Eolas (, meaning "Knowledge"; bacronym: "Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems") is a United States technology firm formed as a spin-off from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in order to commercialize UCSF's patents for work done there by Eolas' co-founders, as part of the Visible Embryo Project. The company was founded in 1994 by Dr. Michael Doyle, Rachelle Tunik, David Martin, and Cheong Ang from the UCSF Center for Knowledge Management (CKM). The company was created at the request of UCSF, and was founded by the inventors of the university's patents. In addition to the work done while at UCSF, Dr. Doyle has led work at Eolas to create new technologies ranging from Spatial Genomics/Spatial transcriptomics, Code signing, transient-key cryptography, and blockchain to mobile AI assistants and automated audio conversation annotation. The University of California, San Francisco CKM team created an advanced early web browser that supported plugins, streaming media, and cloud computing, which could provide seamless access to potentially-unlimited remote high-performance computational capabilities. They demonstrated it at Xerox PARC, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB meeting. The claim that the plug-in/applet functionality was an innovation, advanced to justify their patent application, has been contested by Pei-Yuan Wei, who developed the earlier Viola browser, which added scripted-app capabilities in 1992, a claim supported by inventor of the WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other Web pioneers. Given only a short time to prepare, Wei was only able to demonstrate Viola's equivalent capabilities for local rather than remote files at the 2003 Eolas v. Microsoft trial, and thus fell short of proving prior art to the trial court's satisfaction. The case with Microsoft over patent 5,838,906 was settled in 2007 for a confidential amount of money after an initial $565 million judgment was stayed on appeal, but the University of California disclosed its piece of the final settlement as $30.4 million. In 2009 Eolas sued numerous other companies over patent number 7,599,985 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments, Oracle and JPMorgan Chase, had signed licensing deals with Eolas, while the company continued to seek licenses from others. In February 2012, an eight-person jury in the Eastern District of Texas invalidated some of the claims in the ’906 and ’985 patents, and in July 2012, Judge Leonard Davis ruled against Eolas.