Before going any further with this project I decided to see if there are any patents that cover it. I searched for the names of each of the companies involved in making the film, along with keywords about the watch, and found nothing. Then I searched for several keywords with no company name and found this IBM patent. At first I thought it was pretty much identical to my invention, but as I read through it I realized that there are some important differences. IBM's invention's only goal is to notify the user that they should prepare to leave their current location in time to get to their next appointment, based on both the travel time and the time required to prepare to leave, while mine's goal is to continuously indicate how late or early the user can expect to be, and is not planned to take into account the amount of time required to prepare to leave. IBM's also estimates travel time based on the user's past travel times between their current location and the destination only; I'm planning to store travel times along with mode-of-transportation info between many waypoints along the way so that those segments can be combined as necessary to estimate travel times for journeys the user hasn't made before.

I'm somewhat hopeful that if IBM does think their patent covers my invention, they won't mind enough to take action. Does anybody know if they've ever released a product involving the system described in their patent?

Furthermore, it's a US patent; I live in Canada, and IBM doesn't seem to have an equivalent Canadian patent. Possibly relevant Canadian patents include:

• RIM: CA2734326 A1 (automatically facilitating notifications to others that the user will be late)
• Nortel: CA2379613 A1 (notifications triggered by events and predetermined locations)
• Highwaymaster Communications: CA2212330C (determining ETA of a vehicle to a location, based on location and route (including speed) info received from a dispatch along with the vehicle's current location, and sending a lateness notification to said dispatch if necessary)

Of these, the third seems the most relevant. However, despite having over a hundred (mostly redundant) claims, the inventors didn't seem to envision using such technology for anything other than vehicular applications in a fleet setting.