Brilliant Digital Entertainment subsidiary Kinetech Inc. and Texas-based startup PersonalWeb Technologies confirmed the recent completion of an asset contribution that provided BDE with majority ownership of PersonalWeb. Kinetech contributed its Truenames patent portfolio to PersonalWeb as part of the transaction, but other business details were not available. The companies said the purpose of the agreement was to combine the technology, software development and intellectual property strengths of both companies.
PersonalWeb’s first consumer product is set to be StudyPods, a social learning platform that enables students to connect, collaborate and share academic knowledge with each other at their own university or colleges worldwide, utilizing technology assets PersonalWeb acquired from natural language search engine developer Topodia.
Michael Weiss, CEO of PersonalWeb said, “We have been busy building our business over the past year and are looking forward to bringing a variety of new products utilizing our technology assets, including StudyPods, already in development, to market with BDE and our existing partners.”
Patents included in the Truenames portfolio have already been licensed to numerous companies including Iron Mountain, Skype, Audible Magic and Limewire, and are co-owned in a defined field by Level 3 Communications.
PersonalWeb also is developing other consumer and enterprise products based on its search, social network and content filtering technologies, including the Global File Registry digital content management system in conjunction with BDE’s Altnet Inc. subsidiary.
BDE CEO Kevin Bermeister said, “We are excited by this next phase in the business and are looking forward to working with PersonalWeb to pursue development, licensing and participation in businesses that use our patents for content addressable storage, cloud computing, search, social networking and other important developing technologies in the rapidly growing distributed computing category.”
The Truenames portfolio includes eight key patents dealing with the identification, access and use of data in distributed computing environments and are foundations for cloud computing, distributed search engine file systems, and content addressable storage solutions. The landmark 2005 ruling in the Federal Court of Australia case Universal Music vs. Kazaa Networks makes references to several of these patented technologies and could be supportive evidence in any efforts to enforce its intellectual property.
Bermeister is a familiar name from the earliest days of digital music innovation and litigation. Kinetech is a subsidiary of Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc., as is Altnet Inc., which supplied technology to the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service.
Related links:
PersonalWeb – http://www.personalweb.com
