Apple is generating quite a buzz with invites for their October 23 event, sent out this week.  But don’t let that distract you from other developments coming from the Apple camp.  They’re still busy building an empire, complete with new technology and patents.

According to sources, the iPhone maker acquired Particle, a San Francisco-based creative consulting company that specializes in Web applications and marketing projects using HTML5.  Particle was founded in 2008 with pop star Justin Timberlake as one of its investors, and funded Particle’s social video service Robo.to.

The acquisition is said to be an effort to fortify their HTML endeavors as they emphasize HTML5 on their product pages such as iAd and iCloud.com  Particle’s founder and CTO,  Aubry Anderson, consulted fot Apple between 2006 and 2008, so the acquisition appears to be a talent buy.

“Particle brings positive and energetic relationships with Google and the Chrome team specifically, as well as great Apple relationships and execution experience around iAds, iTunes Extras, and Apple.com,” Particle says of its history with Apple.  “We have participated in and piloted much of the technology which will display the next generation of advertising and deliver media content for the next decade.”

Lining the Coffer with Patents

The US Patent and Trademark Office published numerous patents that have been granted to Apple.  One is a patent that encompases network device discovery and the ease of sharing information via two mobile devices, quite different from the Near Field Communication technology currently making waves in the mobile market.  Though it seems Apple is looking at NFC alternatives, they’re in fact still busying themselves with NFC-related research.

Another granted patent pertains to location-based services for the iPhone, which detects a picture-taking event on a device, determines a current geographic location of the device, receives location-based information based on the determined current geographic location corresponding to one or more relevant businesses in a vicinity of the determined current geographic location,  including information corresponding to one or more businesses ancillary to the picture taking event.

Then there’s the granted patent for camera technologies which pertains to a relatively low cost technique for improving the sharpness or quality of digital images captured by a handheld portable media device.

Other granted patents include Language input interface on a device (The Virtual Keyboard Patent), Multiple-use acoustic port, System and method performing quadrature amplitude modulation by combining co-sets and strongly coded co-set identifiers, Devices and systems for outputting contextual information about an event for which an alarm is set on an electronic device, Integrated circuit with separate supply voltage for memory that is different from logic circuit supply voltage, Methods and apparatus for color uniformity, Multi-context graphics processing, and Systems and methods for identifying unauthorized users of an electronic device.

If you have no idea what these patents are for, let’s just say the US Patent and Trademark Office just granted Apple an arsenal of weapons to sue their competitors.  And maybe we’ll see a related feature or two come out with the next iDevice.