MShift to Appeal Patent Suit Ruling

A federal judge has agreed to dismiss a suit by MShift Inc. alleging that Intuit Inc.'s financial services business, formerly Digital Insight Corp., infringes on its mobile banking patent.

Scott Moeller, the president and founder of MShift, immediately vowed to appeal the judge's ruling Friday granting summary judgment to the defendants.

"For whatever reason, the judge did not credit MShift's substantial evidence of infringement," he said. "We strongly believe the judge's analysis included several significant errors in how he evaluated the highly technical issues." Other defendants in the suit included Mobile Money Ventures LLC, a joint venture between Citigroup Inc. and South Korea's SK Telecom, and several credit unions.

The patent, titled "System for Converting Wireless Communications for a Mobile Device," was awarded to MShift by the U.S. Patent Office in 2005. It lets smartphones and other mobile devices gain access to network sites through an engine that translates between the language of the network site and the language of the mobile device.

The defendants argued that, when MShift applied for the patent in 2000, cell phone browsers did not "speak" the same language, HTML, that was used to display Web pages on most desktop browsers. MShift's conversion engine translated the contents of a Web page from HTML into a language that could be understood and displayed on mobile devices, the defendants said.

MShift was among the first providers of mobile banking; it contracted with Digital Insight for a referral relationship, then a reseller link. But the relationship ended in late 2009 when Digital Insight, now a unit of Intuit, signed up with Mobile Money Ventures to supply mobile banking technology to its credit union and bank customers.

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