On April 3rd, Google announced that it would be forking WebKit to create and start using a rendering engine of its own, called Blink and on April 9th, less than a week later, rival Microsoft filed a trademark application with the USPTO for, yup, ‘Blink’.
We should note that Microsoft has built a Windows Phone 8 application called BLINK. In fact, Microsoft Research noted its existence to the world for the first time back in February 2013.
BLINK (Microsoft’s, not Google’s) essentially lets people capture a burst of images before and after they actually take a shot, so they can sort them and save the best pictures later. The app also comes with stabilization technology developed by Microsoft Research.
So Microsoft has an app called Blink, which was released before Google even announced its Blink WebKit forkage, and both companies regularly files trademark applications for new products and services. Maybe it’s just a coincidence Microsoft filed for the BLINK trademark a couple of days after Google presented its own Blink.
Except, Microsoft doesn’t typically file for trademarks for Microsoft Research projects unless they ‘graduate’ and become full-fledged offerings – which they often don’t, because it’s not the primary objective of the company department. It may still be a coincidence, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Microsoft trying to rattle Google’s cage here.
Credit: TNW
