News archive

New Records
In keeping with our 2019 content roadmap, many new full text records are now available, along with translations to English using Google Translate. Since the beginning of the year 1.4 million documents covering 14 new countries and patent authorities have been added to our global patent database, bringing the total to 38 entities. Three more will be added before the end of the year,…

At a sold-out event at MIT in the middle of summer, corporate, academic, and consulting leaders came together to discuss the future of information management. The Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium drew attendees from as far away as South Korea and Austria seeking new strategies for managing opportunities brought about by technologies such as AI and managing critical risks such as securing personal…

We posted a blog in January highlighting some of the things you can do with our Top 1000 Interactive Ranking Tool. In addition to discovering trends and finding competitors, the tool shows the most current counts of patent grants for the year-to-date.
 
Let’s highlight one particular company that has seen a lot of growth over the past few years, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). In…

Linking patent data to financial and other data sources provides analysts with unique metrics for decision making. On a tactical level, it’s possible to figure out how effective a company’s R&D spend is by linking it to patent grants. When linked to SIC codes, this can be done at an industry level to uncover broader patterns. On a strategic level, tracking patent activity sheds light on technology and geography…

This is a guest blog by Nadav Kenneth (CEO) and Dr. Ronen Golan (CTO) of Inventive-IP, which is based in Israel. Inventive-IP provides patent-related services including prior art search, portfolio evaluation and modeling, competitive landscapes and litigation support. Inventive-IP’s services are supported by their proprietary search and analysis software. 

In this blog, we will use the…

 The Fastest Growing Technologies

Analyzing patent information is a good way to determine which technologies are experiencing rapid growth. We compared US patent application growth by CPC (cooperative patent classification) codes to find the largest increases from 2017 to 2018. The list includes some widely-covered technologies such as machine learning, and also some surprises like warehouse technology.…

When it comes to international patent filings, China has been turning up the heat. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) more than half of all PCT applications, which allow simultaneous filing in many countries, were filed by Asian companies in 2018. China leads the pack, and especially of note are their large numbers of AI and quantum computing patents. They are expected to pass the US in PCT patent applications within the next two years.¹…

In today’s world, many people are accustomed to using apps that can translate signs in other languages by simply aiming their camera. While this is a great tool for vacationers, a vastly more sophisticated tool is needed for legal documents such as patents. The IFI global patent database contains records in 48 languages, and we're committed to making the information stored in them as accessible as…

A subset of IFI patent data is now available for research purposes in conjunction with the World Patent Information (WPI) journal. The collection supports the mission of WPI, which is to publish insights into intellectual property information retrieval along with patent analytics methods.
 
This free collection is designed to foster good scientific practice, such as transparency and repeatability of experiments. It will not be updated with new data to ensure consistency of…

Larry Cady, Senior Analyst, IFI CLAIMS Patent Services
Capitola resident Larry Cady is not a patent attorney but does have over 20 years experience working with an analyzing patent data and trends. 

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IFI's Content Roadmap for 2019 reinforces the company’s ongoing commitment to the quality, reliability, and completeness of the CLAIMS Direct patent repository.
 
Chinese Data Improvements
 
We’ve just started to use a new Chinese data source that is improving quality and timeliness. We are using this new source for all new publications and updates, and during Q1 and Q2 we will complete a…

If you’re looking for an easy way to do simple patent research, our new Top 1000 Interactive tool is the perfect place to start. Based on the top 1000 companies who received US patent grants in 2018, you can search, sort, filter, and generate charts to make your own discoveries. Draw upon the examples below as a starting point.
 
Search for a Company
 
Using Siemens as an example, we typed the…

This analysis of blockchain patent applications and grants from IALE Tecnología, based on IFI data, offers an in-depth examination of this new technology. 
 

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It can be a challenge to stay on top of the patent assets of large companies with many subsidiaries. It’s easy to overlook the true impact of a particular organization if you’re unaware of its holdings and what the combined picture looks like.
 
Janice Stevenson, EVP of Client Relations, will highlight new ways to discover the innovative technologies being introduced by established organizations.
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For developers using patent data to create an application, or for analysts using patent data to generate insights, it is important to Mind the Gap. The gap I am talking about is the gap between your application and your patent data source. 

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According to IBM, poor data quality costs the US economy $3.1 trillion a year. This figure includes lost opportunity costs and bad decisions based on faulty data. In IP (intellectual property), the direct costs of bad information can include multimillion dollar lawsuits with sky-high litigation fees, and the indirect costs of damaged reputations and lowered company valuation.

While there are…

Alternative data is defined in the context of investing as nontraditional data sets that support investment decisions. With the growth and availability of big data, going outside the normal realms of financial information such as quarterly earnings reports or merger and acquisition news is a trend that’s catching fire in the investment management (IM) community.

The lure of achieving alpha, returns that outperform a market index or benchmark, is driving interest in new types of alternative data.
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Product release notes

Early April 2018: Translations for EP and WO Records
As we announced in March, we have added English translations to EP and WO records that were filed in languages other than English.

For EP records these are the translated fields that we added:

• Abstracts: 332,878
• Descriptions: 1,389,918
• Claims: 859,589

• Abstracts: 4,262
• Descriptions : 1,070,417

Quantum computing is going to change the world, and it’s no longer the stuff of science fiction. A series of patent landscape reports from Patinformatics, the firm of industry expert Tony Trippe, shows a recent explosion of patent applications and grants which are leading to some of the first real-world quantum computers. The number of filings has increased by more than 380% since 2014.

If you’re interested in knowing what the future direction of technology is, monitoring patent trends can tell you a lot. While not every patented invention makes its way into a product, if a lot of new patent applications focus on a particular area, you can be reasonably sure this development will show up in a real-world application.
 
The ten millionth patent issued by The United States Patent and Trademark Office (UPSTO) on June 19, 2018 is a good example.
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The ten millionth US Patent will be granted on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (Update: the patent was granted to Raythoen for a laser detection and ranging system.) Is this just another number, or a true milestone for intellectual property? It depends who you ask. 

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As many new uses for patent data come to light, we’re getting requests for basic education on patent content. We’re happy to provide guidance to customers with this need, and we’ve listed educational content from organizations we trust below.

United States Patent System

Patent Searching Fundamentals Course
Patent Information Users Group (PIUG)
US focus with some international content
This 2-day…

As part of our annual Top 50 list of patent assignees, we also take a look at industry trends. Our research uncovered that in 2017, China was awarded 28% more US patents than in 2016. Their total of 11,240 granted patents is ten times the number of patents they were granted in 2007. That pushed the nation into the top five recipients by country for the first time, behind the US, Japan, Korea, and Germany. While patent grants to China still make up only 3.5% of the more than 320,000 awards, it’s likely this share will continue to increase.…

Our senior analyst Larry Cady will show attendees of the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) Biotechnology conference how to combine data sources using Google’s BigQuery and Tableau. Using a CRISPR based example, he will join free public patent data, fee based enriched patent data, chemical annotations from SureChEMBL, and simulated private company data into one report.

 

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Bringing new drugs to market is a complex and expensive process. According to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the average cost of a new drug is $2.6 billion, including failures and time spent.

Using patent data is a cost effective, smart way to mitigate financial risks. Adding patent information to big data analysis can help avoid costly intellectual property issues and provide scientists with access to research that’s never published in journals or presented at conferences.…

IFI Data Enrichments on Google BigQuery provide analysts with additional insight into PTAB cases, and patent legal status in general.