Miles J. Wallace sent a message to Virginia M. Rometty Chairman, President, and CEO, IBM email address that said:
US Patents on Crawler Platform Technology and IP
Dear Ms. Rometty:
Perhaps you and/or your companies may have an interest in ownership of these critical technologies and the United States Patents associated with them.
Netprehension (a portmanteau that means “the capability to grasp the Net”) is a patent-pending software platform for the development and delivery of a multitude of applications that assess and enhance the value of Internet websites and other network resources in ways that are more in line with business goals than existing offerings.
Currently, organizations:
(1) identify and isolate some deficient technical aspect of their Internet asset(s), such as security, performance, accessibility, SEO, functionality, or usability;
(2) evaluate, purchase, and learn a particular product or service to remediate the issue; and
(3) repeat the process for each outstanding issue, acquiring redundant technologies that offer no means of integration. With Netprehension, common technological components of crawler and proxy applications are standardized in a platform layer, and specific applications are constructed by configuring these components in different ways. Users of applications running on the platform then create a living, actionable database of information about the assets they publish or use, in contrast to the static reports generated by lower-level tools. Ultimately, the end-users of these applications will be able to ask higher-order questions such as “What is the value of my website, and how can I increase it?” and “How do my web properties compare to my competitor? Versus last year?” instead of the current state of the art which simply finds web pages containing keywords (search engines) or counts the number of vulnerabilities in a web application (vulnerability scanners).
Initially, Netprehension will be developed to support applications with a modest scope, such as Site Sentinel (a website privacy and data security auditing tool, previously developed using the traditional approach), Multithreat (a cloud-based, comprehensive website security and integrity service for non-technical website owners), and Spectrum (a multi-topic web analysis product that determines overall health, value, safety, and efficiency of targeted web properties). However, we anticipate that Netprehension applications will eventually expand far beyond these use-cases into applications that help defend organizational networks and increase employee productivity. We plan to integrate a third-party component marketplace, greatly increasing the potential range of functionality for such a system. And further, we are considering productizing the platform itself, to be used by integrators and enterprises directly as a technological foundation for their Internet analysis and enhancement ideas. Pending patent applications address all of these aspects.
Netprehension is a distributed software platform for the development and delivery of modular applications that perform network resource (i.e. website) analysis and augmentation on behalf of publishers and consumers. In contrast to the existing software ecosystem of such products, where end-users must purchase separate applications and/or services, with redundant and yet incompatible technology stacks, to address each topic of network resource inquiry (i.e. security, performance, accessibility, SEO, functionality, usability, and so on), Netprehension supports naturally interoperable applications that can be tailored to different audiences and use cases merely by creating unique configurations of modules.
This is achieved by:
• Extracting and standardizing common crawling and proxying functions into a modular platform, and supporting the development of bespoke applications through simple configuration and content addition;
• Utilizing a “common messaging protocol” to provide consistent data access, retrieval, and transmission among modules;
• Providing “service” and “job” building blocks to construct arbitrary workflows;
• Enabling multi-user and multi-tenant installations by dividing processes and storage into “system” and independent “project” domains; and
• Including default user interface templates and widgets for common navigation and look-and-feel.
Netprehension was originally conceived of, and is currently being used, as a means of developing and hosting internally-developed, crawler-based applications with exploratory use-cases, such as Site Sentinel (a website privacy and data security auditing tool, previously developed using a single-purpose web crawler stack), Multithreat (a cloud-based, comprehensive website security and integrity service for non-technical website owners), and Spectrum (a multi-topic web analysis product that determines overall health, value, safety, and efficiency of targeted web properties). We anticipate that Netprehension will eventually: (1) expand beyond website analysis and publisher-focused applications; (2) be capable of hosting proxy-based applications and services; (3) incorporate third-party functionality through the use of integrated exchanges; and (4) be productized as a middleware product itself. Pending patent applications address all of these aspects.
Should you have any interest in owning and controlling the use of crawler technology throughout the technical community and are willing to discuss possibilities, please be in touch as soon as you possibly can. NDAs must be in place before more detailed information can be shared.
--
Miles J. Wallace, President
Ehrlich Wesen Dauer, LLC
5700 Lynne Haven Road
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15217
412.661.1002 X 1 (O)
412.235.8172 (C)
412.661.1008 (F)
