Loudon Owen, left, and Michael Vulpe of i4i, literally counting the $290 million in damages from the Microsoft case. That's the very same calculator used by the jury in the original trial.

Earlier today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Toronto-based technology company i4i in a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft — rejecting the Redmond company’s bid to lower the standard for proving patents invalid at trial. The landmark decision upholds a $290 million verdict against Microsoft.

GeekWire spoke via phone with Loudon Owen, i4i’s chairman, about the ruling, its implications, and what the company plans to do next.

How are you feeling? We are gratified. It’s a tremendously important decision for the industry, and it mushroomed from a case where we were enforcing our property rights into one of the most important decisions in business law by the U.S. Supreme Court in decades.

Where now from here for i4i? First and formost we get out of bed every morning because we’re excited about what we do. The vision and the drive of Michael Vulpe who is the founder and the co-inventor. That’s what we’re going to, we’re going to build our business and change the way the world manages information for the better. At the same time, as people should be aware by now, we’re going to continue to develop intellectual property and we will be vigilant to be sure that people do not infringe upon our rights, and if they do we will enforce.

What products are you going to be offering? We have a suite of products and solutions currently addressing the vertical market in pharmaceuticals, and the life-cycle of data management. It’s custom XML, which capitalizes on XML to ensure that you can structure unstructured data. You can take just mounds of data that otherwise just a jumble of words, and you can effectively create a database out of it and manage it far more effectively, so the data synchronize. Currently we’ve been focusing on the pharmaceutical vertical. We have in the past worked in a whole range of vertical markets. We’ll continue now to build our business and grow it into other verticals.

What are you going to do with the money? We’re going to build our business. It’s funny, we don’t really focus on the money, we’re not really thinking about it. It’s a step in a long journey, and it’s an important next step, but we’ll figure out what to do with our board and our shareholders, and we’ll go forward and build our business.

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