It's a fancy bit of PR-fu right here from Google, like releasing a jobs report right after a big hurricane hits so people don't notice it. A data breach is one thing, but the cover-up should put the nail in coffin of Google's image as benevolent good guys. They are basically Comcast now.
I for one experienced personally when they invited my friend & I to discuss buying our app. They just wanted our secret sauce & after baiting us with promise of working together they us kicked us out and said the race is on.
Now there was no guarantees we’d be working together but two guys with no connections is tricked by Google and told the race is on? Us vs. Google who later is granted patents for what we met them about.
Now everyone says that’s just how Silicon Valley is...its expected. Hmmm things change!
Well your employer was granted patents for what we met them for and emphatically said to us the race is on.
So your saying it held no value to your employer and they have every right to treat the little guy dreamer inventors who do not have the right connections like dogs?
Also it wasn't nor isn't an idea rather algorithms we created in 2013 (have improved since) that just worked and work now... demo videos below...
We are still around (improving our algorithms) and offer our tech to clients for various events. We all have full time jobs and families to sustain.
We'd love to find those connections who sincerely want to guide us (are well connected) so our next big meeting with a FANNG or another tech company is a win for all! I believe if we went in the meeting well connected in the Valley things would have been different! Not treated like dogs!
Isn't making accusations of theft and industrial espionage is unpleasant? This kind of accusation in the industry crops up time and time again and I don't think it should be accepted unchallenged, neither between small companies, or large ones.
I've seen this claims so many times, people claiming some investors took their deck and gave it to their portfolio companies, people claiming another company copied them. The instances where this actually happens usually occurs when an already proven market product is copied (e.g. look at FB copying Snapchat recently), I've never seen it with a pre-success product.
Think of it this way, if I had the idea for capacitive touch smart screen phone in 2004 and met with Apple, could I claim they stole the iPhone from me? There is so much more to an iPhone than just the 'idea'.
Now, if you have some non-obvious algorithm, which if you asked a senior engineer to design, could not come up with it in a few weeks, my opinion would be different. Like if you invented a fundamental new type of homomorphic encryption, which, could be explained on a single page, but enables a fundamentally new type of distributed computing.
There are indeed, some ideas which are very 'dense' in value purely by their description alone, but they're few and far between.
In any case, online forums are rife with people making conspiratorial claims, in economics, in politics, everywhere, and I think a technical community like HN should demand a higher degree of evidence.
Are you saying I was not pursued/invited and met with Motorola ATAP(Google had bought them in Jan 2013) now Google ATAP in April 2013? I am making this up?
I don't think you're making it up, it sounds like you had a bad experience, and someone from Motorola biz-dev/m&a was being a jerk, but without knowing how the interaction went, it's not really my place to pass judgement. In a company of 88,000 employees, there's a non-zero probability of getting a bad interviewer.
I'm sorry to hear you had that experience. Where I part company is the added interpretation. If I was in your situation, and had a negative experience, I'm pretty sure I'd be angry, and feel wronged, and feel 'used', it's only natural.
I mean, Dropbox tried to sell themselves to Apple and Steve Jobs didn't like the price, he went on to say 'you dont have product, you have a feature', actually worse than that:
"And so he started trolling us a little bit, saying we're a feature, not a product, and telling us a bunch of things like that we don't control an operating system so we're going to be disadvantaged, we're going to have to figure out distribution deals, which are risky, and sort of a bunch of business-plan critiques. But then he was like, 'Alright, well I guess we're gonna have to go kill you, basically.' Maybe not in those words, but pretty close."
But do I believe Apple "stole" Dropbox? nah, cloud based backups, sync, etc are pretty straightforward, and although there is innovation at the UI and syncing protocol layer, iCloud is not really a Dropbox clone.
BTW, I encourage you to continue to try and innovate around your idea. There may be a use case beyond 'speakers', like emergency alerts, security, think "California earthquake imminent in 10 seconds!". There could also be a use case for synchronized sound based gaming at parties. There's loads more to do, and having had some bad experiences shouldn't discourage you, it kind of comes with the territory of presenting ideas and startups, you really get shit on a lot.
I agree ideas are a dime a dozen and are not patentable... syncing audio between devices on the same network or separate networks as an idea is not novel. It's all about the steps taken and if they are unique enough to be strong IP, as well you the inventor have access to capital for the patents and the right connections to truly make things happen. Stuff my friends and I are working on to better amidst daily life. Access to capital & more importantly those who can help here in Baltimore for audio syncing technology isn't easy to come by. Though more importantly we have reached out to those in our network who have sold companies yet none have had any experience in making deals with Google, Samsung and others(what strategy to use when all just want to know your algorithmic steps & if they are unique). It's been a crap-shoot for us and our meeting with Google was a learning experience, but a very unnecessary harsh one and worse compared to meetings with others like Samsung; all very professional and respectful!
Indeed we have not given up and the recent news that Google was awarded patents for SpeakerBlast type technology has lit a fire under us even more.
Well I'd enjoy learning what you do at Google. Are you on the Chrome Audio team ;-)
Well, I came to Google via an acquisition in 2010, I worked for years on the GWT (Google Web Toolkit) compiler, and related web compilation tooling. Then I switched to the Apps team (Inbox and Gmail) for a few years. Now I work in Research and Machine Intelligence.
I'm not on the Chrome audio team, but I have had experience with Chrome Audio, as I implemented an OpenAL layer for GwtQuake and the web version of Angry Birds for Chrome using it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_sbusEUz5w for example PlayN, a cross-platform (Web, Android, iOS, Flash) library I worked on in 20% time, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW--Wlf9EFs which details some early experiments with image processing, and the porting of Quake to Chrome in 2010.
Looks like you lived in Maryland too at one time. I grew up in Towson(now in Bel Air in Harford County) and all my family is here. I’d move out there for a dream job; inventing/building/designing interesting tech for a FANNG company. The road to there looks to be thru an acquisition.
This is the same comcast we're talking about right? The one that's spent millions lobbying for the right to monitor what their customers do online and sell it to advertisers?
It's a rigged game for sure. Would Comcast and the other ISPs be fighting so hard for these rights if they didn't have Google and Facebook as models of success using them?
Are you sure you are not both? ATT gives you a discount on your monthly fee if you allow them to inject their own ads. It was opt-in, but it would not surprise me if they don't just do it to all users. Plus, if you are using their DNS, I'd assume they are slurping in all of that data.
