A 10-piece sampler from Microsoft's gushing patent pipeline

Over the past two months, Microsoft again has been making noise with its patent portfolio, first garnering its 10,000th patent in February and then suing TomTom over alleged patent infringement. And over the past two years, Microsoft has topped the IEEE Patent Pipeline Power ranking.

But the company this week also saw the knife cut the other way when Paltalk, a company that specializes in Internet chat service, sued Microsoft for $90 million over alleged patent infringement related to technologies used in Halo that lets users host and participate in online games.

But Microsoft is clearly “beginning to treat its burgeoning patent portfolio as a revenue-generating business,” analyst firm Gartner said last week. Gartner also said it has little doubt that Microsoft will switch to playing offense with its patent interests. With the economic downturn continuing, Microsoft is not alone in protecting its commercial interests and exploring ways to garner revenue.

Here is a look at the 10 most recent patent applications from Microsoft, which were made public for the first time March 12 during the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) weekly publication of patent applications. Per USPTO rules, patent applications are made public roughly 18 months after they are submitted.

Title: Proxy engine for custom handling of Web content

Overview: Processes and techniques for protecting Web users from malicious executable code. A proxy engine intercepts communications between a Web browser and a script engine. The proxy engine can invoke a variety of custom event handlers (e.g., script events) that occur in the processing of Web content. A script shield event handler detects the presence of script in pre-defined script-free zones and prevents the script from being executed on a user’s device.

Filed: Sept. 6, 2007

Inventors: Xiaofeng Fan, Jiahe Helen Wang.

Full patent application 

Title: Electronic program guide displayed simultaneously with television programming

Overview: The system shows one or more “slices” of broadcast programming to the viewer within an electronic programming guide (EPG). In browser mode the viewer can scroll through multiple EPG data slices, while in full the EPG can expand from a single column of data slices to multiple columns of selected data slices. The EPG also can display programming the viewer is most likely to watch.

Filed: Nov. 10, 2008

Inventors: Peter Barrett, Daniel Danker, Jeffrey Yaksick

Full patent application 

Title: Multiple paradigms within a single application

Overview: A user interface with multiple UIs for a single application. A switching mechanism, also part of the single application, lets a user to switch between the different user interfaces.

Filed: Sept. 7, 2007

Inventors: Gregg Dingle, Timothy Cooper, Jeffrey Blucher, Julianne Prekaski, Ashvin Mathew.

Full patent application 

Title: Test results management

Overview: Configuring commands can trace test event data, debug event data and execution event data. The execution event data stream includes function invocation messages produced from execution of a tested application. The test event data stream, the debug event data stream, and the execution event data stream can be received and interleafed into a collated data stream log.