Jim Kitchen
Patent drawing of the uControl touchscreen, its widget interface sketched in line art Patent drawing of the platform architecture, from sensors and SMA controller to operator domain Patent drawing of the legacy panel takeover: the SMA controller wired into an existing alarm keypad bus Patent drawing of the uControl zone-editing interface Patent drawing of a premises network integrating a drone dock among connected devices Design patent drawing of the all-in-one touchscreen, three-quarter view

The invention story

  • Program built 2009 · uControl
  • Rebuilt at Comcast · Simple Things · Vessel
  • First priority filing April 2009

Ideas that outlived the companies that made them.

Patent programs are supposed to be a big-company luxury. We built one at uControl when we were thirty people, because I believed the inventions would outlive whatever happened to the company. A startup that survives on invention has two choices: let the ideas evaporate into shipped features, or capture them as assets that compound. Most startups choose evaporation without ever deciding to. We decided the other way, and the program's first priority filing dates to April 2009.

The system mattered more than any single filing. A patent program is not a suggestion box. It has to find what's actually novel in the daily engineering work, capture it before it disappears into the next sprint, and turn the result into something the business can use. Just as important, it has to celebrate the engineers and product minds who did the inventing. The reward money helps. Seeing your name on a granted patent, presented in front of the whole company, helps more.

  1. 01 Encourage
  2. 02 Incentivize
  3. 03 Identify
  4. 04 Harvest
  5. 05 Package
  6. 06 Productize
Patent drawing of the event-logging architecture across home and operator domains
US9147337

The portfolio built by that program has been tested the way patents actually get tested. It survived two acquisitions. It survived assertion litigation against the company's chief competitor, intact. Comcast is still prosecuting continuations from those families in 2026, seventeen years after the first filings, which is the quietest and most convincing compliment a portfolio can receive.

The program traveled better than I expected. At Comcast, I was asked to rebuild the corporate IP capture and reward system on the uControl model. I interviewed people who had built the programs at Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, took what was worth taking, and shipped a program with visibility to the C-suite. At Simple Things, we filed the platform's core patent applications inside a single year, and when the company wound down, the IP was the asset that endured: the applications are still in prosecution, and the technology lives on at Genki Robotics. At Vessel, standing up the IP creation process was part of the technology mandate from the start. Every company since uControl has gotten a version of the same machine.

I'm a named inventor on 65 granted U.S. patents, spanning both the uControl-era and legacy-iControl families of a portfolio that has grown past 240 patents and applications. The families below are the record.

Six families: the platform core, zero-touch install and activation, cloud architecture, life-safety reliability, sensing and intelligence, and hardware and industrial design.

The full inventory · six families, 65 grants
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