• by Philip Rosenstein , December 7, 2016

Drawbridge announced on Wednesday that it has secured a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a system to group Internet devices based upon device usage.

The award of this patent validates Drawbridge’s Connected Consumer Graph and Cross-Device Platform which are both built on the newly patented technology.

According to the patent’s abstract, Drawbridge developed:

- “An index structure that associates devices with device feature information;

- A pairing engine to determine device pairs based upon device feature information;

- A feature vector generation engine to produce feature vectors corresponding to determined device pairs based upon feature values associated within the index structure with devices of the determined device pairs;

- A scoring engine to determine scores to associate with determined device pairs based upon produced feature vectors;

- A graph structure, wherein nodes within the graph structure represent devices of determined device pairs, and wherein edges between pairs of nodes within the graph structure indicate determined device pairs,

and

- “A clustering engine to identify respective clusters of three or more nodes within the graph structure that represent respective groups of devices.”

“Cross-device identity is one of the most talked-about problems in not just the ad-tech and martech spaces, but also in the greater enterprise data markets,” Devin Guan, Drawbridge CTO told Real-Time Daily via email.

“We started solving these problems over five years ago, and it’s rewarding to receive this patent for our probabilistic cross-device identity resolution technology, especially now that the applications for that data have grown even more than we first anticipated they would.”