Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

He has been called a "born creative thinker" and "a man of extraordinarily high principle". Others consider his inventions frivolous and derivative. Not that Frederick Bailier Richardson III - aka Ric Richardson - particularly cares.

As of last week, the 47-year-old inventor, surfer and one-time dirt-biker stands to reap the lion's share of a $US388 million ($537 million) damages award from Microsoft, after a US jury found the software giant had stolen his technology.

Mr Richardson, who grew up in Lane Cove and never studied beyond year 12 at Hunters Hills High, is the founder of Uniloc, which sued Microsoft in 2003 for violating its patent relating to anti-piracy technology. "I would love to tell you how much money I'll get," he told the Herald, "but frankly I don't know. I don't get into the operational side of the business. To me, the money is important only in so far as it allows me to further my ideas."

Despite his low profile, Mr Richardson, who divides his time between Sydney and Huntington Beach, California, is the inventor of dozens of patents. Recent projects include adapting the carbon scrubbing technology found in submarines to car exhaust pipes and collaborating with friend and Nobel nominee Peter Rentzepis, from the University of California, on the use of lasers to achieve atomic level computing.

"Ric is scarily intelligent, and he works crazy hours," Brad Davis, chief executive of Uniloc USA, said. "He's the kind of guy who can become an expert on something in about eight seconds."

The son of a freelance cameraman, Mr Richardson began inventing early,

experimenting in the mid 1970s with bicycle design. "I would disappear into Dad's garage, putting different forks on the front of Dragsters and cutting off bicycle seats and putting on motorcycle handlebars and trying only a back brake."

He had, without knowing, invented the BMX. "Then one day I opened American Dirt Bike magazine and saw a BMX and realised that I'd been beaten to it. I ask them if I could at least be BMX's Australian distributor, but a container of bikes cost $8000, and Mum and Dad weren't willing to give me that."

In his early teens, he alternated between teaching guitar and helping his father on shoots. "Dad was a stringer cameraman for the ABC. Whenever stories broke outside the normal hours, they would call us. As soon as I was strong enough, Dad had me going out at 3am with him, lugging around the old reel-to-reel tape recorders."