From Geekwire:
The Onion, September 2006: “Sequestered in a private booth at a Pasadena-area Cheesecake Factory for nearly 25 minutes, a party of eight California Institute Of Technology physicists emerged exhausted but visibly excited Friday evening after successfully splitting the bill.”
Google Patent Application, October 2013: “For example, continuing with the example of FIG. 4, assume that Users A-C have drinks at a bar and User B pays a bill of $45 for the drinks. User B adds the payment transaction as an expenditure of the group and allocates $15 of the transaction to User A, $20 to User B, $10 to User C. In this example, the balance module 308 would update the individual balances of Users A-C to indicate that User B now owes $115 to User A ($130-$15) and User C owes $10 to User B ($0+$10).”
Yes, it’s true: In a classic example of parody coming to life, a newly published patent filing reveals Google’s ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal.
The filing outlines a system (such as a mobile app) for automatically storing information about group expenses, tracking how much is owed by different people in the group, and ultimately settling the balance by transferring money between their respective accounts.
Appropriately enough, six Googlers are listed as inventors on the patent filing. Is there any doubt how they came up with this idea?...MORE
