Good things take time: U.S. Patent 11,080,947, granted
Six years after filing, Tap & Arrange — the single-button multi-timing method behind Herotime — is a granted United States patent. Here is what it covers, in plain language.
On December 19, 2021 — six years almost to the day after we filed, two days before Christmas 2015 — the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted patent 11,080,947 B2 for the method at the heart of Herotime.
The application was drafted and prosecuted with the patent attorneys Maikowski & Ninnemann in Berlin, and it survived examination with its core claims intact. That matters: what is protected is not a screen layout or a button color, but the method itself — timing many entities with a single primary actuator, where the mode of the tap decides the assignment.
A method for timing many athletes with one button — where the way you tap decides who gets the time. The claim set, in one sentence
What the patent covers, in plain language
Manual timing breaks down the moment one person has to time several others. The patent solves it with three start gestures and one run-phase rule:
- Rapid tap — two or more quick taps record one shared group start, one athlete per tap. The gun for a heat.
- Short tap — starts the next single athlete in the starting order. Stagger a lane at a time.
- Long press — starts every athlete still waiting, in one gesture.
- Circular assignment — in the run phase, every tap records the next split and assigns it automatically to the least-recently-timed athlete. You never aim at a per-athlete button; you just tap when someone crosses the line.
- Drag to reassign — when one athlete overtakes another, you fix it by dragging one time record onto another. The circular order updates itself.
- The volume button — claim 23 explicitly covers the phone's physical volume button as the actuator. Timing by feel, eyes on the athletes, is part of the invention.
What this means for Herotime
Herotime remains the only multi stopwatch built on this method — the reason a single coach can start a whole squad and catch every split without looking down. The patent is also a commitment: this is engineered, examined technology, not a clock app with extra buttons.
If you are building timing software and find yourself converging on tap-mode disambiguation or circular split assignment — talk to us before replicating the method.