The company just appliedfor a patent on a camera whose images could selectively transition from opaque to transparent and back again, depending on how much privacy is called for.
Mervyn Jacobson read about Simons' bumpy journey and was smitten with the idea of finding value in junk DNA. In 1989 they formed GeneType and appliedfor their first patent covering noncoding regions and HLA. In 2000 GeneType pulled off a reverse merger with a publicly traded Australian shell company that formerly mined for gold.
Far from a casual review, the standards for the grant of a patent are so stringent, and applied in such a careful manner, that in 2010 a decision was made to grant a patentfor less than 63% of applications that had been completely examined.
Stoler noted that Stahura appliedfor and Demand now owns Patent 7539774, which covers methods for obtaining large numbers of web addresses at low cost including near-misses to trademarked names.