answer — but they are drafted across three statutory categories (method, apparatus, computer-readable medium) and with differing required "second source" limitations.

Claim 1 — Method (GPS + on-device sensor).
A computer-implemented way to pin down where a location-aware mobile device is, where the device also works as a wireless messaging device. Three steps: (i) get GPS "location-designating information" acquired via GPS signals; (ii) get "location-related information" that is not based on GPS signals and is based at least on a sensor in the mobile device; (iii) identify the location using both. GPS only "approximately" identifies the location; the sensor-derived information makes the identification "more accurately or narrowly."

Claim 17 — Computing device coupled to the mobile device (Wi-Fi variant).
A device (which can be coupled to the mobile phone) with a retriever that pulls both the GPS location-designating information and location-related information, plus an identifier that determines the location from both. Here the location-related information must depend on Wi-Fi technologies to help identify location, and must be available at the mobile device's location. GPS gives the approximate fix; the Wi-Fi-based information narrows it.

Claim 26 — Location-aware mobile device (Wi-Fi network variant).
The same retriever + identifier architecture, but claimed as the mobile device itself. Requires: the device can act as a wireless communication device for sending/receiving messages; the location-related information is not based on GPS signals, is available at the device's location, and depends on at least one Wi-Fi network for location.

Claim 33 — Non-transitory computer-readable storage medium (sensor + Wi-Fi).
Program instructions performing the claim-1 style method, where the location-related information is not GPS-based but uses data from a sensor in the device, and is additionally obtained from at least one Wi-Fi network to help identify location. GPS remains the approximate fix.

Claim 34 — Non-transitory computer-readable storage medium (non-GPS wireless signals / Wi-Fi).
Slightly different framing: code retrieves location information using GPS signals and "related information" using certain wireless signals that are not GPS signals (and not transmitted from a satellite, per dependent claim 42), then identifies location from both. The related information must depend on Wi-Fi signals to help identify location.

Claim 43 — Computing device with receiver and database (Wi-Fi variant).
A receiver wirelessly receives (a) location information via GPS signals and (b) related information via non-GPS wireless signals. An identifier determines the location from both, and that identification includes accessing a database that stores at least the location information and the related information. The related information must use Wi-Fi signals to help identify location.

Claim 49 — Location-aware mobile device (sensor-based, messaging-centric).
The broadest-style mobile-device claim: a retriever gets (a) location information via GPS signals and (b) related information that does not use GPS signals but is based on data from a sensor in the device. An identifier determines the location from both. The device must be operable as a communication device allowing the user to send messages to one or more other users. GPS gives the approximate fix; the sensor data plus related information narrows it.

Notable dependent-claim coverage (selected, for context)

• Claim 2 / 18 / 28 / 35 / 39 / 46 / 50 / 53: transforming the identified location into a location label — "a name used by a plurality of people" / "commonly used by users" — i.e., a point-of-interest or place name (claim 8).
• Claim 3 / 21 / 30: the mobile device is a mobile phone.
• Claims 6 / 38 / 45 / 52: Wi-Fi as the means by which the device gains network access.
• Claims 10 / 31: location-related information includes direction information.
• Claims 14 / 22 / 37 / 44 / 60: GPS signals based on information from at least four satellites.
• Claims 15 / 23: location-related information comprises another location-designating information based on Wi-Fi triangulation.
• Claims 16 / 24 / 40 / 47 / 54: location-related information depends on GSM technologies.
• Claims 7 / 19 / 29: storing the label and electronically searching / querying the storage device to retrieve it.
• Claims 55 / 56: the messages include emails and phone calls.
• Claim 57 / 58 / 59: the sensor generates data from wireless signals at the device's location (not from a satellite).

Note on claim 60: The fetched full text truncates claim 60 mid-sentence at "wherein the GPS signals are based on information from at least". Based on parallel claims 14/22/37/44, it almost certainly reads "…at least four satellites," but I cannot confirm the full text from the retrieved copy and flag this as an uncertainty.

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4. Litigation / CAFC 2026 Docket Findings

I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity, appeal, or decision specifically involving US 8,611,920. Searches of Federal Circuit docket material and general web sources returned no 2026 appeal tied to this patent number. Treat this as "not found," not as proof of absence.

What the searches did surface, with important caveats:

1. No confirmed assertion of 8,611,920 located. The IpVenture enforcement activity I could identify involves other patents:

   • IpVenture, Inc. v. ProStar Computer, Inc., Nos. 06-1012, -1081 (Fed. Cir. Sep. 28, 2007) — standing/ownership dispute over US 6,216,235 (thermal/power management), not this patent.
   • IpVenture, Inc. v. FedEx Corp., No. 4:14-cv-04894 (N.D. Cal.) — package-tracking patents; the identified patents-in-suit were 7,212,829 and 8,725,165 (see IPR2014-00833 related-matters filing and Finnegan's case note), not 8,611,920.
   • IpVenture, Inc. v. Cellco Partnership et al., No. 3:10-cv-04755 (N.D. Cal.) — resolved by stipulated dismissal with prejudice (May 7, 2012); the record I retrieved does not list the patent numbers asserted.
   • IpVenture, Inc. v. Acer, Inc. / Toshiba/Dell litigations — these involve thermal-management patents designated "'235," "'599," "'668," and "'190."

2. Identifier-confusion warning (interpreted literally). In the Acer/Toshiba/Dell filings, the shorthand "'190 patent" refers to a thermal-management patent in the US 6,216,xxx family — it is not US 8,611,920. Likewise, IPR2017-00750 concerns US 6,909,356. I did not auto-correct or merge these; they are distinct patents that share no more than a superficial numeric resemblance to the '920 number.

3. Justia's page for 8,611,920 carries a citation string referencing "Briefs, Global Positioning & Navigation News Wire, vol." — indicating the patent has been cited in third-party briefs and a news-wire compilation. I could not verify the underlying case from the retrieved snippet, and the Google Patents copy shows no "Cited By" litigation table for this document. This is a lead, not a confirmed docket entry.

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5. Uncertainty Statement

• High confidence: patent number, title, inventors, application number, filing date, issue date, assignee, claim count, abstract, claims text, and priority chain — all taken from the authoritative full patent text supplied and corroborated by Justia.
• Medium confidence: inventor city for C. Douglass Thomas (Justia's grant record says Campbell, CA; a 2017 later-family publication says Saratoga, CA — the inventor later relocated, so both may be correct at different times).
• Not established: any 2026 CAFC docket entry or appeal involving US 8,611,920; and whether 8,611,920 was ever asserted in the IpVenture district-court campaigns. I could not confirm an assertion either way and recommend verifying directly with USPTO PatentCenter, PACER, and the CAFC docket before relying on this point.

I'll run targeted searches for litigation involving US 8,611,920 specifically.

Let me dig deeper with more specific queries, including IPR/PGR activity and the Unified Patents litigation portal.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent 8,611,920

Bottom line: I found no litigation in which US 8,611,920 is identified as an asserted patent. I searched patent-litigation aggregators, dockets, and general web sources. Every hit that involved IpVenture (the assignee) concerned different patent numbers. Below is what I searched, what I found, and — importantly — what I did not find.

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1. Threshold timing point (controls the whole analysis)

US 8,611,920 issued December 17, 2013 (App. No. 11/705,339, filed Feb. 10, 2007). Interpreted literally, this means no infringement suit filed before Dec. 17, 2013 could have asserted it. That immediately excludes much of the IpVenture campaign material that surfaced in search results (the 2009–2012 cases), because those predate the grant.

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2. What I searched

Search sites requested but not fully exhaustible in this session: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist, PACER, and the CAFC docket. The Unified Patents portal returned hits only for related-family patents, not for 8,611,920 itself.

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3. Results — IpVenture cases found (NONE assert 8,611,920)

For each, I give the case and then state explicitly why it is not US 8,611,920.

PTAB / IPR: No IPR or PGR petition against 8,611,920 was found. The IPR2017-00750 matter that surfaced concerns US 6,909,356, and the Unified Patents IPR/RPI material addressed US 8,605,794 and US 8,577,577 — none is 8,611,920.

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4. ⚠️ Identifier-confusion warning (taking identifiers literally)

Search results repeatedly surfaced similar-but-different numbers. Per the strict rule, I do not auto-correct or merge these; they are distinct patents:

• "'190 patent" in the IpVenture v. Acer/Gateway/Toshiba/Dell complaints = the thermal-management US 6,216,xxx family. This is not US 8,611,920. The '190 shorthand shares only superficial numeric resemblance.
• US 8,618,103 — a separate IpVenture family patent whose Justia page cites Case 3:10-cv-04755-JSW.
• US 8,886,220 and US 8,725,165 — downstream/wrong-family continuations, distinct from '920.
• US 8,591,922 (Mallinckrodt, Jazz Pharmaceuticals) and US 8,715,922 (Vironovative) — pharmaceutical/antiviral patents with no relationship to 8,611,920; these appeared only as numeric near-matches. Excluded.
• 0:22-cv-61192 (Scilex v. AVEVA) — a docket number coincidence, not patent 8,611,920. Excluded.

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5. Outcome / current status

Because no case asserting 8,611,920 was identified, there is no litigation outcome or current status to report for that patent. For completeness on the assignee's activity: the closest post-issue campaign is IpVenture v. FedEx (N.D. Cal. 4:14-cv-04894), which asserted US 7,212,829 and US 8,725,165. The 3:10-cv-04755-JSW case was dismissed with prejudice on May 7, 2012 (stipulated final judgment; each side bearing its own costs) — but again, that predates the '920 grant.

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6. Uncertainty statement (required)

• High confidence: US 8,611,920 issued Dec. 17, 2013, so it could not have been asserted in the 2009–2012 cases; and the IpVenture cases I located that name specific patents name other numbers.
• Not established (negative finding): whether US 8,611,920 was ever asserted in any district court, ITC action, or PTAB proceeding. My searches returned no such assertion. Treat this as "not found," not as proof of absence.
• Specifically unverified in this session: the Unified Patents litigation caselist (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), full PACER coverage, and the CAFC docket. These are the sources most likely to hold a definitive answer, and I could not exhaustively query them here.

Recommended verification path: Confirm directly via (1) the Unified Patents litigation caselist for "8611920", (2) USPTO PatentCenter / PTAB PTACTS for any IPR/PGR naming the '920 patent, and (3) PACER full-text search on "8,611,920" and on "8611920". Any hit should be date-checked against the Dec. 17, 2013 issue date before being treated as a genuine assertion.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" signal against live sources before drafting.

The two "'920 patent" hits in those results are different patents (US 11,966,920 PayRange/PGR and the DivX '920) — a classic identifier-confusion trap. Let me run targeted searches on the IpVenture patent specifically.

No PTAB activity surfaced yet. Let me probe the family and a possible recent assertion campaign.

Proceedings overview

Zero. USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) AIA-trial data returns no inter partes review, post-grant review, or covered business method review naming US 8,611,920 as the challenged patent, and my independent web verification (PTAB E2E petition documents surfaced via ptacts.uspto.gov, Docket Alarm, Finnegan case notes, and the Unified Patents portal) surfaced no filing on this patent number. There are no proceedings to sort by outcome, so the standard "most-impactful-first" ordering is vacuous here: the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied.

Bottom-line defensive posture: unlike its sibling patents in the IpVenture location family, US 8,611,920 has never been tested at the PTAB. That is a double-edged signal for a defendant: (a) all 60 claims are untested and un-narrowed — the patent owner can assert them as issued, with no IPR estoppel and no cancellation record cutting against it; but (b) the absence of any IPR over a patent that has been in force since 2013 and whose family has drawn attacks suggests it was either never asserted, or asserted only in campaigns that settled. You get no free "claim 1 is dead" argument here — you would be the first petitioner, and you would owe a full § 102/§ 103 case with no PTAB roadmap to copy.

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There are no proceedings to report

Because the task instructions say not to invent proceeding numbers, I am not creating placeholder sections. What follows is instead the verification record and the identifier-confusion traps that a defendant's invalidity team must avoid, since several live PTAB/CAFC documents use the shorthand "the '920 Patent" for entirely different patents.

False positives I encountered and rejected (do not merge these)

Sources: ptacts.uspto.gov petition document (KioSoft/PayRange '920 PGR); CourtListener Dkt. 164, C.D. Cal. 2:19-cv-01602; RPX litigation document excerpt, IpVenture '190 family.

The one IpVenture PTAB proceeding that does exist — on a different patent

For completeness, the only IpVenture PTAB trial I could confirm is on a different patent, and it is instructive as a family-level precedent:

• IPR2014-00833 — FedEx Corp. v. IpVenture, Inc., challenging US 8,725,165 (shipment tracking/notifications). Panel: Judges Droesch, Lee, Zecher. FWD 2015-11-20 invalidated claims 1–30 of the '165 patent. IpVenture's own Related Matters notice in that case (filed 2014-06-19) lists the co-pending family matters and confirms the parallel district cases (IpVenture v. FedEx, N.D. Cal. 4:11-cv-05367 and 4:14-cv-04894) — it does not list US 8,611,920 or any proceeding against it. Appeal: Fed. Cir. Nos. 16-1911, argued before Judges Dyk, Hughes, O'Malley, affirmed 2017-05-09.
• Sources: Finnegan case note, "Fed. Circ. Affirms PTAB Win for FedEx"; Finnegan summary PDF (docket numbers, panels); Docket Alarm, IPR2014-00833 Related Matters (Paper 4); Law360 via Finnegan, FWD invalidating claims 1–30.

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Strategic summary

Claim-by-claim status. All 60 claims of US 8,611,920 — including independent claims 1, 17, 26, 33, 34, 43, and 49 — stand as issued and un-amended. No claim is canceled, none is the subject of a statutory disclaimer I could locate, and none has been construed by the Board. Contrast that with the family's other structures: the '165 patent's claims 1–30 were wiped out in IPR2014-00833, and (per the PayRange-related briefing on an unrelated patent) IpVenture has elsewhere resorted to statutory disclaimer of claims when facing a strong § 101 challenge — e.g., disclaiming claims 1–6, 8–10, and 12–20 of US 11,481,772. Neither of those events touches the '920. Practical consequence: every one of the '920's 60 claims is a live, untested assertion target.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel on this patent at all — no petitioner has ever been through an institution on it, so no party is estopped and, correspondingly, no party has a free prior-art runway carved out for it. This cuts both ways. You are not blocked from bringing any ground, but you also cannot inherit anyone else's work product, expert declarations, or Board-endorsed claim construction. Your prior-art search starts from scratch. Note the § 315(b) one-year bar from service of a complaint alleging infringement: if a demand letter has matured into a complaint, clock management is your first practical issue.

Pattern signals. (1) No repeat petitioner exists on this patent because there has been no first petitioner. (2) IpVenture does litigate, and does so in waves: Cellco Partnership et al. (N.D. Cal. 3:10-cv-04755, dismissed with prejudice 2012-05-07), FedEx (N.D. Cal. 4:11-cv-05367 and 4:14-cv-04894), Lenovo/Acer/Dell/Samsung/Toshiba (N.D. Cal. 3:12-cv-04143, thermal patents), and MX3 Diagnostics (W.D. Tex. 6:21-cv-00713). The notable signal is that the family's PTAB exposure has come from large, deep-pocketed defendants (FedEx) rather than from a defensive aggregator — I found no evidence that Unified Patents or a similar entity has ever challenged an IpVenture patent. That means the absence of IPRs on the '920 is more likely a function of non-assertion or early settlement than of the claims being invulnerable. (3) IpVenture appears pro se / in-house in PTAB proceedings (lead counsel C. Douglass Thomas, an inventor-credentialed practitioner, with Peter P. Tong as backup, per the IPR2014-00833 mandatory notices) — a fact that affects how you should expect motions practice and settlement posture to be handled.

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Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the null result at the source before relying on it. Structured ODP data and my bounded web verification agree, but you should re-run a PTAB E2E search by patent number 8611920 and by application 11/705,339, plus a name search on IpVenture across all AIA trial types. Also check USPTO PatentCenter for a statutory disclaimer under 37 C.F.R. § 1.321 against any of the 60 claims — a disclaimer would not show up as a PTAB proceeding but would silently kill asserted claims.
2. Because there is no FWD to link, there is nothing to cite. I cannot quote a disposition for this patent — no such document exists. Any internal memo asserting that "claims X–Y of the '920 were canceled" would be false; the cancellation language in the family belongs to the '165 patent (IPR2014-00833, claims 1–30, FWD 2015-11-20, aff'd Fed. Cir. 16-1911, 2017-05-09).
3. First-petitioner strategy. With no prior Board construction on any '920 term, you get to shape the claim-construction record — but you also carry the full burden with no institutional track record to lean on. The seven independent claims are drafted with materially different secondary-source limitations (on-device sensor in claims 1/33/49; Wi-Fi in 17/26/34/43/49-passim; "not transmitted from a satellite" in 42/48/57). A petition built to knock out only the sensor-based independents will leave the Wi-Fi-based ones standing, so map your grounds to all seven independents and their key dependents (2/18/28/35/50 label transformation; 3/21/30 mobile phone; 6/38/45/52 Wi-Fi network access) before filing.
4. Parallel-family awareness. The '920 is one node in a chain running to US 8,886,220 → 9,219,988 → 9,723,442 → 10,652,690 → 10,827,298 → 10,873,828 → 11,368,808 → 11,418,905. IpVenture has historically asserted continuations rather than the earliest patent (as it did in FedEx, asserting '829 and '165). If you invalidate the '920's claims and the owner pivots to a later continuation, your work product may not carry over. Budget for a family-level, not patent-level, analysis.
5. Watch the docket, not the patent number, for the next filing. Given the volume of " '920" false positives in unrelated cases, any monitoring alert keyed on the string "'920" will generate noise. Filter on 8,611,920 and on 11/705,339 exactly.

Confidence and limits. High confidence in the absence of PTAB proceedings on US 8,611,920 as of 2026-09-29, based on the authoritative ODP block plus corroborating searches. Caveat: my last three verification queries (MX3 Diagnostics asserted patents, IPRs on family members 8,886,220 / 9,219,988 / 11,418,905, and the Unified Patents portal page for this patent) did not complete — the search tool hit its step limit. I therefore cannot rule out (a) an AIA trial on a later family member rather than the '920 itself, or (b) a very recently filed petition not yet indexed in ODP. Treat those two specific gaps as open, and close them via PTAB E2E and the Unified Patents portal before finalizing any opinion.

I'll research the assignment/ownership record for US 8,611,920 across the sources specified.

Let me search for the specific assignment records and inventor employment details.

Let me search for the specific recorded assignments and any USPTO assignment database records for this application.

I hit the session's tool-step limit before I could query the USPTO Assignment Center directly for application 11/705,339. Below I report what I could substantiate from the sources reached, and I flag explicitly — rather than paper over — the one gap that matters most: I could not retrieve the actual reel/frame assignment record for the '920 patent itself. I have not attributed any reel/frame number to US 8,611,920 that I could not confirm belongs to it.

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Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 8,611,920

Inventors

Unusual pattern — founder-inventor-counsel collapse. Two of the three named inventors (Tong and Thomas) own the assignee, and Thomas personally prosecuted the applications and later acted as IpVenture's lead counsel (PTAB IPR2014-00833 papers list C. Douglass Thomas, Reg. No. 32,947, as Lead Counsel and Peter P. Tong as Backup Counsel, both signing from the same IpVenture address). This is not the usual "all inventors leave within 12 months" fire-sale precursor; it is the opposite — the inventors are the assignee and remain affiliated with it across the ~20-year prosecution of the family. The Federal Circuit's opinion in IpVenture v. ProStar independently confirms: "IpVenture, Inc. owns and licenses patents… The company is owned by Mr. Peter Tong and Mr. C. Douglass Thomas."

Original assignee

IpVenture, Inc. — original and current assignee on the face of US 8,611,920. Address evolved over time: 5150 El Camino Real, Building A, Suite 22, Los Altos, CA 94022 (its litigation/prosecution address on 2014 papers), with earlier references to 10050 N. Foothill Blvd and a later face-of-patent address of San Jose, CA.

• Primary line of business: patent licensing / monetization — a non-practicing entity. A Taiwan government science-and-technology policy outlet (STPI) describes IpVenture as a "專利授權公司 (Non-Practicing Entity: NPE)… located in Los Altos… founded by Douglass Thomas and Peter Tong." The Federal Circuit characterized it as a company that "owns and licenses patents."
• Products embodying the claims: no evidence of any commercial product. Its described activity is owning and licensing, and asserting the patents.
• Enforcement posture: repeat plaintiff. Confirmed IpVenture campaigns include ProStar/Midern (C.D. Cal./Fed. Cir., '235 patent), FedEx (N.D. Cal. 4:14-cv-04894; US 7,212,829 and 8,725,165), and the Acer/Gateway/Toshiba/Dell "'190-family" thermal-management suits (note: that "'190" shorthand is the US 6,216,xxx family, not this patent). As noted in the prior sections, I did not confirm any suit asserting US 8,611,920.
• Current status: operating as a licensing entity; listed as current assignee. Google Patents legal status for '920 is Expired – Fee Related (adjusted expiration 2023-02-05). Not a legal conclusion.

Assignment timeline

Important limitation (read first). I could not directly retrieve the USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search record for application 11/705,339 within this session (tool-step budget was exhausted at the search stage). I therefore cannot state the reel/frame, execution date, or recorded correspondent for the assignment of this specific patent, and I have deliberately not supplied a reel/frame number for it. What I can document is the assignee chain and the recording pattern for the same assignee on adjacent family members:

• No shell / aggregator transfer found. Every reference to the ownership of the '920 patent — including every continuation in the family through US 11,418,905 (2022) — shows IpVenture, Inc. as assignee. I found no assignment of this family to Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, or any other catalogued NPE.
• Corroborating recording pattern on adjacent applications (do not attribute to '920):
  • Reel 015295 / Frame 0337 — recorded April 15, 2004 — assignment in favor of IpVenture, Inc., recorded for application 10/826,529 (shipment-tracking family, attorney docket IPVAP003C2), not for '920. Correspondent/customer of record: Customer No. 34071, IpVenture, Inc., with calls directed to C. Douglass Thomas. This reel/frame belongs to a different application and must not be cited as the '920 record.
  • Recorded April 15, 2003 — for the sibling '235 patent family, the Federal Circuit brief states that inventors Alan Thomas and C. Douglass Thomas "assigned their entire right, title and interest… to IpVenture," and that an "Assignment Agreement… was duly recorded in the USPTO on April 15, 2003." Again, a different patent family, cited only to show IpVenture's consistent "inventor → IpVenture" recording practice.
• Inference (labeled as such): given that IpVenture is the original assignee named on the '920 patent and the sole assignee across the entire continuation chain, the ownership chain is inventor assignment(s) → IpVenture, Inc., with no recorded post-issuance transfer surfaced. This is consistent with the instruction that "no recorded post-issuance assignments… usually means the original assignee still owns the patent."

Bottom line for this section: the Assignment Center record for 11/705,339 was not retrieved, so I cannot honestly render a reel/frame-by-reel/frame timeline. The evidence strongly indicates a single-link chain (inventors → IpVenture, Inc.) with no downstream NPE transfer.

Timeline diagram

Only events I can support are shown; the inventor→assignee recording date for '920 is unverified and therefore omitted rather than guessed.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8611920
    2000 : Priority provisional filed
    2001 : Parent application filed
    2003 : CIP application filed
    2007 : 920 application filed
    2008 : Pre-grant publication
    2013 : Issued to IpVenture Inc
         : IpVenture is inventors own company
    2022 : Last family member issued
    2023 : Adjusted expiration

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The patent was never moved to a licensing-only LLC; IpVenture has been the assignee from the outset across the whole family to US 11,418,905 (2022). No "IP/Licensing/Holdings LLC" successor appears. (No reel/frame transfer found — and none would be expected if there were none.)

2. Known asserter in the chain — present. The current (and only) assignee, IpVenture, Inc., is a non-practicing licensing company that has filed multiple infringement actions (ProStar, FedEx 4:14-cv-04894, the Acer/Gateway/Toshiba/Dell campaigns) and is characterized as an NPE by third parties. It does not match the "classic" catalogued NPE names, but it is functionally a high-frequency licenser. Basis: IpVenture as assignee of record on '920; Federal Circuit and STPI characterizations.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — present, but weakly diagnostic. The recurring correspondent/counsel is C. Douglass Thomas (Reg. No. 32,947), appearing as correspondent on IpVenture's recordings (Customer No. 34071) and as Lead Counsel in PTAB IPR2014-00833. Because Thomas is simultaneously a named inventor and a co-owner of the assignee, this is not the "shell LLCs change, the lawyer stays" pattern the rubric targets — it is founder-counsel. I flag it as present-but-weak, not as evidence of a separate NPE operator.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. No chain of consecutive LLC-to-LLC assignments within 24 months was found; there is no downstream transfer at all.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — unclear / not applicable. Because no suit asserting US 8,611,920 was confirmed (see prior litigation section), there is no trigger event against which to measure a pre-suit transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No IpVenture bankruptcy or patent-sale proceeding surfaced.

7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company-to-NPE transfer; the NPE is the origin assignee.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN.

Verdict

NPE — moderate confidence.

Justification: The patent's assignee of record, IpVenture, Inc., is a self-described non-practicing licensing company — corroborated by the Federal Circuit ("owns and licenses patents"), a Taiwan STPI NPE characterization, and its own multi-defendant enforcement campaigns (ProStar, FedEx 4:14-cv-04894, Acer/Gateway/Toshiba/Dell) — and there is no evidence of any product embodying the claims, which supplies the one strong "known asserter" signal. The chain, however, is not a shell-transfer or cascading-LLC pattern: IpVenture is the original assignee, owned by two of the three named inventors (Tong and Thomas), with no downstream transfer to any catalogued NPE aggregator — hence moderate rather than high confidence. Caveat: these conclusions rest on assignee identity and litigation history, not on a retrieved USPTO Assignment Center reel/frame for 11/705,339, which I could not query in this session.

Verification link (as instructed): USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search by patent number 8611920 (and application 11/705,339). This is the authoritative record I was unable to retrieve here and should be the first check before relying on the "single-link, no downstream transfer" inference above.

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Open items to resolve with direct Assignment Center access:

• The reel/frame, execution date, recording date, and recorded correspondent for the inventor→IpVenture assignment covering 11/705,339.
• Confirmation that no post-issuance assignment exists (i.e., that IpVenture's ownership is uninterrupted).

I'll search for the patent's cited prior art references and front-page citations.

Let me try to pull the actual front-page citation list.

Let me try to retrieve the actual front-page citations via the patent PDF and FPO.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,611,920 B2

Analyst: Senior US patent analyst
Target patent: US 8,611,920 B2 — "Method and apparatus for location identification" (IpVenture, Inc.)
Primary source: Authoritative full patent text supplied in this session (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8611920/en)

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⚠️ Threshold disclosure — read before the tables

I could not retrieve the front-page "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents) list for US 8,611,920, and I will not fabricate it.

Here is exactly what happened, so you can judge the reliability of everything below:

1. The authoritative full text supplied for this analysis does not contain a citation section. The fetched Google Patents page runs: images → classifications → definitions → abstract → description → claims → landscapes. There is no "(56) References Cited," no "Patent Citations," and no "Non-Patent Citations" block. So I cannot read the examiner's citation list off the authoritative source.

2. My web searches did not surface a verified citation list for the '920 face. Targeted queries ("8611920" "References Cited", "8611920" patent citations, Unified Patents portal) returned other patents' citation lists, family-member pages, and classification sitemaps — none reproduced the '920 examiner citations.

3. Therefore, any answer that purports to list "each patent citation for 8611920" with § 102 mappings would necessarily be invented. I am reporting the documented material I can actually verify, then giving an explicit, clearly-labeled analytical prior-art framework, and then a verification path. I am not presenting guessed references as the patent's citation list.

I also note your instruction to "search the USPTO database" — my available tooling this session is live web search, not a direct USPTO API/PACER/PatentCenter query. I flag this rather than imply a database pull I did not perform.

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1. Confirmed identification (literal, not auto-corrected)

Governing § 102 regime: Application 11/705,339 was filed 2007-02-10, i.e., before the AIA's 2013-03-16 changeover, and the patent claims benefit back to a 2000-02-28 provisional. Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 therefore governs, and the critical-date question turns on which claims/embodiments get which effective filing date (2000-02-28 provisional / 2001-02-28 parent / 2003-03-26 CIP / 2007-02-10 as filed). This matters because the '920 claims are heavily weighted toward Wi-Fi and sensor-based augmentation, subject matter that appears to have been added in the 2003 CIP rather than the 2000 provisional — so the practical § 102(b) critical date for the independent claims is likely 2003-03-26 or 2007-02-10, not 2000-02-28. That is an analytical inference from the priority chain, not a legal conclusion.

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2. The only citations I can verify from the authoritative text

The patent's Cross Reference to Related Applications section and its closing incorporation-by-reference paragraph are the only citation-type content present in the supplied text. These are intra-family cross-references and incorporations — not third-party prior art — and I label them accordingly.

Bottom line for § 2: none of these can anticipate the '920. They share inventors and ownership with the '920 and are its own priority chain.

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3. One externally-documented citation of the family (reverse direction — important for critical-date work)

I flag this explicitly because it is easy to invert: this is a citation of the IpVenture family by a third party, not a citation in the '920.

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4. Leads surfaced by search — direction UNVERIFIED, do not treat as the '920 citation list

The Unified Patents portal returned two documents whose pages cross-list US-8611920-B2, suggesting a citation/link relationship whose direction I could not confirm:

Caution — identifier-integrity note (consistent with the prior sections' warning): the search results also surfaced a dense list of location patents on the Unified Patents page for US-5570412-A (including US 6,392,594; US 6,587,691; US 7,580,995; US 8,984,059; US 8,462,745; US 10,064,158, etc.). That list belongs to US-5570412-A's page, not to US 8,611,920, and mixing them in would be exactly the identifier-conflation error previously flagged. I am not attributing any of those to the '920.

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5. Analytical prior-art framework — mapped element-by-element to the independent claims

Because I cannot cite the '920's actual examiner citations, here is the defensible substitute: what a reference must disclose to anticipate each independent claim, and the classes of art that would supply it. This is my analysis, not the patent's citation list.

Universal "all-elements" rule: pre-AIA § 102 anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every limitation, arranged as claimed. For the '920, every independent claim requires at least these four:

1. A GPS acquisition of "location-designating information" (approximate fix);
2. A second, non-GPS source of location information (sensor in the device, and/or Wi-Fi, and/or GSM);
3. An identification step that uses both to narrow/more accurately identify the location; and
4. The device is operable as a wireless messaging device (claims 1, 17, 26, 33, 34, 43, 49 — claims 49/55/56 specifically require user-to-user messaging, e.g., emails/phone calls).

Claim-specific differentiators that narrow the anticipation field:

Pre-2003 (and pre-2007) art classes to prioritize when the real citation list is obtained: (a) hybrid GPS/cellular location systems; (b) GPS + WLAN-assisted positioning; (c) reverse-geocoding and POI-labeling patents; (d) sensor-fusion navigation patents; (e) location-tagging-of-messages/email art. My assessment: the '920's independent claims are narrowly drafted around "GPS approximate fix + non-GPS augmentation to narrow the answer, on a messaging-capable device," which is a combination that most single pre-2000 references are unlikely to meet under § 102 — the more realistic challenge vector is § 103 obviousness (e.g., a GPS tracker + a WLAN-positioning reference + a POI-database reference), not single-reference anticipation.

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6. What I would need to give you the literal citation-by-citation § 102 mapping

1. USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Application Locating and Monitoring record for App. 11/705,339 — the "References Cited" and "Examiner's search strategy" tabs (definitive).
2. FreePatentsOnline or USPTO full-page images (patft) for US 8,611,920 — the (56) block on the printed front page.
3. Google Patents → US8611920B2 → "Patent Citations" and "Non-Patent Citations" sub-tabs (the page I fetched omitted these).
4. PTAB PTACTS — to confirm definitively that no IPR/PGR ever construed these claims (consistent with the prior sections' negative finding).

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7. Uncertainty statement and contradictions flagged

High confidence (from the authoritative text): patent number, title, application number, filing/issue dates, assignee, inventors, 60 claims / 7 independent claims, pre-AIA § 102 regime, priority chain, and the absence of a citation section in the supplied text.

Not established (negative findings):

• The front-page prior-art citation list for US 8,611,920 — not retrieved. I will not enumerate it.
• Whether the Unified Patents cross-listings (US 5,905,461; US 6,067,044) are citations in the '920, citations of it, or merely classification-based neighbors — unverified.

Contradictions / discrepancies flagged:

1. Date mismatch in this tasking: the system header states today is 2026-09-29, while the task instruction states Current Date: April 26, 2026. I flag rather than reconcile. (Also, the prior "Patent summary" section is internally dated to a fetch of 2026-09-29, and the earlier summary references 2026 docket checks — consistent with the former.)
2. Priority date 2000-02-27 vs. 2000-02-28: the Unified Patents portal shows 2000-02-27; the patent's own text and Google Patents show 2000-02-28. The patent text controls (prov. 60/185,480). Repeating the prior section's flag — not auto-corrected.
3. Claim 60 truncation confirmed: the authoritative full text supplied in this message truncates claim 60 at "wherein the GPS signals are based on information from at least". This corroborates the prior section's flag; parallel claims 14/22/37/44 suggest "…at least four satellites," but the full text is not available in the supplied copy.
4. No conflict detected with the previously-generated sections regarding litigation: my searches likewise found no assertion of 8,611,920 and no PTAB proceeding against it. The "'190 patent" shorthand in the IpVenture v. Acer/Toshiba/Dell campaign refers to the US 6,216,xxx thermal-management family, not US 8,611,920 — consistent with the prior warning.

Note on the requested "§ 102" mapping: I have supplied a § 102 mapping only for the documents I could verify (the intra-family cross-references, all of which fail as prior art). For the examiner citations, I have supplied an analytical anticipation framework rather than invented citations. Providing real, cited references requires the USPTO front-page record identified in § 6.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art references cited on the patent's page and in the field, rather than working from memory.

Let me pull the actual "References Cited" list from Justia and corroborate with free patent databases.

The Justia reference list is the key prior-art section. Let me retrieve it in full.

Obviousness Analysis — US 8,611,920 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the Patent Summary and Litigation Summary already produced. I do not repeat bibliographic or litigation findings except where they change the §103 calculus.

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0. Threshold caveat on the "Prior Art section" (read this first)

Contradiction / gap to flag explicitly. The authoritative full text I was given from Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8611920/en) truncates before the "References Cited" tables. It contains the Prior art keywords line (location; mobile device; information; recited; related information) and the Prior art date (2000-02-28), but the U.S.-patent-document citation table, the Foreign Patent Documents table, and the Other Publications / NPL list are absent from the supplied text. So I could not read the "Prior Art section" of this page in full.

I recovered a partial "References Cited" list from Justia's page for 8,611,920 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/8611920), which I reproduce because the references-of-record drive the analysis below. The list I actually retrieved runs from US 5,652,570 (Lepkofker, Jul. 29, 1997) through US 5,963,130 (Schlager et al., Oct. 5, 1999) — ~36 entries, and the retrieved prefix ends mid-list. Entries after Schlager, all Foreign Patent Documents, and all NPL are not in hand. Confidence on the retrieved prefix: high. Confidence that it is the complete list: not established.

Retrieved prefix (US Patent Documents, number / date / inventor):

(Source: https://patents.justia.com/patent/8611920 — retrieved prefix only.)

Why this matters for the §103 answer: the references-of-record are overwhelmingly personal/asset tracking, GPS locator, and monitoring art, not "GPS-plus-second-positioning-source" art. On its face, the examiner's citation set reads as art relevant to a tracking/monitoring disclosure. That is a material mismatch with the granted claims, which are directed to disambiguating a location using a second, non-GPS source. That mismatch is the single most important observation in this analysis, and it is the basis for the combinations set out in §III–IV.

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1. Legal framework I am applying

The priority date is a contested, claim-by-claim question

The patent's own Cross Reference section states it is a continuation of Ser. No. 10/397,472 (filed Mar. 26, 2003), which is itself a CIP of Ser. No. 09/797,517 (filed Feb. 28, 2001), claiming benefit of provisional 60/185,480 (Feb. 28, 2000).

• Claims reciting only generic GPS + "a sensor" + label transformation arguably reach back to Feb. 28, 2000.
• Every claim reciting Wi-Fi (17, 26, 33, 34, 43, 38, 45, 51, 52, 59) and GSM (16, 24, 40, 47, 54) must be supported by the CIP-era (Mar. 26, 2003) disclosure, because Wi-Fi (802.11b, 1999) and Wi-Fi/GSM-based location did not exist as an integrated mobile-phone technique in the Feb. 2000 provisional. The specification's support for these is a single sentence — "other wireless or mobile devices can also serve as location-designating devices, such as devices based on GSM technologies or Wi-Fi technologies" — with the rest supplied by incorporation of the 2003 provisional (60/444,198 et al.).

Consequence: For the Wi-Fi/GSM claims, prior art dated between Feb. 2000 and Mar. 26, 2003 remains available under § 102(a)/(e)/(b). That window contains the decisive art (see §III.B).

Level of ordinary skill (PHOSITA)

A person with a bachelor's degree in EE/CS and 2–4 years' experience in wireless location systems, GPS receivers, or cellular/PCS radio engineering — with working knowledge of GPS error budgets, network-based positioning (TOA/TDOA/AoA/E-OTD/cell-ID), RF LAN technology, and mobile-device sensor integration. This is a routine engineering field; the Federal Circuit and the PTAB have consistently found analogous combination of GPS with terrestrial positioning to be within ordinary skill.

Key claim-construction pressure points

Unclaimed subject matter (important for framing): the Abstract's headline features — consolidation/compression ("All of the location-designating information pertaining to a given area can be consolidated"), threshold-based retention, comparison to standards, and dynamic display density — are described extensively but are not claimed in any of claims 1–60. The §103 exposure is therefore concentrated almost entirely in the narrow "GPS gives an approximate fix; a second non-GPS source narrows it" core.

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2. The single technical proposition the independent claims reduce to

Claims 1, 17, 26, 33, 34, 43 and 49 all recite the same two-step architecture:

1. obtain an approximate position from GPS; and
2. obtain a second, non-GPS quantity (an on-device sensor reading — cl. 1, 49; or Wi-Fi/GSM signals — cl. 17, 26, 33, 34, 43) available at the device's location;
3. combine the two to produce a narrower/more accurate position.

That is the textbook definition of hybrid / assisted positioning, which was a mature, heavily patented and heavily published field well before either candidate priority date. The remainder of this analysis shows why.

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3. Primary obviousness combinations

Combination A — GPS + on-board non-GPS sensor, to narrow the fix

Reaches: claim 1; claim 49; claim 33 (sensor prong); claim 26 (sensor prong).

Motivation to combine (each independently sufficient under KSR):

1. The patent's own admissions. The specification concedes GPS error "can have errors of 15 meters or more" and that a user can be at one of several locations (bookstore vs. theatre). A known problem is half the KSR inquiry.
2. The FCC E911 Phase II mandate, which the patent's own Background section cites as driving handset location. It required carriers to locate handsets where GPS alone was unreliable (indoors, urban canyons) → express regulatory pressure to hybridize.
3. Known arrangement of known elements. A GPS receiver, a MEMS sensor (the patent itself notes such sensors "can be micro-electro-mechanical systems" and monolithically integrated), and a combiner/fusion step were all known; combining them yields no more than the expected result.
4. Design-necessity / teaching-in-the-art. Hybrid positioning to bound ambiguity was the explicit subject of Sheynblat '124, whose title is the combination.

Likely outcome: claims 1, 49 and the sensor prongs of 26/33 are obvious over Hoffman '233 or Camhi '283 in view of Sheynblat '124 and/or Levi '776. Note that the sensor prong is defeated by any sensor; the references-of-record (Hoffman, Camhi, Lepkofker) supply sensors in GPS trackers, and the specification's broad reading ("a sensor") does not escape them.

Watch the §102 vs §103 boundary. If Sheynblat '124 or Hoffman '233 is shown to disclose the combined identification step in a messaging-capable handset, the argument shifts from §103 to §102 anticipation for claim 1 — the claim adds no element beyond retrieval-and-combination.

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Combination B — GPS + Wi-Fi / RF-LAN signals for location

Reaches: claims 17, 26, 33, 34, 38, 42, 43, 45, 48, 51, 52, 59 — the claims that require "Wi-Fi technologies," "Wi-Fi signals," "at least one Wi-Fi network," or "certain wireless signals which are not GPS signals."

Because these claims likely get only the Mar. 26, 2003 CIP priority (§1), all of the following is available art:

Motivation to combine (Wi-Fi prong):

1. Complementary coverage. The field already understood that satellite signals are attenuated "such as by two orders of magnitude" indoors (the patent's own Background says so); the WLAN art (Ward 1997; Bahl 2000) was developed precisely for the indoor case where GPS fails. Combining an outdoor system with an indoor system to cover complementary environments is the paradigm KSR case of a predictable improvement.
2. Same radio already in the device. A GPS phone that also had a Wi-Fi radio (for data) could obtain location from that radio at zero marginal hardware cost — a classic design-incentive rationale.
3. Explicit suggestion in the art. Sheynblat '124 expressly proposes using non-satellite wireless signals to augment satellite positioning, which is directly on point for claims 17/34/43.

Likely outcome: claims 17, 26, 33, 34, 43 and their Wi-Fi dependents are obvious over Bahl & Padmanabhan (2000) and/or Ward et al. (1997) — each disclosing Wi-Fi-based location of a client device — in view of Sheynblat '124 or Stilp '144 for GPS/network fusion, with 802.11b as the network-access teaching for claims 38/45/52.

Practical note on which prong is strongest: for claim 34 and its dependents (42, 48), the limitation is the negative one — "certain wireless signals, which are not GPS signals" and "not transmitted from a satellite." Wi-Fi and cellular are inherently terrestrial, so this is essentially a definitional limitation with no independent inventive weight — a strong §103 argument on its own.

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Combination C — GPS + GSM/cellular network positioning

Reaches: claims 15, 16, 23, 24, 40, 47, 54; supports 17/43.

• US 5,327,144 A (Stilp, 1994) — cellular telephone location system;
• known GSM techniques for handset location, including cell-ID, Timing Advance, E-OTD and A-GPS, all of which the art described as hybrids that "lower the time needed to generate a position fix over conventional GPS and can increase receiver sensitivity" (search result content, AU 2010328470 B2 background — a later document, cited only as a restatement of the state of the art).
• Motivation: E911 Phase II; and network-based techniques were already the stated fallback/hybrid for GPS-poor environments, i.e., an express suggestion to combine.

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Combination D — coordinate → human-readable "label" (POI/place name)

Reaches: claims 2, 7, 8, 18, 19, 28, 29, 35, 39, 41, 46, 50, 53.

Motivation: the patent's own stated problem — "It is not easy for a person to know where a location is just by looking at these numerical values." Substituting a name for coordinates is a predictable, routine improvement with a recognized benefit. The label-in-a-database-and-search limitation (claims 7/19/29/35/39/41/46) is met by any conventional indexed database of POI records.

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Combination E — remaining dependents (each trivially obvious)

None of these dependents carries independent patentable weight. Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."

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4. Consolidated claim-chart summary

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5. Anticipation (§ 102) note — do not overlook this

Because several independent claims recite only the combine-two-sources step, a single reference disclosing both an approximate GPS determination and a second non-GPS determination of the same device's location anticipates rather than merely renders obvious:

• US 5,999,124 (Sheynblat) is the highest-probability single-reference §102 candidate for the combination concept, though its "second source" is a wireless communication signal rather than an on-device physical sensor — so it likely anticipates claims 34/43 and combines against claims 1/49.
• For claims 17/26/33, a WLAN-positioning reference that also mentions GPS fallback would anticipate; on the art I could retrieve, Bahl/Ward do not discuss GPS, so §103 combination is the correct posture there.

I flag this distinction because the record suggests the examiner's rejections were built on tracking/monitoring art, and no reference in the retrieved citation prefix appears directed to GPS + second-source location fusion. If so, the strongest invalidity challenge is the one the examiner did not make — a §103 combination of WLAN-positioning publications with hybrid GPS/network-positioning patents.

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6. Counterarguments the patent owner would raise, and my assessment

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7. Weaknesses in my own analysis (stated plainly)

1. The "Prior Art section" was not fully available to me. The supplied Google Patents text truncates before all citation tables, and the Justia-derived list is a partial prefix. The Foreign Patent Documents and Other Publications/NPL rows — which is where a hybrid-positioning reference would most plausibly sit — are unknown. My combination analysis therefore draws on art outside the record, not from the record itself.
2. Exact numbers, dates and content for US 5,999,124 (Sheynblat), US 5,583,776 (Levi), US 5,842,396 (Krasner), US 6,122,520 (Want) and US 5,327,144 (Stilp) are from my own knowledge of the field, not from a document I retrieved in this session. I have high confidence in Sheynblat '124, Levi '776 and Stilp '144; medium confidence in 6,122,520 and on the precise Krasner number/date. Each must be verified against its full text before being relied on in a filing.
3. The Bahl & Padmanabhan and Ward et al. citations are conference/journal publications, not patents; they are §102(b) printed publications only if their dates are as stated (Ward, Oct. 1997; RADAR, INFOCOM, Mar. 2000). Verify dates and content.
4. Claim 60 remains truncated in the supplied text ("…based on information from at least"); I continue to treat the "≥ 4 satellites" reading as probable-but-unconfirmed, as flagged in the Patent Summary.

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8. Bottom line

The granted claims of US 8,611,920 reduce to a single, well-trodden engineering proposition: use GPS to get a coarse fix and use a second, non-GPS source — an on-board sensor, or Wi-Fi/GSM signals — to narrow it. That proposition was squarely within the prior art and within the ordinary skill level of the field by 2000, and certainly by 2003:

• Claims 1, 49 (and the sensor prongs of 26, 33): obvious over the references-of-record themselves — Hoffman '233 / Camhi '283 / Lepkofker '570 (GPS plus on-board sensors in a tracked portable unit) — in view of Sheynblat '124 and/or Levi '776, with E911 and the patent's own admitted 15 m GPS error supplying motivation.
• Claims 17, 26, 33, 34, 43 and the Wi-Fi dependents: obvious over Ward et al. (1997) and/or Bahl & Padmanabhan (2000) — Wi-Fi-based client-device location — in view of Sheynblat '124 / Stilp '144, with 802.11b for the network-access prongs (claims 38, 45, 52).
• All dependent claims add only conventional features (phones, databases, POI labels, ≥ 4 satellites per the patent's own Background, direction sensors, environment sensors, email/voice messaging), none of independent inventive weight.
• Most telling: the references the examiner actually cited are tracking/monitoring art, not second-source positioning art. The invalidity case here is not built on the record; it is built on the art the examination apparently never reached — which is also why the absence of any IPR/PGR challenge to this patent (Litigation Summary §2) should not be read as a validity endorsement.

Verification checklist before relying on any of the above: (1) obtain the complete "References Cited / Foreign Patent Documents / Other Publications" tables from Google Patents, Justia, or USPTO PatentCenter; (2) pull the full texts of Sheynblat '124, Levi '776, Stilp '144, Bahl & Padmanabhan (2000) and Ward et al. (1997); (3) confirm the written-description support in provisional 60/185,480 and application 09/797,517 for Wi-Fi/GSM-based location, to fix the effective date for claims 16/17/24/26/33/34/40/43/47/54; and (4) confirm the full text of claim 60.