More than 400 patents went on the block in 74 lots. Around 25 lots sold. Many languished under the seller's reserve minimum, clearly an indication of owner optimism trumping market reality. Most patents that did sell went for $10,000 or less, many to phone bidders. The bidding on some lots was positively snail-paced. In several cases where the bidding got close, but failed to reach reserve price, sellers got real and headed off to private negotiations with the highest bidder.

Private auction-style sale of related patents is relatively common, as are public patent auctions precipitated by bankruptcy. The Ocean Tomo flea-market approach could be charitably deemed an experiment.

Some lots generated drama. A movie compression patent by Douglas Ballantyne, for shoving a film to TV through cable, shot to $650,000, stalled, rose to $1 million with two bidders left, before nudging and closing at $1.4 million. The catalog-listed value for the patent was $2 to $5 million.

The audience burst into applause after a rapid round of bidding for a lot of flash memory patents from 3Com drove from $350,000 to $950,000 in mere minutes. That's what having "flash" in the technology will do.

The bidders remained anonymous; none wore name tags, though several were wearing stylish troll lapel pins (just kidding). A woman with an imaginary troll broach scooped a few low-lying offers in a variety of technical fields.

Representatives of several large companies attended the auction, including GE, Microsoft, Dupont, and AT&T. As well as the expected offerings from individual inventors, also up for bid were lots from some well-known companies, including Motorola, Ford Motors, and Clorox.

One of the perceived problems with the auction was the variety of technologies on offer. Overall it may have made for a larger crowd, but bidding on any particular lot was limited to a very few bidders from the get-go. No one seemed please with that aspect. Whether Ocean Tomo will have smaller, but more focused auctions, remains to be seen. What would make sense, to generate the buzz of a large gathering while streamlining business, is to simultaneously run several auctions organized by technology area.

Acknowledging the need for more realism in the pricing mechanism, Ocean Tomo CEO Jim Malackowski announced before the auction began that they were considering using outside appraisers to set patent values next time. This first time, sellers had dreamed their prices into the catalog listing. After the auction Malackowski reiterated the need for more realistic reserve prices to grease sales.

Of course, at the end, Malackowski beamed, "In my view, this was a great success." And to the extent it leads to a more successful auction next round, planned for New York in October, he's right. But Malackowski does not think this kind of patent auction is the wave of the future, instead considering this a stepping stone in raising awareness towards a patent marketplace, specifically a viable patent exchange, like a stock exchange, for patent licensing rights.