The Dolcera Blog

The Tech world is buzzing in 2011. Apple, Android, and Patents seems to the most recurring themes conversations converge too. Apple is a great success story, and literally becoming the apple of everyone’s eye by becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world, consistently innovating and generating higher and higher revenues. They recently posted one of their best quarters ever.

Many see Apple’s rise as a challenger to the Open Innovation theories, and positing that in technology a closed system offers you much more strength and sustainable innovation coming up with products which have completely re-shaped markets.

Of course Apple had a visionary in the form of Steve Jobs, but technologies don’t just develop “magically” and systems don’t just fall into “amazing” perfect tandem on their own. So, we at Dolcera decided to look into what exactly are the sources of Apple’s innovation.

Apple being a very secretive company, it was hard to find a lot of inside information. But one of the best sources of “innovation” data is the legal document which one gets for innovating - a patents. We decided to look at the patents of Apple and get an idea of the true sources of Apple’s innovation.

In our opinion, the key sources of Apple’s innovation are :
1. Expenditure on research,
2. Acquisitions, and
3. Patent Deals
Apple definitely has a strong in-house research. But every time Steve Jobs wished to make one of his “visions” a reality, it often required Apple to go out and spot “sources” which can be acquired, or taken the technology from. Some prime examples are acquisition of Fingerworks which developed the Multi-Touch for iPhone, and technology licensing from LiquidMetal which gave Apple products their great aesthetics among many others.

We have tried to provide a basic story flow in the visual below.

We are also conducting web seminars to detail on the findings of our research, and how you too can do the same. For details contact us at - info@dolcera.com

 Author: Pramath Malik

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Samsung had been a long term supplier for Apple Inc for the products -LCD screens, flash memory & processors for mobile devices. In January 2011, Apple Inc placed an order on Samsung for mobile processors, forcing Samsung to quadruple their capacity from 5,000 sheets of chips a month to20, 000 sheets of chips a month. In Feb 2011, Apple Inc and Samsung signed a deal worth $7.8B for supplying various components. In Apr 2011, Apple Inc filed a law suit against Samsung, alleging that Samsung copied the design of its mobile devices and developed Galaxy series of mobiles. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) may hamper the chances of Intel introducing world’s first 3D chips into the market, bringing the chip to the market towards the end of 2011 before Intel. Industry sources suggest that Apple Inc is going to place orders on TSMC for A6 processors towards mid 2012 shunning Samsung which is the present supplier of A4 & A5 processors for mobile devices.

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SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dolcera Corporation, a leading information services and technology firm that helps companies quickly and effectively navigate through their entire innovation cycle to achieve successful business outcomes, today announced its new Patent Dashboard, available for the first time as a standalone platform.

Dolcera’s flagship software as a service (SaaS) Patent Dashboard is a proprietary Web 2.0-based collaborative tool that enables companies to visualize, search, and map the relevant competitive patent landscape, determine patent value, and ultimately accelerate the time to commercialize their patents. The new Patent Dashboard v1.1 provides greater flexibility and control as well as enhanced search and reporting capabilities.

Mapping the Patent Landscape

Today, patents are under greater scrutiny, take longer to be approved, and can cost several hundred thousands of dollars from application until grant stage. At the same time, patents represent new sources of revenue through commercialization or acquisition, and are also viewed as points of differentiation and competitive advantage.

The Patent Dashboard’s ease of use and flexibility, along with its collaboration capabilities, make it easy and practical for experts and non-experts to use. It may also be used alone or with other patent tools, such as those for search, intellectual asset management, or research.

Among the new features of the Dolcera Patent Dashboard Tool v1.1 are:

• Custom Taxonomies and Patent Additions by users on the fly, based on their topics of interest;
• Editable Patent Categories that can be easily moved within the Dashboard;
• Enhanced Researching and Reporting, with patent searches (even complex Boolean ones) and information filters; and
• Enhanced Collaboration via relevance rankings, referral tagging, track changes, and data security for selective user access.

The Dolcera Patent Dashboard is sold directly; a single full and functional user license starts from $49 per user per month.

About Dolcera

Dolcera is a leading information services and technology firm that helps companies quickly and effectively navigate through their entire innovation cycle to achieve successful business outcomes. The company’s mission is to deliver high-quality Intellectual Property (IP), technology, and market research services that can be deployed easily and quickly within a company or department. Dolcera’s products and services are used by Fortune 500 and Global 1000 organizations across a wide array of industries including alternative energy, biotechnology, chemicals, oil and gas, consumer goods, food and beverages, manufacturing, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, software and telecommunications. The company is privately held and based in San Mateo, Calif. and Hyderabad, India. For a demo of the Patent Dashboard, please see: YouTube Link.

For more information, please visit: www.dolcera.com

Dolcera and Dolcera Patent Dashboard are trademarks of Dolcera Corporation. All other products and services mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

Contacts

Creekside Communications
JoAnn Johnston, 650-322-6245
joann@creekside-communications.com
or
Dolcera Corporation
Manikandan B., 650-269-7952
manikandan.b@dolcera.com

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Ranking makes life easier. Be it top 10 companies, top 10 universities to study technology or to choose amongst top 10 sci-fi movies you want to watch on the weekends; ranking allow us to choose the best amongst the available. Time saver, decision influencer and extremely helpful are the ranked material.

At Dolcera, we thought of applying the ranking methodology to patents. We have ranked patents based on a variety of parameters. First factor amongst all remains the client focus, second, sufficiency of disclosed information in patents and third credibility of a patent to perform the same process/art with higher efficiency than any other patent with similar focus.

Let us consider an example, the first table in the image below show patents with similar focus of decreasing tumor volume using RNA interference (RNAi). The patent one has disclosed maximum information in this area and in addition to the desired data, it has also published a lot more supporting information derived from other experiments. Further, as the rank goes down the percentage decrease in tumor volume decreases. Some may argue that patent 2 has disclosed more decrease in tumor volume than patent 1 but then patent 1 has disclosed more supporting data, taking its overall weighted score higher. Of course, if the client is still interested only in comparing tumor volume, patent at rank 2 will come at rank 1. Hence the ranking is customized to suit the client requirements.

The ranking of patents is not that simple as it may sound. The analysis team has to encounter challenges and figure out the ways to overcome them. Graphs, charts, instrumental outputs etc. will not give you data in percentages which can be just copy-pasted to compare. They have to be calculated first using mathematical tools which may vary from calculating areas under the graphs or applying differentiation & integration on instrumental outputs, to allow the reader to compare results before making the final decision. It’s considered an absolute value add to the decision making process by the clients who have sought such a service from us.

Not all experimental data will be quantitative. For people familiar with biotechnology would know that there are experiments (such as gel electrophoresis, staining etc.) that give qualitative or quasi-quantitative results. I am sure, the same will hold true with other technology fields too. Second part of the figure above summarizes few patents which can not be ranked as there is no data yield from such experiments and hence comparison is not possible. But then why miss them? We provide a Dolcera summary table which will give reader an idea as these experiments were atleast conducted and disclosed in patents. This comparison will thus strengthen the decision to be taken from ranking matrices discussed above.

This systemic approach of collecting, sorting, analyzing, and finally ranking the data has the following advantages:

1. Saves time!
2. Easy comparative analysis.
3. Helps in competitive watch
4. Decision on in-and-out licensing can be made.
5. Strong baseline for future scientific investigations.

Who will be benefited?

Scientific community: Extensive experimental data, comparison matrix of data from different patents with same focus is a feast to researchers and scientists as it helps them to choose best technologies.

Patent attorneys: Allows competitor watch, supports their decision on in and out licensing.

Venture capitalists / investors: Patent ranking based on disclosed information helps investors to decide patents to further invest upon.

Which technology fields are covered?

Patents in all the technological fields can be ranked. You just need to tell us the focus area and we will rank the patents for you. The ranking and weighing scores can be customized to suit user’s requirements.

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