ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,548,038, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Realtime busyness for places" was invented by Frank Russo (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Luuk Van Dijk (Zurich, Switzerland), Paul Donnelly (San Jose, Calif.), Quang Duong (San Francisco), James Aspinall (San Francisco), Finnegan Southey (San Francisco) and Steve Chien (San Carlos, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Real-time busyness information is for a public place is computed in a privacy-sensitive way, and provided for display in relation to historical busyness information. An aggregate amount of real-time location information available for a particular public...