****************** The U.S. patent office has approved the ICQ inventors' patent on their technology for instant messaging via the Internet, HA'ARETZ reported. The office also granted a patent on the entrepreneurs' technology for the transmission of instant messages over cellular networks. America Online, which bought ICQ with its owner Mirabilis in 1998 for $400 million, can file patent infringement suits against Yahoo! and Microsoft which develop and market similar software for the transmission of instant messages, or, alternatively, can demand the companies pay royalties. An estimated 400 million people worldwide use instant messaging, about 135 million of them ICQ users. ****************** While the patent office often gets things wrong (e.g. the hoo ha about Amazon.com's one click patent) this approval does suggest that IM=(online awareness + buddy list + over TCP/IP protocal + messaging) and is something relatively new. Quentin