One Year Special: Our Best Calls of 2026
In this issue
🎂 The occasion: One year and 52 issues of Hot Off The Patent Press.
🏆 The top 5: Our best moments predicting the future using patents.
📈 Honorable Mentions: What else moved: Frozen kidneys, homebody AI, grocery pricing laws and a space start-up that doubled in five months.
One year ago, we sent our first issue. It was about a car that could read your mood before you said a word.
Every week since, we've picked one patent, explained how it works and made a guess about where it goes next. Patents are early signals. Companies file them long before they ship anything, so if you read them closely, you can sometimes see the future coming.
To celebrate one year, we went back through all our articles, checked each one against what actually happened, and distilled the calls we're proudest of.
To everyone who has opened, forwarded, replied to and argued with this newsletter for a year, THANK YOU!! We stand by it, patents are fun, and we hope you are convinced too.
Here's to year two.
Sharjil & Charlotte
| 1 | The patent cliff fell right on time |
We said the price would crash. It crashed on day one.
From: How 2026's Expiring Patents Will Change Your Life · Jan 4, 2026
We opened the year by following the patent clock on semaglutide, the molecule behind Ozempic and Wegovy. Our call was that as the core patent (US 8,536,122) expired in big markets outside the US, cheap copies would pour in and prices would fall hard. We also said the US would have to wait.
India's patent expired on March 20. The next day, more than a dozen drugmakers, including Sun Pharma, Dr Reddy's, Zydus and Natco, launched their own versions (ThePrint). Natco opened at ₹1,290 a month, about US$14 (Bloomberg Law). Branded Ozempic had cost roughly ₹8,800 to ₹11,000 (South First). By March 31, Novo Nordisk had cut its own prices by up to 48% (Business Today).
Then Canada moved. On April 28, it became the first G7 country to approve a generic semaglutide (Health Canada). Apotex said its version would cost about a third of brand-name Ozempic (BNN Bloomberg), and by June, Canada had approved its first generic Wegovy for weight loss too (Health Canada). And the US? Still waiting, just as we said.
| 2 | Fitbit went from patent to your wrist in eight months |
A patent in February. A Nature paper in March. A feature on your watch by September.
From: Your Fitbit Knows Something Your Doctor Doesn't... Yet · Feb 8, 2026
We covered Google's patent (WO2025231209A1) for predicting insulin resistance, an early warning sign for type 2 diabetes, from your heart rate, sleep and steps, with no needle required. Our take was that Google had what Theranos never did, which is millions of wrists already producing the data, and a blood-test study with Quest Diagnostics to train on. We also flagged the FDA's wellness lane as Google's way to market.
Five weeks later, Google's research team published the science in Nature (HospiMedica). In August, at Made by Google, it announced Insulin Resistance Trends and billed it as a first for Pixel and Fitbit wearables (Cult of Mac). The model behind it was trained on more than a trillion minutes of data from 5 million opted-in users (MobiHealthNews).
On September 24, it started rolling out free to Pixel Watch 3, 4 and 5 owners (PhoneArena). It's pitched as a wellness trend, rather than a diagnosis, which is exactly the lane we pointed to. Patent to product in eight months was the fastest run we saw all year.
| 3 | Glasses beat headsets |
The metaverse died. The glasses didn't.
From: The Metaverse Died. Long Live XR. · Apr 26, 2026
In April, we added up roughly US$77 billion of losses at Meta's Reality Labs and argued the patents told a different story. Engineers had apparently stopped building virtual worlds and started solving smaller problems, like fitting optics into normal-looking glasses. Headsets asked too much of people, and glasses are far easier to adopt in everyday life.
Six months later, Meta's own numbers make the case. Reality Labs revenue fell 6% in the third quarter because fewer people bought Quest headsets, while AI glasses kept growing strongly (Road to VR). Meta also said it will only release new VR headsets when it has a major breakthrough to show. Over the same quarter, Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica reported smart glasses sales up 20% (ChannelNews).
The global picture matches. IDC found extended reality glasses shipments up 79.8% year on year in the second quarter, while mixed reality headsets fell 22.3% (IDC).
| 4 | Universal's safer bet keeps looking smarter |
Olaf fell over. Then he fell over again.
From: Olaf Fell Over. Universal Has A Safer Bet. · Apr 12, 2026
On March 30, Disney's free-roaming Olaf robot froze, toppled backwards and lost his carrot nose in front of guests at Disneyland Paris, a day after his debut (KTLA). Two weeks later, we wrote about Universal's patent application (US 2026/0084074 A1) for a figure that only looks like it walks, with a hidden cart doing the real work. Our call was that in a theme park, an illusion that never falls beats a robot that sometimes does and destroys the magic for the little children.
In October, Olaf fell again. A guest's video showed him tipping onto the pavement in World of Frozen, nose flying, while performers rushed to pick him up (WDW News Today). Disney is still planning to bring the robot to more parks (Inside the Magic), and fans love the memes. But a fall in front of a crowd is still a fall.
Meanwhile, Universal's Epic Universe nine-foot 800-pound Frankenstein Monster walks across the lab in the Monsters Unchained pre-show and is yet to fall over.
The lesson we took in April still stands. The smartest animatronics cheat just enough to stay on their feet.
| 5 | Meta passed on the ghost, then bought the bots |
Two days after our issue, Meta bought a social network run by AI agents.
From: Meta's Creepiest Patent Yet · Mar 8, 2026
In March we covered US 12,513,102 B2, Meta's patent for training an AI on your posts, comments and likes, so a bot can keep acting like you online, even after you die. Our call had two halves. The creepy "digital ghost" might never ship. But the idea underneath it, AI that acts on your behalf in social spaces, was where Meta was really heading, and the patent was a way of fencing off that ground early.
Two days later, on March 10, Meta confirmed it had bought Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network where AI agents post, comment and talk to each other (Reuters via The Star). Agents on Moltbook are tied to the real people who own them (The Decoder via Pulse). Its founders, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, joined Meta Superintelligence Labs on March 16 (Business Today). Meta said the team would "open up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses" (Gigazine).
And the ghost? Meta told reporters it had no plans to take the deceased-user idea forward (Fortune), and eight months on, there's still no ghost in your feed. Both halves of the call landed. The version that imitates the dead stayed on paper. The version where bots act for the living got a team, a platform and a seat inside Meta's top AI lab.
Here are four more developments from the year that we couldn't leave out.
From: Is This Start-Up Freezing People? · Aug 23, 2026
In August we asked whether Until Labs' frozen rat kidney results could scale up. Two months later, a University of Minnesota team showed pig kidneys cooled to −150°C, some banked for over a year, could be rewarmed, transplanted into pigs and make urine (MIT Technology Review). Pig kidneys are about 100 times heavier than rat kidneys and close to human size. It's the scale-up the whole field was waiting for.
From: Keep Your Assistant At Home · Jan 18, 2026
We unpacked four patents for an AI that handles easy jobs on your own device and only climbs to the cloud when it must. In March, Akamai, one of those four filers, launched an AI network spread across 4,400 edge locations (IT Brief). In June, Apple rebuilt Siri on the same ladder. Simple requests stay on your phone, harder ones go to its Private Cloud Compute (DataNorth).
From: No, Walmart Didn't Patent Shifting Shelf Prices · Mar 29, 2026
We read Walmart's digital shelf label patents and found nothing about pricing you based on your personal data. But we did think that changing prices like that would be super concerning from a regulatory standpoint. A month later, Maryland signed the first US ban on surveillance pricing in grocery stores, in force from October 1 (Skadden). In July, New Jersey banned it too, and froze new electronic shelf labels for a year from February 2027 (Lowenstein Sandler). It was one of the year's clearest themes: regulators moved faster than patents did.
From: Ground control to Major Cloud · Aug 16, 2026
Our Intel issue noted Starcloud's US$1.1 billion valuation and asked who would pay for the control room in space. Five days later, Starcloud raised US$250 million at a US$2.3 billion valuation, more than double its price in March (Via Satellite). Investors are paying for orbital data centres well before the hardware has proven itself.
Thank you everyone for subscribing and reading over the past year! We have thoroughly enjoyed sharing these insights with you, and hope that you have fun glimpsing into the future.
Reflecting on the past year has only strengthened our thesis that patents are an underrated signal for staying on top of commercial movement. Thank you for sharing with those who genuinely love to stay on top of the novel tech game.
Which call do you think we nailed? Which one should we have seen coming? Hit reply, we read every response.
Year two starts next week.
