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RedVentures is pretty much the 1000lb gorilla in SEO lead gen. They also have a pretty large patent library and aren't afraid to use it. This includes a patent

RedVentures is pretty much the 1000lb gorilla in SEO lead gen. They also have a pretty large patent library and aren't afraid to use it. This includes a patent on zip code search which our last startup was on the receiving end of an infringement claim.[1] If you are a reporter or investigative journalist I'd encourage you to do some poking around into the business model behind APlaceForMom.com and the FTC action to spin off Caring.com and the overall effect on the nursing home industry. I can go on a major rant about RV, their moves to rollup the majority of the lead gen industry but due to prior legal interactions with them I'll refrain from painting a target on my back any further than I have. --- [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140149249A1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140149249A1/

athrowaway3z 5y ago
I remember reading some piece of policy document that stated offhandedly in its introduction as a matter of fact something like "Patents allow us to foster innovation and are a benefit to society". I can only imagine that businesses are going to setup somewhere outside the US. Not for tax reasons, but simply to avoid the exposure to the minefield of patent.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  If you do business in the US, a US court can compel you to stop doing so, even if you're not there.
  - staticautomatic 5y ago
    Except that these days they almost never do that.
    - yccs27 5y ago
      With patent claims up to billions of dollars, "they likely won't enforce it" isn't good enough for most serious companies.
      - staticautomatic 5y ago
        I’m not talking about enforcing an injunction. I’m talking about granting one.
dgb23 5y ago
How can this be a patent? It’s as ridiculous as the one click buy. Don’t your legislators see how these things are not at all useful and are only used to bully? How they only create useless overhead? How it prevents progress and incremental innovation? How it induces fear into small businesses and creates perverse incentives for large ones?
- Akronymus 5y ago
  I tried multiple times to understand what it is actually saying. But between the vagueness and buzzwords I didn't get it at all.
rancar2 5y ago
Nick, I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles. I’d love to hear more about what our industry can do to shift the tide back towards serving those in need of care better. My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective. If you are an investigative journalist or class action lawyer, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m easy to find.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  I appreciate you responding to this thread, but "My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective" is a really fake, BS response. If you want to engage with the HN community, talk about why you own and have prosecuted what seem like obvious patents. It was filed in 2009, when similar services were all over the web.
rexreed 5y ago
When I click on the link above it says that the current patent status is "Abandoned"?
- nickreese 5y ago
  I may have linked to the wrong one. They have 2 active owned via AllConnect patented by Glenn Goad. One is zip code availability lookup/search and the other is address level search for availability of services. They also have a 3rd more aggressive one that the patent examiner gave them headaches over and they ultimately abandoned. —- We were sued in 2018. My knowledge of their patents is from then. They may have abandoned some since then.
  - thesausageking 5y ago
    It sounds like it might be this one: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8433617B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8433617B2/en It's active and I see lawsuits were filed around it in 2018.
    - rexreed 5y ago
      Thanks! That looks like the one. How do these patents make it through the "novel, unique, and non-obvious" evaluation process by examiners?
      - loceng 5y ago
        Regulatory capture and incompetence, par for course of industrial complexes - where lawyers make more profit via the most successfully, doing whatever dark patterns to earn more profit/extract more from society, then having more $ to pay lawyers, and it's also initially funded by VC industrial complex. It's ultimately why I believe control mechanisms must be abandoned, no patents (or if allowed, perhaps only for 3-5 years to give a head start but longer than that is clearly harmful and costly to society and innovation/competition).
      - thesausageking 5y ago
javiramos 5y ago
It seems like the cited patent was an application that was eventually abandoned. The application didn't hold very well during examination.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
In case any engineer reading the linked patent is confused about what the patent is saying ... that is a feature of the patent ... not a bug. Patents are written to be vague. They don't need to teach anything. They just need to look "sophisticated" so a jury of yokels in rural Texas thinks that it's very "smart". Then you get an award of Billions of dollars for something you cook up on a whiteboard over lunch with your lawyer. After seeing the breakneck pace of innovation in Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm convinced that a free for all is a better state for an economy then what we have in California with patents. Patents create a system where you need to get a thousand permissions from people ... spend millions on lawyers ... all for what? All because we are worried that someone somewhere might have done the thing you are trying to do first. I say so what? Yes its sad if someone makes something and they don't get paid for it because everyone else does the same thing. But is that a bigger tragedy then what we have now where trolls shut down whole industries and approaches? Where lawyers live parasitically on the backs of engineers, doing nothing but causing friction in the system and adding no value. I know formerly good engineers that no longer do engineering. They just spit out endless amounts of bullshit papers for lawyers to turn into patents, which will then be used to harass those of us that are actually trying to build useful products. A society that incentivizes parasitism instead of productive work will end up falling behind a society that incentivizes useful work. Between the policies of the Fed that have pushed so many smart people into unproductive speculative jobs (like flipping houses) and stupid laws like software patents, I've become very bearish about America's future prospects after visiting China. Everyone in China actually seems to be working at a breakneck pace making useful stuff. Everyone in America seems to just have their hand in someone else's pocket, or they are buying some asset in the hope they can sell it for more tomorrow. How can we continue to make progress like this? This is so insane.
- josaka 5y ago
  That's not a patent. It's a published application, which was abandoned after being rejected by the USPTO. This can be verified on the USPTO's public PAIR system. The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.
vgeek 5y ago
This is what is sad. During that time frame, BroadbandNow was 100% better (listing all providers vs just paying) than AllConnect. I didn't really know how large RV was until discovering their acquisition of Imagitas from the USPS, so they both have their tentacles everywhere & would rather litigate than innovate. I've seen their job listings and looked them up from the employment side before, and they seem to have high turnover & somewhat cult-like/exploitative behaviors.
steve76 5y ago
Call the number for APlaceForMom.com. RING RING RING RING RING ... "Fruit cellar!"
ren_engineer 5y ago
Google should technically blacklist most of their sites, they blatantly link to their own properties to boost the SEO ranking of all their online properties The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  > The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part It would make them somewhat hypocritical if they did.
  - NickEubanks 5y ago
    +1
  - ren_engineer 5y ago
    In this case it makes their "product" worse because search quality is bad and only focused on exploiting Google's user. Google has an incentive to remove these companies for their own benefit even if you ignore basic ethics
    - luckylion 5y ago
      Their product is the ad-section above the search results.
- edwardofclt 5y ago
  RV plays the game that Google created and they do it well. What’s wrong with that? Google doesn’t stop it because that’s how they make ad revenue. And I wouldn’t say monopolizing is the right term… that would imply we ran Google and made sure to make our results #1.
  - ren_engineer 5y ago
    The entire company is just a giant PBN that is considered too big to fail/deindex.
walshemj 5y ago
I would have thought that there would be prior art on that (zip / post code lookup) from US Postal Service or the GPO
dmix 5y ago
A good example of their SEO content generation: https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap This websites also used the same website design: https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap This one is slightly different but same leadgen business model: https://www.mymove.com/ https://www.mymove.com/ Also with a coupon directory with affiliate links: https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/ https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/ Couldn’t find any obvious cross links between properties. But definitely giant Google keyword engines with a leadgen business model.
mitchellst 5y ago
RV employee here, so take this as you will but... this comment is baffling. RV does not own or operate A Place for Mom. One of the private equity firms that owns a stake in RV also has a stake in A Place for Mom. Not the strongest connection in the world. RV bought Bankrate, Inc in 2017 (the acquisition through which I joined RV, in another division) which owned Caring.com. Because of the investor connection, RV never integrated Caring and sold it off immediately. So, maybe the senior care industry has some awful practices. But... RV does not do business in that industry. This is really what you hold against us?
- dmix 5y ago
  This was the FTC complaint that led to the sale of Caring.com https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-approves-red-ventures-application-sell-caringcom https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-a... Apparently APlaceForMom was #1 in the market and Caring.com was #2 and the FTC feared that having the same stockholders owning majority stakes in both companies would lead to data sharing and essentially be market consolidation. So RV sold off their $1.4B investment.
- elefanten 5y ago
  You ignored the monopolist patent troll stuff and the part where the poster's company was sued by RV for zip code search, but yeah good summary.

athrowaway3z 5y ago

I remember reading some piece of policy document that stated offhandedly in its introduction as a matter of fact something like "Patents allow us to foster innovation and are a benefit to society". I can only imagine that businesses are going to setup somewhere outside the US. Not for tax reasons, but simply to avoid the exposure to the minefield of patent.

skrebbel 5y ago
If you do business in the US, a US court can compel you to stop doing so, even if you're not there.
- staticautomatic 5y ago
  Except that these days they almost never do that.
  - yccs27 5y ago
    With patent claims up to billions of dollars, "they likely won't enforce it" isn't good enough for most serious companies.
    - staticautomatic 5y ago
      I’m not talking about enforcing an injunction. I’m talking about granting one.

dgb23 5y ago

How can this be a patent? It’s as ridiculous as the one click buy. Don’t your legislators see how these things are not at all useful and are only used to bully? How they only create useless overhead? How it prevents progress and incremental innovation? How it induces fear into small businesses and creates perverse incentives for large ones?

Akronymus 5y ago
I tried multiple times to understand what it is actually saying. But between the vagueness and buzzwords I didn't get it at all.

rancar2 5y ago

Nick, I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles. I’d love to hear more about what our industry can do to shift the tide back towards serving those in need of care better. My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective. If you are an investigative journalist or class action lawyer, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m easy to find.

thesausageking 5y ago
I appreciate you responding to this thread, but "My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective" is a really fake, BS response. If you want to engage with the HN community, talk about why you own and have prosecuted what seem like obvious patents. It was filed in 2009, when similar services were all over the web.

rexreed 5y ago

When I click on the link above it says that the current patent status is "Abandoned"?

nickreese 5y ago
I may have linked to the wrong one. They have 2 active owned via AllConnect patented by Glenn Goad. One is zip code availability lookup/search and the other is address level search for availability of services. They also have a 3rd more aggressive one that the patent examiner gave them headaches over and they ultimately abandoned. —- We were sued in 2018. My knowledge of their patents is from then. They may have abandoned some since then.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  It sounds like it might be this one: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8433617B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8433617B2/en It's active and I see lawsuits were filed around it in 2018.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Thanks! That looks like the one. How do these patents make it through the "novel, unique, and non-obvious" evaluation process by examiners?
    - loceng 5y ago
      Regulatory capture and incompetence, par for course of industrial complexes - where lawyers make more profit via the most successfully, doing whatever dark patterns to earn more profit/extract more from society, then having more $ to pay lawyers, and it's also initially funded by VC industrial complex. It's ultimately why I believe control mechanisms must be abandoned, no patents (or if allowed, perhaps only for 3-5 years to give a head start but longer than that is clearly harmful and costly to society and innovation/competition).
    - thesausageking 5y ago

javiramos 5y ago

It seems like the cited patent was an application that was eventually abandoned. The application didn't hold very well during examination.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

In case any engineer reading the linked patent is confused about what the patent is saying ... that is a feature of the patent ... not a bug. Patents are written to be vague. They don't need to teach anything. They just need to look "sophisticated" so a jury of yokels in rural Texas thinks that it's very "smart". Then you get an award of Billions of dollars for something you cook up on a whiteboard over lunch with your lawyer. After seeing the breakneck pace of innovation in Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm convinced that a free for all is a better state for an economy then what we have in California with patents. Patents create a system where you need to get a thousand permissions from people ... spend millions on lawyers ... all for what? All because we are worried that someone somewhere might have done the thing you are trying to do first. I say so what? Yes its sad if someone makes something and they don't get paid for it because everyone else does the same thing. But is that a bigger tragedy then what we have now where trolls shut down whole industries and approaches? Where lawyers live parasitically on the backs of engineers, doing nothing but causing friction in the system and adding no value. I know formerly good engineers that no longer do engineering. They just spit out endless amounts of bullshit papers for lawyers to turn into patents, which will then be used to harass those of us that are actually trying to build useful products. A society that incentivizes parasitism instead of productive work will end up falling behind a society that incentivizes useful work. Between the policies of the Fed that have pushed so many smart people into unproductive speculative jobs (like flipping houses) and stupid laws like software patents, I've become very bearish about America's future prospects after visiting China. Everyone in China actually seems to be working at a breakneck pace making useful stuff. Everyone in America seems to just have their hand in someone else's pocket, or they are buying some asset in the hope they can sell it for more tomorrow. How can we continue to make progress like this? This is so insane.

josaka 5y ago
That's not a patent. It's a published application, which was abandoned after being rejected by the USPTO. This can be verified on the USPTO's public PAIR system. The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.

vgeek 5y ago

This is what is sad. During that time frame, BroadbandNow was 100% better (listing all providers vs just paying) than AllConnect. I didn't really know how large RV was until discovering their acquisition of Imagitas from the USPS, so they both have their tentacles everywhere & would rather litigate than innovate. I've seen their job listings and looked them up from the employment side before, and they seem to have high turnover & somewhat cult-like/exploitative behaviors.

steve76 5y ago

Call the number for APlaceForMom.com. RING RING RING RING RING ... "Fruit cellar!"

ren_engineer 5y ago

Google should technically blacklist most of their sites, they blatantly link to their own properties to boost the SEO ranking of all their online properties The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part

arrosenberg 5y ago
> The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part It would make them somewhat hypocritical if they did.
- NickEubanks 5y ago
  +1
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  In this case it makes their "product" worse because search quality is bad and only focused on exploiting Google's user. Google has an incentive to remove these companies for their own benefit even if you ignore basic ethics
  - luckylion 5y ago
    Their product is the ad-section above the search results.
edwardofclt 5y ago
RV plays the game that Google created and they do it well. What’s wrong with that? Google doesn’t stop it because that’s how they make ad revenue. And I wouldn’t say monopolizing is the right term… that would imply we ran Google and made sure to make our results #1.
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  The entire company is just a giant PBN that is considered too big to fail/deindex.

walshemj 5y ago

I would have thought that there would be prior art on that (zip / post code lookup) from US Postal Service or the GPO

dmix 5y ago

A good example of their SEO content generation: https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap This websites also used the same website design: https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap This one is slightly different but same leadgen business model: https://www.mymove.com/ https://www.mymove.com/ Also with a coupon directory with affiliate links: https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/ https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/ Couldn’t find any obvious cross links between properties. But definitely giant Google keyword engines with a leadgen business model.

mitchellst 5y ago

RV employee here, so take this as you will but... this comment is baffling. RV does not own or operate A Place for Mom. One of the private equity firms that owns a stake in RV also has a stake in A Place for Mom. Not the strongest connection in the world. RV bought Bankrate, Inc in 2017 (the acquisition through which I joined RV, in another division) which owned Caring.com. Because of the investor connection, RV never integrated Caring and sold it off immediately. So, maybe the senior care industry has some awful practices. But... RV does not do business in that industry. This is really what you hold against us?

dmix 5y ago
This was the FTC complaint that led to the sale of Caring.com https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-approves-red-ventures-application-sell-caringcom https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-a... Apparently APlaceForMom was #1 in the market and Caring.com was #2 and the FTC feared that having the same stockholders owning majority stakes in both companies would lead to data sharing and essentially be market consolidation. So RV sold off their $1.4B investment.
elefanten 5y ago
You ignored the monopolist patent troll stuff and the part where the poster's company was sued by RV for zip code search, but yeah good summary.