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The patent embedded below is extremely valuable: it just sold for $2.6 million. At 3pm on Thursday, this US patent (number 6,618,593) sold at the Union League Club of Chicago, and that price made it one of the biggest bids recorded for intellectual property during a live auction.
The patent covers mobile social networking - set to be one of the hottest tech markets this year. It covers location aware devices that connect to a remote server and allow users to make connections with other users based on distance and other factors. This is the system that a lot of the existing mobile social networks use: you say you're interested in dating hot girls who dig World of Warcraft (ok, it's a longshot), and the system alerts you when a matching person is in your vicinity. Loopt is a current example. We're not sure who bought the patent, or whether they plan to go after those making use of the tech. The guys who filed it, however, were geniuses: they came up with this stuff 7 years ago.