Avistar (News - Alert) Communications Corporation, a provider of unified visual communications solutions, has been granted two U.S. new patents which further expand the company’s intellectual property coverage in login-based Voice over IP (VoIP) services and text- based instant messaging.

 

"Basically, these two patents are designed to accommodate the way people communicate today, while addressing further convergence in the future," said Simon Moss, CEO at Avistar, in a statement. "These two patents enable users to click one button to contact another person and find that person no matter what device he or she is using or where he or she is.

 

Avistar owns and develops an extensive portfolio of 82 patents encompassing presence-based interactions, wireless communications, desktop video, recorded and live media at the desktop, instant messaging, multimedia documents, data sharing and service-rich video network architectures.

 

The two new patents (7,398,296, issued on July 8 and 7,412,482, issued on August 12) cover systems and methods for login-based routing of real-time communications. Users can flexibly login at any number of devices or locations and can choose from a number of real-time communications options, including text-based real-time messaging.

 

Commenting on the grant of these new patents, Moss said that they are significant to both the industry and the company as they describe the use of real-time text and audio, not just video. And they have a priority date of October 1993. And secondly, with the PTO's approval of these two patents, together with their rejection of the re-examination requests for 19 Avistar patents, Moss feels that it suggests a favorable outcome with regard to the company’s other pending patents.

 

Through its active licensing program, Avistar makes all of its intellectual property available to potential partners and licensees. Current licensees include Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), Polycom, Inc., Tandberg ASA, Radvision Ltd., LifeSize (News - Alert) Communications, Inc. and Emblaze-VCON.