I found a company that sells a Payment Ring. Upon a quick look, it seems to be like Purewrist. You have a prepaid account, and fund it (via bank, PayPal, Venmo, etc… Also, the ring expires (based on photo from their app).
I didn’t see it mentioned in the Forums yet, so I thought I’d mention it. I’m currently headed out to dinner, but I might do some more research later and share my findings. Not sure if a Conversion Service would be possible, but it might be better to just go with the Walletmor (unless this ring has a longer expiration date), not sure yet.
I find the court cases around the Esos ring/McClear Patents to be enough of an issue that I would be concerned about the viability of using one of their rings.
To be fair I find the McClear/Joseph Prencipe Patents to be equally dubious. It seems like he has patented “exchanging data with a wearable device”. I don’t know how that meshes with the use of NDEF. Personally I think it should be invalidated on the grounds that it is a) obvious and b) prior art includes several papers explicitly about RFID wearables from 2011 (the original patent date is 2012).
I am no lawyer, but looking at the bits I can see from the two Prencipe/Esos cases and the current assignments of some of the Patents it seems as though Esos at least partially won.
As a result of that they own some of the Patents on wearable “NFC Computers”. They are now suing tokenize (I think they might be https://www.tokenring.com/ )for breach of their patents.
Edited to add: there might be more, this is just the stuff I found in a quick search (between driving bits) while travelling to Portland and back this afternoon.
Saw this online so popping in for some clarification. Cheers guys
Hmm interesting, I didn’t know they actually got around to selling something.
@Zwack “Personally I think it should be invalidated on the grounds that it is a) obvious and b) prior art includes several papers explicitly about RFID wearables from 2011 (the original patent date is 2012).” The claims of '609 patents are different than the scope of the concept of “RFID wearables”, and this is why they were accepted. I started on the patent in 2010, took some time to get it to filing tho. =/
@Zwack “I am no lawyer, but looking at the bits I can see from the two Prencipe/Esos cases and the current assignments of some of the Patents it seems as though Esos at least partially won.”
The filings do not show that Esos has partially won. On the other hand, Esos recently lost the majority of its claims in a motion for summary judgment. Their case is literally based on forging documents, so no big surprise there.
@Amal “Oh no it looks like they had it assigned for a time…”
Esos has been playing shenanigans with the USPTO assignment registry for some time so as to showcase to their potential investors/customers that they “owned” the relevant patents. While under the law, the USPTO assignment registry does not have a relationship with ownership, this tactic has given them success in convincing potential customers for some time. Too bad really! It’ll shake out eventually.
