Ferren has been named inventor on over 500 current and pending US patents. His 2005 patent with Hillis for multi-touch gestures led to the invalidation of Apple's "pinch-to-zoom" patent, which Apple cited in its billion-dollar lawsuit against Samsung. His 2009 US patent #8381985 (assigned to Intel Corporation) teaches the use of two cameras and electronic image processing to emulate the function of zoom lenses within devices such as smart phones, where traditional zoom lenses cannot fit. Another of his patents was for contextual database technology associated with Metaweb, a company acquired by Google which became part of the Google Knowledge Graph.