ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,494,056, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to Lemon Inc. (Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands).

"Social networking based on asset items" was invented by Tianyang Xu (Los Angeles), Peilin Li (Los Angeles), Qingyu Chen (Los Angeles), Yuxi Zhang (Los Angeles) and Xiaojie Li (Los Angeles).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present disclosure describes techniques for social networking based on collecting asset items. Features may be extracted from an image comprising an object. The object may be associated with a location. One or more pre-stored files may be determined based on the location. The one or more pre-stored files may each correspond to one or ...