Apple is the current juggernaut in the portable music player business. Creative Technology recently got a bit of boost being granted its so-called Zen patent (6,928,433), related to the user interface for portable music players, but its product sales are nothing to crow about, as it's being slaughtered by Apple. Meanwhile, the pioneer in the business, Rio, just got flushed.

The first portable digital music device was Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300, put out  in 1998. Rio was based upon flash memory, the same technology Apple now uses in its iPod Shuffle. Apple was using little tiny hard disks before it got into flash memory. And now Apple is taking the flash market by storm, with a 46% market share and growing.

Diamond Multimedia sold Rio to SonicBlue in 2000. SonicBlue, going under in 2003, sold Rio to D&M Holdings, a Japanese holding company for several electronic brands. Now D&M has dumped Rio's engineering assets to a Texas company, closing the business. End of story.

EpicRealm had the Internet tiger by the tail in 2000, teaming with Intel, Cisco, and other major players in the networking industry. At the end of 2001 they introduced their server accelerator eXT technology. But by the end of 2002, EpicRealm seemed to drop off the map, no longer a viable product company.

But EpicRealm was also a technology company, not just a product company: they had patents: 5,894,554, and divisional 6,415,335, with a priority date of April 1996. Now EpicRealm has the tiger by the tail again, asserting against 13 companies for patent infringement.

EpicRealm's patents' claims go to offloading a service request from a receiving Web server to a page server, which dynamically creates a web page in response. Certainly sounds useful... valuable... wow!

Are the EpicRealm patents valid? For that matter, is any patent valid? If you really want to know, call Patent Hawk.