Facebook, YELP et al. sued for Patent Infringement by MacroSolve, Inc.

January 30, 2012: Facebook, among others, has been sued for patent infringement by MacroSolve, Inc. in the Texas Eastern District Court. The patent-in-suit is US7822816 (the ‘816 patent) titled “System and method for data management”.  The ‘816 patent essentially discloses steps for distributing electronic forms via the Internet or to mobile devices and receiving responses for evaluating and analysis. The other defendants in the patent suit are Yelp, Wal-Mart Stores, Hyatt Corporation and newegg. According to Foss patents, MacroSolve had sued close to 20 companies in June last year, primarily targeting small mobile app developers. Further, MacroSolve brought patent infringement lawsuits against 10 more companies on January 03, 2012.

Claim 1 of the ‘816 patent recites:

A method for managing data including the steps of: (a) creating a questionnaire comprising a series of questions; (b) tokenizing said questionnaire; thereby producing a plurality of tokens representing said questionnaire; (c) establishing a first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection with a remote computing device; (d) transmitting said plurality of tokens to a remote computing device via said first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection; (e) terminating said first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection with said remote computing device; (f) after said first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection is terminated, executing at least a portion of said plurality of tokens representing said questionnaire at said remote computing device to collect a response from a user; (g) establishing a second wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection between said remote computing device and a server; (h) after said second wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection is established, transmitting at least a portion of said response from the user to said server via said second wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection; and (i) storing said transmitted response at said server.  

The ‘816 patent was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 26, 2010. MacroSolve has also filed another patent application (US20110040831A1) which is a continuation of the ‘816 patent.