The way I’ve approached patents is by working together with an experienced team that complements my skills. The patents below are the result of 16 years of experience in the very early stages of online music, finance and fashion.
I am the inventor of 5 US granted patents and one patent pending. Also, Apple acquired the patents of our previous startup, Strands Inc. All of them cover foundational aspects of taste capturing, personalization and ecommerce.
Online fashion community and system
- Link to patent US9479577;
- When we started in fashion, our background in other fields led us to pay attention to 3 areas. First: creating a learning system by capturing data from real usage of clothes (outfits); Second: enabling ecommerce by linking items in a fashion image to an ecommerce database; And third, helping people find the right item by using the system we had built;
- This patent covers:
- (i) Shop the look: System to include, in a fashion image, links to a vendor of the fashion items;
- (ii) Fashion Graph: System to extract correlations among items in fashion images;
- (iii) Search providing results of items worn together with input, instead of expecting similar items to input.
Continuation of Online fashion community and system
- Link to patent US20170019464 – Patent pending;
- This application is a continuation of and claims priority benefit to U.S. patent application Online fashion community and system;
- When we started in fashion, we looked at outfits as a way to (among other things) understand how clothes matched well together. This means that we paid attention not only to images, but to items in images. From the perspective of the protection of our innovation, we elevated the invention by abstracting the original concept, and we protected correlations of fashion items inside fashion images. This gave us an advantage over Facebook’s Social Graph, which protects correlations among images, and not among items inside images. Facebook was looking at the problem from a different perspective to ours, so their Social Graph does not protect (because they did not see it at the time) the correlations of items inside images. We did. Now, with the new deep learning algorithms automatically extracting data from items within images and the resulting consumer products, this early innovation is a very relevant one;
- This patent covers the aspect mentioned above, and many other aspects related to image-based ecommerce, search and personalization.
Display screen with graphical user interface
- Link to patent USD850475S1;
- This is an interesting design patent. It is a novel approach to protect search interfaces of digital closets, automated fashion stylists and similar fashion consumer applications;
- The USPTO rejected the application in 2 occasions over a previous Apple patent that protects a search box interface in a touch screen device, specifically, over the figure 6 of said patent;
- After the first rejection, we filed an Appeal Brief claiming that the texts “Text box” and “What would you like to wear?” share no common words or no semantic meaning or connotation, and we claim that the difference in text is not a minor variation because the overall design depends heavily on the text for its ornamental impact, such that any significant change in text drastically changes the overall design;
- After the second rejection, we decide not to file a new Appeal and instead go directly to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board – PTAB;
- Two years later, the Board reverses the examiner’s rejection, agrees with our Appeal and we win the case, and the patent;
- It is an interesting patent because it protects search interfaces related to several upcoming products that will be offered by Google, Amazon, Alibaba or Facebook, in the form of digital closets, automated fashion stylists and similar fashion applications.
The other 3 design patents also protect fashion-stylist interfaces but I expect them to have lower overall relevance as compared to the above – they are good companions. They are available here:
- USD778294 – Display screen with graphical user interface;
- USD850475S1 – Display screen with graphical user interface;
- USD746300 – Display screen with graphical user interface.