Patent on Performance and Capacity Planning

Here is another patent that I filed while working at Sun.

System and method for generating a probability distribution of computer performance ratios

A system and method for generating a probability distribution indicating the probability of a range of performance ratios between computer systems. Benchmark and/or other testing results are obtained for both computer systems. For each test, a ratio of one system's performance to the other is calculated. The ratios and/or testing results may be weighted. From the performance ratios, a histogram is produced to indicate the probabilities of achieving the various ratios. Based on the distribution of probabilities, a particular performance ratio can be predicted with a corresponding level of confidence, and used for capacity planning or configuring a computing environment.

Patents on Peer to Peer Trading Platform

While working at eBay Research Labs I did some work using Skype that resulted in four patents in the area of P2P trading and reputation systems. I just noticed that they are now public, as of late 2007, and here they are:

Peer-to-peer trading platform

Peer-to-peer trading platform with relative reputation-based item search and buddy rating

Peer-to-peer trading platform with search caching

Peer-to-peer trading platform with roles-based transactions

The seed of the idea came from my good friend Josep Ferrandiz, who still works at PayPal. The ideas were developed with help from Zahid Ahmed who is now working for EMC, and with a lot of help from Neel Sundaresan who manages eBay Research labs. The patents are in all of our names.

I think we came up with some cool ideas, we also stress tested the Skype API's in some novel ways and got some things fixed. The lasting legacy of this work is more robust application to application messaging API's and improvements in Skype4Java.