ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,312,274, issued on May 27, was assigned to Sococo Inc. (Austin, Texas).
"Visual communications" was invented by Eric Cozzi (Hayward, Calif.), David Van Wie (Eugene, Ore.), Paul J. Brody (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Matthew Leacock (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A persistent virtual area that supports establishment of respective presences of communicants operating respective network nodes connected to the virtual area even after all network nodes have disconnected from the virtual area is maintained. A presence in the virtual area is established for a user of a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) terminal device. Transm...