ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,356,282, issued on July 8, was assigned to Tile Inc. (San Mateo, Calif.).

"Multi-device architecture for tracking device access" was invented by Michael George Farley (Foster City, Calif.), Jose Pons Vega (Belmont, Calif.), Charles Y. Choi (San Francisco) and Renu Janjam (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes providing, by a first computing device, and to a tracking device, a first request to locate the tracking device. The first request is provided via a first wireless communication network associated with the first computing device and the tracking device. The method includes receiving, from the tracking devi...