Microsoft patents ... a mere 146 issued so far in November

Microsoft was issued 146 patents in November as of November 25, according to the Patents.com site ... and this isn't a particularly blockbuster month. In October, Redmond staked its intellectual property claim by acquiring 220 patents. Today alone, Microsoft was awarded three patents and these give a clue as to the startling range of technologies that Microsoft Research is dabbling in (and the even more frenzied pace of its lawyers that want to lay claim to as much intellectual property as possible).

Sending messages in response to events occurring on a gaming service. Microsoft patented a method for sending what it claims are secure messages to someone outside a gaming environment in response to a predefined event occurring within a gaming environment. The patents documents describes this as a technology that allows people to subscribe to an alert service that will notify them of events of their choosing. For example, if one of your friends logs on to a game, the service can notify you that said friend is playing, even if you are not logged in to the game.

Rich object model for diverse auto-id tags. A method of resolving information on AutoID tags (such as RFID). Tags can have fixed information (such as declaring what kind of object it is) and changing information (such as declaring where it is located).

Force measuring systems for digital pens and other products: This is an electrical conductive technology that allows a pen or stylus to detect the direction it is being moved. The hope is that this new material will allow digital pens to become lighter and thinner.

There were several other interesting patents for the enterprise in the November bunch including one that enforces rights management through edge email servers; a method and apparatus for fault tolerant TCP handshaking; a technology for scalable virtual partitioning of resources and Web access to secure data.

Stay tuned for the 10 best Microsoft Research projects

With the vast numbers of patents Microsoft earns each year, it is hard to get a feel for which technologies will be speeding to your corporate network soon. However, on Monday, watch Network World for a list of the top 10 Microsoft research projects as picked by the researchers themselves. That lists includes a large number of touch screen projects and some amazing social networking schemes that do everything from help emergency personal during a disaster to predict political trends by crawling the Web in real time. We'll post a link to it here when it publishes.

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