The first round of litigation from Mimzi, LLC fizzled out when the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) canceled all claims from the sole patent that the inventor-controlled plaintiff had asserted in separate District of Delaware complaints filed against Foursquare Labs and TripAdvisor, in late 2018, and against Acer, ASUSTek, and HTC, in early 2019. More than two years later, Mimzi has returned to litigation, this time with three more recently issued patents from the same family, at issue in a new case against Samsung (2:23-cv-00238), filed in the Eastern District of Texas. The accused products are Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets using the SmartThings Find technology and/or the Bixby virtual assistant.  

Last month, District Judge Leonard P. Stark issued a set of Alice rulings—this time two—after another “Section 101 Day”, held on January 10 in Delaware. In a single hearing, the court considered eligibility challenges to patents asserted by Pebble Tide LLC, a plaintiff associated with Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, in a campaign targeting products that take and send still photos and videos (most recently, provided by insurance companies to facilitate auto damage estimates) and to a patent asserted by Mimzi, LLC, an inventor-controlled plaintiff, in a campaign targeting incorporation of voice response technology in a variety of apps and devices. Judge Stark’s decisions, in a January 31 order lifting heavily from the hearing transcript, produced mixed results.

Inventor-controlled Mimzi, LLC has expanded its sole litigation campaign, begun last November, by adding suits that target the voice response functionality provided by either Alphabet (Google) or Microsoft in mobile devices made and/or sold by Acer (1:19-cv-00272), ASUSTek (1:19-cv-00273), or HTC (1:19-cv-00274). Each new case identifies such devices for that defendant, providing infringement allegations with respect to the inclusion of voice response technology from Google (Voice Action, Search by Voice, Google Voice Search, Google Now, Google Assistant) or Microsoft (Cortana). For example, in the Acer suit, Mimzi calls out the Liquid Zest smartphone and Iconia One 10 tablet for their inclusion of the former; the Liquid Jade Primo smartphone and the Switch 7 Black Edition and Aspire E 15 laptops, of the latter. These latest defendants join Foursquare Labs and Trip Advisor in the campaign, both accused of infringement over apps made for “use on mobile devices that use the Apple, Android, Microsoft or other operating systems”.

Inventor-controlled Mimzi, LLC has filed suit against Foursquare Labs (1:18-cv-01767) and Trip Advisor (1:18-cv-01768) in Delaware. The new complaints assert a single patent broadly related to returning location-based information from a “social network database” in response to a spoken request. At issue are the defendants’ mobile apps, which allegedly permit users (i.e., smartphone users) to view “location-dependent information” in response to questions asked (“Where is the nearest (best, most popular) Chinese restaurant?” given as an example).