20110315

Patent Hat Trick

After 5 years in the USPTO caverns, the third karl critz patent has been issued. This relates to my time back at the MathWorks as product lead for the Report Generator. Users had been asking for some easy way to package up Simulink and Stateflow models, then send them to colleagues for review. Interviews showed that people were willing to install a special program or plug-in, but preferred not to. I built a tool that would export these models to then-rare Scalable Vector Graphics so that models could be viewed and navigated in any modern web browser. There was even a neat "overview" mode that anticipated Apple's "Expose" feature by a few years. This feature is what made us jump to version 3.0, and it helped sales tidily. My career has progressed onward from this sort of work, but it's still cool to get the recognition.

(It is a bit embarrassing that the lawyers captured the figures using internet explorer, and "provided by compaq" no less.)

2 comments:

  1. Nice work! Hat trick done, now for the baker's dozen. m.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Impressive! I hope you celebrated in some way.

    ReplyDelete