US 6,724,403 · Granted 2004-04-20

The Dashboard Patent That Pioneered the Tile Grid Interface

Imagine a dashboard on your screen where each box (called a tile) shows live information from different websites or apps—weather, news, stocks—and they all update at their own pace without freezing the whole screen. This patent describes exactly that system, decades before phone home screens made tiles cool.

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The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a graphical user interface that displays multiple information sources in a grid of independent tiles, where each tile can refresh and update its content on its own schedule without interrupting the others. What's protected here is the specific system for managing when and how different data sources refresh simultaneously on the same screen, along with the platform-independent architecture that lets it work across different operating systems.

Why it matters

This patent laid important groundwork for what would become standard in digital dashboards—the idea that you could watch ten different live feeds at once, each ticking at its own speed, without the whole interface lagging. It predates the smartphone era by several years, making it an early blueprint for the dashboard-style interfaces that define everything from Windows 10 to Apple's widgets today. Surfcast pioneered the concept of compartmentalized, independently refreshing content views.

Real-world use

When you look at your phone's home screen widgets showing weather, calendar, and news headlines all updating independently, or when you open a financial dashboard showing stocks, crypto prices, and market news in separate boxes, you're seeing the descendant of this patent's core idea.

Original USPTO abstract

A computerized method of presenting information from a variety of sources on a display device. Specifically the present invention describes a graphical user interface for organizing the simultaneous display of information from a multitude of information sources. In particular, the present invention comprises a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others. The grid functionality manages the refresh rates of the multiple information sources. The present invention is intended to operate in a platform independent manner.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,724,403
Filing date: 2000-10-30
Grant date: 2004-04-20
Assignee: Surfcast, Inc.
Inventor(s): SANTORO OVID, LAGERMANN KLAUS
CPC class: H04M1/72427

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