The Dolcera Blog

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H.R.5980 is a bill introduced on July 29, 2010 by US government. The Bill proposes the exclusion of claims and full text specification for the pending applications i.e until the patent application gets granted you cannot view the claims. USPTO will only publish abstracts for the publications or pending applications and no claims will be published. This change may impact the ability to monitor competitors’ pending applications.

See Sec-C in the bill(H.R.5980).
Also read here for more information.

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“Is it a bird, is it a plane…” What is the Dolcera dashboard and how does it fit into the constellation of other patent products? Three types of patent applications have been available to IP professionals over the years:

1. Patent search engines: In this category, we have the Thomson tools (Micropatent, Delphion, Thomson Innovation), Questel, Lexis-Nexis, Google Patents, and the patent office’s own search tools (USPTO’s search engine, eSpaceNet, etc.).
2. Patent analytics tools: In this category, we have the desktop tools (VantagePoint, for example), and the online tools such as Aureka, Innography, and PatentInsight Pro.
3. Intellectual asset management systems: In this category, we have FoundationIP, IPMaster, Anaqua, and many others.

Patent professionals and other patent-aware professionals (inventors, scientists, business development/licensing managers) need tools for the following tasks:

1. Search: Conducting patent searches on patent databases around the world.
2. Categorization: Organize patent data (one’s own patents or competitors’ patents or those of a potential acquisition) into categories and groups that can be used for easy access to patent information.
3. Analysis: Analyzing large quantities of patent information to understand trends and to make business decisions.
4. Sharing/Presentation: Share “raw” patent data and the analysis with large teams of people.
5. Collaboration: Obtaining feedback from other stakeholders in the organization, or from partners and collaborators (outside counsel, for example) on the patent data.
6. Docketing: Tracking one’s own portfolio through the prosecution process and beyond.

The existing products do a good job of search, analysis, and docketing processes. While categorization, sharing/presentation, and collaboration are equally important aspects of the patent world, they are underserved by the tools described above. Enter the Dolcera dashboard. The dashboard focuses on the three tasks: patent categorization, patent sharing/presentation, and collaboration. With the dashboard, these three tasks are a breeze: you can take your patent sets and categories, organize patents into the categories, share the results with an interactive presentation platform, and collaborate with your colleagues easily. The dashboard is the Facebook of patents, and not the Google search engine. Dolcera also provides high quality patent search and analysis services as well, using some of the excellent search tools described above, as well as using some of our internal proprietary technologies.

The year 1996-2000 were fantastic for all things mobile. Almost. The Palm Pilot sold like hot cakes, the Wireless Access Protocol was going to make all of the Web available on the phone and there were all sorts of new browsers being put on the phone. There were operating systems being built for the phones too. Ebooks and ebook readers were beginning to emerge too. And there we were @ iScribe — putting prescription writing on mobile devices too and changing the way doctors worked… forever.

Most of the promises were unfulfilled at the time and we had to wait for 10 years before the mobile devices, browsers and ebook readers became usable. All that is happening now.

All, that is, except for e-prescribing on mobile devices. My beloved iScribe is dead and not coming back. And doctors aren’t using their phones except to select the restaurant they’ll go to for dinner… and to make the occasional phone call. Will the new healthcare bill force doctors to use technology and reduce waste?Is the practice of medicine ever going to come to the 21st century, I wonder.

Social Media and networking websites have affected the life of people in one way or the other. Simply put, we are all hooked by these websites. We at Dolcera thought that it may be interesting to make a preliminary research on the social media to find their nexus with the patenting fraternity. This blog post is mainly to share the preliminary research with our readers.

The following graph shows the IP activity over the last few years. There is certainly an upward trend since 2004 however, the year 2008 & 2009 IP activity could be marred by the Bilski repercussions on the business method patents among other reasons. It is also to be noted that 2009 data is not up to date owing to the data unavailability.

The following graph shows the IPC classes that were taken into the consideration while doing the search.

The following graph shows the patent assignee information in this field.

Note: The patent counts for some of the prominent social media websites are Facebook(48) and Myspace & Technorati with just less than 20 each.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Harit Mohan & Samir Raiyani for their help in this exercise.

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James Watson was on Charlie Rose last night. He made some very interesting points:

• In the 21st century, psychology will finally become a science
• The genetics of psychological disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder etc. is not understood at all, and very little investment is going into these fields
• We need a fight against psychological disorders on the same scale as the fight against cancer
• A lot has been learned in the fight against cancer (from the billions spent), and a cure for cancer seems to be closer than ever

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The results of PG diploma (2008-2009), a course offered by NALSAR - Hyderabad in patent laws, was declared today. With 100 % passing percentage the environment in office was jubilating.What else could be better Diwali gift than this, said the cheered Dolcerians?

Dolcera is first to report online analysis of passing percentage this year. The graph below reflects the trend of how students all over India performed in the exam.

Click here to download the result sheet.

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The New York Times today has an article describing how the German Mittelstand companies are coping with the downturn. One interesting concept they describe in the story is that of “time accounts.”

Employees are tapping “time accounts,” a device that Trumpf and many other companies created over the last decade to cushion the effects of a slowdown.

During the fat years, employees stored hours of overtime, for which they were not then paid, in anticipation of tougher times. Now those hours are being paid out, keeping paychecks heftier than they would be otherwise.

Why doesn’t the services world employ this strategy around the world?

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Here is the explanation: For this option “Reduce to One Member per Family” we use the default order US-WO-EP-JP-GB-DE-FR for selecting the representative document, the Worksheet retains only one family member and deletes the other patents from the list. This feature gives you the basis for analysis of patents by family, eliminating the distortion that results from counting the same invention in each country. This is how we determine what document to keep. In each family, documents are sorted by country code, in order of preference: US WO EP JP GB DE FR. The first group of patents or authority (let’s say there are multiple US documents) is then sorted by date (oldest first) and then we choose the first record or oldest record.