On Tuesday, TeleCommunication Systems Inc. (TCS) announced that it had received a U.S. patent on its server location technology. U.S. Patent No. 7,120,450, entitled “Consequential Location Derived Information,” issued on October 10th and includes 22 method and apparatus claims for providing information regarding a wireless device. According to the summary of the invention, “[a]pplications register with the system they are interested in presence and/or location information consequentially,” and “[a]request for presence or location information is received by a potentially unrelated application, either through a direct request or as a polled request.” Afterwards, the location information “is retrieved through standard practices and replied to the caller,” and “[a]s a consequence of the original presence or location request, the resultant information is also returned to the register applications.” The patent references the practice of watching/monitoring wireless subscriber locations by “polling,” noting that “[t]he conventional polling technique utilizes a system within the wireless network to request updated location information relating to all provisioned subscribers” which is performed, for example, every few minutes. However, the patent states that polling is “very resource intensive making it a costly solution for the business use cases it supports.” According to the patent, implementing the disclosed technology “greatly reduces the load placed on the wireless network since the registered applications received updated information without directly requesting the information.”

SYS-Con Media Article: LINK
U.S. Patent No. 7,120,450: LINK
TeleCommunication Systems Website: LINK