Sony Corporation

Sony Electronics Inc

Sean Kennedy

Edward Theodore Winter

Gary Lyons

Fredrik Carpio

Masafumi Kuboyama

Andrew Lee Lawton

Vijayanand Muralidhar Kallianpur

Paul Jin Hwang

Adrian Crisan

Victor Glenn Reha

Jeffrey Sulm

Michael Nientse Chang

Brian Lee

Marjorie Guerrero

Rommel Garay

Eric Gerzymisch

Yoshiro Muraoka

Certain aspects of a device and method for authenticating a user are disclosed. The device may display a first set of images and receive a user input. The received user input may comprise a set of gestures and a selection of a plurality of images from the first set of images in a pre-determined sequence. The selected plurality of images may be modified based on the set of gestures. The device compares the modified selected plurality of images with a second set of pre-stored images. The device may authenticate the user based on the comparison.

Device and method for authenticating a user

A computer establishes a wireless wide area network (WWAN) account simply by entering his telephone number in a user interface (UI) which is sent to an Internet server and correlated with the user's telephone account. A utility notes when a usage limitation for a period is approaching and in response disables wireless updates and automatically executes the updates when a landline connection is sensed.

Simplified activation and management of wireless wide area network (WWAN) account

System and methods for automated adjustment of device settings are described. An electronic device comprises a receiver for receiving environmental information related to a surroundings of the device, a setting configurator for determining a desired setting for the device as a function of the environmental information, and a setting adjuster for adjusting a device setting in accordance with the desired setting. Moreover, the device further comprises a sensor for receiving the stimulus from the surroundings, for determining the value of the stimulus, and for sending the value of the stimulus to the receiver. Further, the device setting includes a volume of a speaker or a headphone, a theme or a color of a background displayed by the display, a brightness of the display, a sharpness of the display, a user interface displayed on the display, an intensity of a backlight of the display, or a contrast of the display.

Systems and methods for automated adjustment of device settings

A method and apparatus for temporal tagging of videos in response to identification of locations on the video where persons in a contact list of a user are identified in response to facial recognition. The temporal tags can be retained within the video, or contained separately in a metadata file having fields to indicate time locations in the video and identified persons seen at those locations. Use of the temporal tags allows for automatic distribution of content relevant to the recipient, based on their presence in the video, or of persons in the video of which they are interested.

Temporal video tagging and distribution

A method of managing content related to a plurality of social networking websites. The method comprises accessing a first account that stores user's authentication information of the plurality of the networking websites and connecting to the plurality of social networking websites. Content associated with a second account is obtained from each of the plurality of social networking websites and service capabilities of each of the plurality of social networking websites are tracked. The obtained content from all the social networking websites is displayed on a single page and service information applicable to content is provided.

Method and system for content distribution management

In a configuration-to-order (CTO) software provisioning system, software upgrade/downgrade support, software running change support, and software file server management are provided in part using microcode typically stored on a user computer BIOS.

Configuration to order software deployment and management

A user of a user computer whose hard disk drive (HDD) is 'fried' can press a special key to cause BIOS to automatically gather location information about the computer from its GPS receiver and gather information about the HDD, activate a WWAN transceiver, and automatically send the location and HDD information over the WWAN to a service computer, which may return a location of a nearest service center to the user computer and any other advice including recovery advice for the HDD that the service center might be able to divine from the information sent to it by the user computer.

Recovery from HDD failure and technical support through WWAN

A software management database contains data structures supporting computer software provisioning for a range of CTO/BTO variations, language variations, region variations, and operating system variations.

Growing community of inventors

San Diego, CA, United States of America

Sean Kennedy