(Photo: Comicbook.com)

William Shatner, the Priceline spokesperson best known for his timeless role as the sexy/fearless/fearlessly sexy Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek, recently joined Reddit. And, as happens with many Reddit newbies, he has been immediately sucked in, perhaps to the point of obsession. In fact, dear Mr. Shatner appears to be spending a not insignificant amount of his precious time arguing with people on Reddit. Stars: they're just like us!

Mr. Shatner made the tech press a couple weeks back with his impassioned discussion of the darker side of Reddit, including the casual racism and misogyny that permeates subreddits large and small. "Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred," he wrote shortly after joining.

A review of his username page reveals that Mr. Shatner hasn't quit there. He's been spending an awful lot of time in r/StarTrek, r/SciFi and r/Entertainment arguing with fellow Redditors.

When, for example, Mr. Shatner posted a video to several subreddits that showed his Priceline costar Kaley Cuoco in a series of outtakes, many Redditors took issue with his flagrant self-promotion, saying the video was sponsored by Priceline. "Oh OK. Where's the logo? It's a ridiculous assertion," he shot back. "So going on your logic then the ISS video I posted on my phone call to the ISS was sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency? Or maybe Priceline is now offering rooms on the ISS so that was just a 30 minute infomercial?"

The entire comment thread has since been deleted, but evidence of Mr. Shatner's love of arguing with people on the web still lives on in his Reddit user profile:

I keep oscillating back and forth wondering if people do this for karma, cruelty or ignorance. Thank you for the article. I did read it but if you go look I'm not here to do an AMA. I answered the Duck/Horse question that is the only question that seems to count....

So this is what you (colloquially not specifically) are afraid of? An actor not wanting to answer your horse/duck questions and wanting to promote their movie? ;-)

For the record, Mr. Shatner said he wouldn't fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses.

This guy used to be a fucking STARFLEET Captain! [Photo: WJYY)

The release reads:

Priceline.com Incorporated (PCLN) announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement for the Priceline Group to acquire KAYAK in a stock and cash transaction.  Under the terms of the agreement, the transaction values KAYAK at $1.8 billion ($1.65 billion net of cash acquired) or $40 per share of KAYAK (subject to the collar described below), with the Group paying approximately $500 million of the consideration in cash and $1.3 billion in equity and assumed stock options.

The Boards of Directors of the Priceline Group and KAYAK have unanimously approved the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including a vote of KAYAK’s shareholders and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close by late 1^st quarter 2013.  KAYAK’s current management team will continue to manage KAYAK’s operations independently as part of the Priceline Group of companies.  The Group expects that the impact of the KAYAK acquisition on Non-GAAP EPS in 2013 will be de minimis.

With both companies trading publicly, the announcement came minutes after the markets closed. Priceline's stock closed at $627.87 today after falling 1.06 percent; Kayak fell 1.59 percent to $31.04.

The travel industry as a whole has seen 37 percent growth this year, though much of that occurred in early 2012. In October, Priceline led the charge on a "travel group rebound," surpassing earnings forecasts.

Despite existing within the same industry, the two companies are strange bedfellows when it comes to their business models. Kayak aggregates travel prices from sites across the web to help users find the cheapest airfare and hotel rooms. Priceline, however, is built on an auction strategy, where users offer a bid for flights, hotels or car rentals and are immediately booked for that service if the business accepts their offer. The press release says Kayak will continue to operate independently of Priceline, but wouldn't that mean Kayak could be driving customers to travel sites that are essentially Priceline competitors?

Meanwhile, some New York techies are already suggesting other travel site alternatives.

Mr. Walker. (Photo: Inside the Internet Garage)

In Connecticut in 1997, Jay Walker, inventor, created the idea for a "demand collection system," which is how he describes the mechanism behind Priceline.com. Priceline, of course, lets customers name their own price and other conditions, input their credit cards and agree to rent a hotel, flight, car or whatever, typically sight unseen.

At the time, the New York Times called Priceline a "reverse auction," a term that has stuck around long enough to work its way into the consciousness of moderator and adjunct professor Aaron Cohen, who made the mistake of employing it during an interview on Tuesday night at NYU for a series called Inside the Internet Garage produced by NYU Steinhardt.

Priceline is not a reverse auction, emphasized Mr. Walker—a slight, grey-haired man with dark eyebrows and a sense of righteousness—before an audience of students. "Saul Hansell, who was the journalist for the New York Times, was lazy and stupid," he declared, "and I told him so numerous times."

The quibble was the beginning of an at-times contentious look back at the history of Priceline, now one of the most valuable Internet companies based in New York with a market cap of $37.21 billion, and whether Mr. Walker's numerous lawsuits over patent infringement constitute a tax on innovation.

Priceline, which went public in 1999, first spiked spectacularly and then dove spectacularly, at one time considered just another dot-com flop. Mr. Walker exited the company in 2000. Since then, he's been tinkering at Walker Digital, his privately-held "innovation and development" lab founded in 1994 and based in Stamford, which has filed a lot of patents. Walker Digital, which says it has spent $100 million on research and development, holds between 800 and 1,000 patents, Mr. Walker estimated.

Betabeat found 483 patents assigned to Walker Digital in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's online database. Those patents cover a sweeping range of business models, from a method to remind consumers to take their medicine to a system for instant online lotteries. Many of the ideas were never built into companies.

Mr. Walker himself is named on 633 patents, which Wikipedia says makes him one of the world's most prolific inventors. "We only work at Walker Digital on inventions that we can patent," a younger Mr. Walker told Charlie Rose in 1999. "If you look on the Internet today, there are no patented business methods other than ours to speak of... what makes our business different is literally over 20 patents."

Unfortunately for Mr. Walker, Walker Digital's patents aren't getting the respect he'd hoped for. The lab brought a few cases related to Priceline in 1999, 2000 and 2001, then laid low for years. During this period, Mr. Walker said he approached companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Zynga in order to strike licensing deals for activity he said infringed on Walker Digital's patents. The companies blew him off, he said. In order to be taken seriously, he had to take them to court. "They said, 'if you don't sue us, you're not serious,'" he recalled.

In October 2009, Walker Digital sued Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, Inc. over infringements that included "the function in Microsoft Word that allows a user to look up information about a user-selected term or terms located in a document being created without having to stop work on the document." In 2011, a judge ruled there was no infringement.

In November 2010, Walker Digital sued Facebook over the concept of "friending," or a "method and system for establishing and maintaining user-controlled anonymous communications."

In April 2011, Walker Digital filed 15 lawsuits against more than 100 companies.

Walker Digital has brought about 80 lawsuits for patent infringement, according to the federal courts database PACER. The vast majority of the cases are outstanding, but seven have been dismissed with prejudice—meaning the judge forbade Walker Digital from attempting to bring the suit again—including a case against Facebook, a case against the game maker Activision, and a case against Mastercard. It's unclear whether Walker Digital has won any victories on the settlement side, though eight more cases were dismissed or voluntarily dismissed. Walker Digital did not respond to request for comment.

"The patent is the most public of all documents," Mr. Walker extolled on stage. "Is Jay Walker jealous of Paul Allen?" wrote PaidContent at the time, invoking the Microsoft cofounder who drew ridicule for his 11 lawsuits over "related links" and other blindingly obvious ideas.

"A patent is a teaching, so a patent is a bargain between the inventor and society where the inventor, in return for disclosing his or her complete operating details of how to build the invention, receives a limited period of exclusivity from the government."

Companies should all be checking the public U.S.P.T.O. database, Mr. Walker said, to verify that their own inventions have not been previously patented. The companies that infringe on Walker Digital's patents have a policy of not checking the patent database, he said, because intentionally infringing on a patent can be punishable by three times the damage of unintentionally infringing. "Anybody who wants to can search the patent files and see, 'are we practicing something which somebody else has invented, in which case we probably ought to contact them and get a license, or are we not?'"

The fact that it was possible for someone else to independently think of and execute an idea Mr. Walker once had did not sway Mr. Walker from asserting that the idea still merits protection.

"Last year, you got into some litigation with some gaming companies," Mr. Cohen said, prodding his subject toward the issue. "Walker Digital, I think in the year 2000, got a patent for, and I'm paraphrasing here, the ability to share the results of a game with a central repository for the purpose of comparing those results with others, a kind of leaderboard-like construct. Is that fair?"

"I don't want to characterize any one patent, because that's unfortunately legally admissible in court," Mr. Walker said.

Before the Internet became popular, the businessmen at Walker Digital—Mr. Walker doesn't employ technologists, he has no use for them, he said—sat down and said, "What problems might the Internet solve in the video game space?" It was such thought experiments that led to Walker Digital's portfolio of patents, which take between three and seven years to get granted.

Mr. Walker acknowledges that patent trolls, companies that use their patents only to extort money from legitimate businesses, are a problem. The issue is that in the early days of the Internet, the patent office was stuffed with time-crunched examiners who granted sloppy patents because they didn't understand the Internet and probably didn't speak English very well. "The problem is that very few of them are born in America. Almost all patent examiners are foreign," he said. "That's a real problem when they're examining English patents."

Lumping Walker Digital in with poorly-described patents is unfair, he said. "It's a bit like blaming knife manufacturers for knife murders," he said.

"As inventors, we risk capital and resources and time. When we invent something that turns out to be useful, there's absolutely no reason we shouldn't get an economic rent for that invention," Mr. Walker said. "There's nothing wrong with inventing things and paying the cost... to seek a patent, if you've really invented something."

Groupon has fallen hard since it was the "fastest-growing company in the world" with a valuation of $25 billion, thanks to revelations of accounting discrepancies, revenue numbers, payouts to early investors and a class action lawsuit by employees. Groupon already looks overvalued at its current $10 billion valuation, says Henry Blodget, who estimates a more appropriate valuation would be in the $7.5 billion range in a post titled, "I Wouldn't Touch Groupon's Stock At The IPO Price With A 50-Foot Pole."

Bummerzone for Andrew Mason. But there may be some Groupon backlash backlash. "But just for the sake of symmetry, here’s a simple bull case for Groupon, and for how it could get its really high revenue growth back," writes the highly-regarded Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon this morning.

Now that Groupon has a massive subscriber list, he writes, the company can stop trying to sign up new customers and move on to more creative models of monetization: impulse buys, high-priced goods, travel deals. "Groupon could easily become as valuable as, say, Priceline, which has a market capitalization of $24 billion," Mr. Salmon writes. "If you look at the size of the customer base, and the loyalty of those customers, it’s hard to make a case that a mature Priceline is five times more valuable than a mature Groupon. After all, Priceline is much more constrained in what it sells than Groupon is, and it reaches fewer people."

Interesting that Mr. Salmon compares Groupon to Priceline, which was flying high with a valuation about equal to that of the entire airline industry, opened on the NASDAQ at $16 and closed at $69 despite losing money every quarter except one. But when the market crashed and burned in 2001, Priceline was nearly delisted.

We weren't just scaling back, slowing down, or doing more layoffs. The site was to be shut down that night. The next morning Jay Walker, founder of Priceline.com, gave an emotional talk to a rather shocked staff and tried to convey that we hadn't failed. He stressed that we had a real business with real customers, but had simply run out of money," says Guise, who was one of the first of five Wharton alums to start at WebHouse Club, a separate company and privately-held licensee of Priceline.com. "What was devastating was that I felt like we were just about to turn the corner of success." [employee account in Wharton Magazine]

Luckily the company pivoted, hired a new CEO and executed a 6:1 reverse stock split, recovering in less than two years. More struggles followed--its Better Business Bureau delisting mirrors Groupon's public relations problems with unhappy merchants and overworked employees. It's odd how parallel the two companies' stories are. But now we know what Groupon has to do to break out of its slump: kill that annoying cat and hire William Shatner.

Showing off a patent, probably.

Ever since Jay Walker founded Walker Digital in 1994, the company has made its fortune by spinning ideas like Priceline out into companies. But in a profile today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Mr. Walker's new money-making strategy seems to be filing lawsuits.

Last year, the Stamford, Connecticut-based company put its patent portfolio up for auction. But although a bid was made for $135 million for ideas like "managing identities and connecting with friends online" (circa 1996) it didn't meet Mr. Walker's minimum.

So instead, he resorted to  teaming up with IP Navigation Group, which describes itself as a "patent monetization" firm. As FOSS Patents recently pointed out, others describe the IP Navigation Group and its affiliates a little differently. Law.com, for example, says owner Erich Spangenberg runs one of the  "largest, and most litigious, patent-holding companies" and recommends a "sue first, ask questions later" approach.

That might explain why after tapping IP Navigation, Walker Digital has already made $25 million from filing about 30 lawsuits targeting hundreds of companies, including Amazon, Zynga, Google, and NewsCorp for violating one or more of the companies 400 or so patents, reports the Journal. Some sound laughable. Walker Digital sued Microsoft and Yahoo for auction systems placing ads against Internet search results. It also sued News Corp for an infringement related to social-networking for its MySpace subsidiary.

But Mr. Walker defends himself against the trolling accusation, telling the paper, "Not only are we not a troll, but the people who want to label me are often the same ones that want to use our property and not pay." With the 20-year lifespan for patents, Mr. Walker says they could expire while being exploited by other companies.

The aggressive change in direction for Walker Digital puts a depressing new spin on the white hot patent wars, as Mr. Walker has long been respected as an "ideas man." In fact a 1999 article in Forbes wondered if Mr. Walker wasn't "an Edison for a New Age." As an entrepreneur, detractors argue, he should know the difference between having an idea and the work the companies he's suing have done to see them to fruition. You know the system's broken if you're feeling litigation sympathy pangs for the likes of Google and NewsCorp.