American Technology Receives New Patents
There was a time when you pulled into a California gas station and an attendant filled your tank. It was nothing special. It was just the way they did things.
Soon, a wireless attendant will be on duty to fill your car-mounted computer with content.
Officials at Rancho Bernardo-based Sensoria Corp., working with San Jose-based Ten Square Corp., see a future where motorists download MP3-format files, video files and promotional offers from antennas near fuel dispensers.
The same technology will also let gas station sensors take diagnostic data from vehicles, then send it back to fleet managers.
Sensoria and Ten Square will team up with major automakers and petroleum retailers to pilot the technology this summer. Sensoria’s vice president of marketing, Brian Davis, declined to give more details, but said San Diegans may get a sneak peek.
“I’m pretty optimistic we’ll see it here this summer in pilot form,” he said.
While Ten Square provides the content, Sensoria provides the broadband connection from the service station to the vehicle. Fast downloads are important, said Davis, since convenience store owners don’t want customers hanging around the gas pumps longer than necessary.
In the near-term, Ten Square has announced it will roll out its Ten Square Digital Network in San Diego and 19 other cities this year. The network will display advertising and offer coupons on screens affixed to gas pumps, automatic teller machines and kiosks. Ten Square recently piloted the technology in Atlanta.
You might watch for such advertising screens to appear on pay phones, too, provided those don’t go the way of the gas station attendant.
– – –
Sound Patents: San Diego’s American Technology Corp. recently received three U.S. patents for loudspeaker technologies. It has also acquired rights to several audio reproduction and amplifier technology patents from Carver Corp., the Seattle-area home electronics company that filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
Robert Putnam, American’s vice president for investor relations, declined to give a price for the patents, calling American’s offer “a small bid.”
“We count ourselves fortunate for what we were able to acquire,” he said. The company has another important link to the old Carver. A key Carver employee, Jim Croft, is now chief technology officer for American.
Column Components: Quake Global is the new name for Quake Wireless. The San Diego company helps the owners of trucks, heavy equipment, ships and other movable assets track those assets using satellite and cellular towers. The new name better reflects the company’s line of work, said President and CEO Ray Calhoun, noting the old name may have suggested cell phone service San Diego-based TargetSafety.com, which offers government mandated safety training via the Internet, will provide state and federal safety training to Foster Farms employees in six facilities in Oregon and Washington. First up: employees at the company’s Donald, Ore., chicken feed mill.
Graves’ column appears weekly. Write him at bgraves@sdbj.com.