Vindigo, a maker of popular city guide applications for wireless and mobile devices, has secured a patent for a key aspect of its "location-based" software products.

The patent helps the New York-based company protect a popular feature in its Palm OS- and Pocket PC-based software that computes walking and driving directions to the restaurants or locations for which they are searching.

The patent (No. 6,480,785) also helps the company protect a key piece of its software design that makes its location-based guides use less processing memory.

Vindigo makes programs that list restaurants, museums and other locations such as ATMs that can be listed closest to where the user is standing, by listing nearby cross streets.

A popular feature of the guides are the walking and driving times from the users' location, a calculation that squeezes a vast array of data into a small application. But if there is one gripe that fans of Vindigo cite, it is that the applications tend to use up too much of the precious memory on their devices.

Jason Devitt, chief executive and a co-founder of Vindigo, said the patent covers a technology embeds a navigational system into handheld devices that helps users deploy 'location-based' databases. It also covers an approach that helps compress the data used in the application.

"One of the things people like about Vindigo is the walking directions from one place to another. It's actually quite hard to compress all the information-mapping necessary for that, and at the same time, come up with an efficient way of calculating it that will run on a (handheld device) processor that is small and underpowered," he said.

In addition, Devitt said, computing driving directions can be even harder to squeeze on a device in a memory-efficient manner, since they include computations on driving directions, turn restrictions and one-way streets, for example.

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Devitt said Vindigo's patent describes, but is not limited to, an algorithm that organizes streets of a road network into nodes of an undirected graph, using efficient traversal algorithms to optimize routes.

Although the patent could open up future licensing revenue streams for the company, Devitt said the nearly two-year process of securing it was primarily to protect key aspects of its city guide database applications. The company has three or four other patents related to its city guide applications pending as well, he said.

The patent, titled, "System For Determining a Route and Presenting Navigational Instructions Therefor", is "one of the keys of our ability to deliver the Vindigo service," Devitt said.

The company makes city guides and entertainment applications that cover where to eat, shop and play in over 50 cities.