Manning & Napier, Inc. (NYSE-Listed MN) visited the NYSE to celebrate the company’s successful completion of its initial public offering. In honor of the occasion, founder William Manning rang The Opening Bell.
Congratulations to our friends and colleagues at Manning & Napier on their success.
Featuring articles by leaders in the intellectual property community for publication on Securing Innovation... (Archives)
by John P. Beardwood and Mark D. Penner of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP
Introduction
Recognizing, protecting and exploiting Intellectual Property ("IP") assets has never been more important to businesses. While capturing the benefits of innovation can make the difference between profitability and demise, there are numerous and competing priorities on companies' time, money, and attention that make doing so a challenge.
In order to assist our clients more efficiently and effectively manage their IP within this competitive and challenging marketplace, Fasken Martineau conducted a survey of a number of Canadian companies as to how these companies view the importance, value and role of IP in their business. The following analysis of the results of our survey will help our clients secure more effective IP protection, more effectively manage the IP development process and reduce the risk posed by third party IP.
Respondents View IP As Driving Their Business Model
A majority of our 2009 survey respondents know and understand that IP is important to their business. Almost 80% of respondents consider IP to be a key or top priority, while only 6% consider IP to be a low priority.
Our survey respondents also have a clear, and remarkably uniform, view of the role that IP plays within their organizations. Two thirds of the respondents surveyed reported that IP plays a significant role in generating revenue for their company (for example, through licensing).
A majority of respondents also indicated that IP "distinguishes" their company in the marketplace (60%) and "creates barriers for competitors" (56%).
The fact that 62% of the respondents indicated that one of the key roles of IP within the business was to "increase the company's valuation" suggests that most respondents understand the value of IP as an asset. Further, 44% of respondents considered that one role of IP was to "attract investment."
Global IP Outlook: Looking beyond Canada to Secure IP Protection
IP protection in countries other than Canada is clearly important for the Canadian companies surveyed, as two thirds of the respondents report that they sell products or make their services available outside Canada. Of those respondents that do sell products or offer services outside of Canada, 69% indicated that they have sought IP protection outside of Canada. The overwhelming majority (91%) of the respondents who sought protection outside of Canada indicated they had sought to protect their IP rights within the United States. However, other jurisdictions appear to also be key, including Europe (73%), the United Kingdom (55%), Japan (50%), India (36%) and China (32%). This not only reflects the growing role that these countries are playing within an ever increasing global market, but – in the case of India and China - may also reflect a perception that IP protection in these jurisdictions is becoming more effective, such that it justifies companies making the effort to obtain such protection.
Read and download the Intellectual Property Bulletin about this survey on the authors' law firm website, www.fasken.com and, for more information about this survey, please contact the authors, John Beardwood and Mark Penner.
Governor Jerry Brown announced that Sunday, October 16, 2011 is "Steve Jobs Day" in California, where the life of the Apple co-founder will be remembered in private memorials and a public television documentary, iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World on the Discovery Channel. Here's to Steve Jobs; here's to the crazy ones who think different.
In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his life:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
via Mashable
As we approach the 10 year anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, it's interesting to reflect on this architectural model of "ground zero" in 3D on this tragic day in history, looking forward to the future.
We've written about innovative 3D Printing, and linked to some amazing presentations of the technology here and here, in connection with industrial design, but this is a stunning example of the application of the art and science of 3D printing in architectural design modelling.
MakerBot sent Stephen Colbert's head into space on a weather balloon with a FlipCam and a GPS enabled cell phone. Includes epic space footage!
Seriously, folks, 3D Printing seems to have really taken off, with the development of a drone that takes just a week to create. Watch the video of the first flight of a 3D printed airplane and read all about it at New Scientist.
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A 3-D printer from Z Corporation ranges in price between $15,000 and $60,000, but Joe Titlow, the vice president of product management, said the value outweighs the price for these companies. "This technology enables the ability to create physical models," said Titlow in an interview with ABC News. "It enables them to do something amazing and increase innovation; they can design a product, print it out and get instant feedback of their model." The Z Corporation printers don't just print models and sculptures, but fully operable wrenches, tools and even parts for a car.
According to Z Corporation, these printers have been sold to Motorola, Nike and Toyota.
Is this true?
Continue Reading...Congratulations to IBM on 100 years of innovation.
In the span of a century, IBM has evolved from a small business that made scales, time clocks and tabulating machines to a globally integrated enterprise with more than 400,000 employees and a strong vision for the future. The stories that have emerged throughout our history are complex tales of big risks, lessons learned and discoveries that have transformed the way we work and live.
These 100 iconic moments—these Icons of Progress—demonstrate our faith in science, our pursuit of knowledge and our belief that together we can make the world work better.
The number of patents obtained in the United States and in many other countries around the world hardly begins to tell the story of innovation by IBM.
For every invention that is patented by IBM, there are probably thousands more inventions and innovations that are not patented but are protected intellectual property in defensive publications or technical disclosures. As well as leading in patents, IBM has been a leader in the effective use of defensive publishing for over half a century. IBM's Technical Disclosure Bulletin and all its technical disclosures since 1958 have been published as part of IP.com's Prior Art Database. The recent addition of IBM Redbooks to the IP.com Intellectual Property Library is an effective extension of the ongoing collaboration between IP.com and IBM to make their non-patent literature and technical disclosures easily accessible to patent examiners and inventors everywhere. Congratulations, IBM, on a century of achievements that have changed the world.
IP.com's Intellectual Property Research and Analytics provides innovative companies with high quality patent searching, analysis, and more. We embrace the philosophy that to assist our clients in meeting their challenges, we must also continuously innovate. Many on our team are inventors themselves; all have deep knowledge and technical expertise in their fields.
IP.com research and analytics professionals are engineers and scientists with backgrounds in physics, optical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, and life sciences. All our research professionals have many years of experience practicing in their respective industries as well as several years of experience performing intellectual property research.
With the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs heating up between the Boston Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks in June, we got thinking how important refrigeration is to the game of hockey.
The modern rules of ice hockey were drawn up in 1875 by James Creighton of McGill University in Canada, but the first artificial ice rink, called the Glaciarium, had long before been developed by a Brit, in 1844, and John Gamgee later constructed an artificial ice rink in a tent in a small building just off the Kings Road in Chelsea, London, in 1877.
The rink was based on a concrete surface, with layers of earth, cow hair and timber planks. Atop these were laid oval copper pipes carrying a solution of glycerine with ether, nitrogen peroxide and water. The pipes were covered by water and the solution was pumped through, freezing the water into ice. Gamgee had discovered the process while attempting to develop a method to freeze meat for import from Australia and New Zealand, and had patented it as early as 1870.
A century after the first artificial ice rink, an American, Frank Zamboni, invented the world's first self-propelled ice resurfacing machine, which he trademarked the ZAMBONI® ice resurfacing machine. By the summer of 1949 he was able to get a good sheet of ice consistently, and the "Model A Zamboni Ice Resurfacer" became a working reality. Frank applied for a patent and in 1953, Patent Application No. 93,478 was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as patent number US 2642679.
Sports fans, is there no end to refrigeration innovation?
This year, we're honored to host Blawg Review on Memorial Day, 2011.
When I was a kid, we called May 30 "Decoration Day." writes Oliver North in his Memorial Day blog post.
We've hosted Blawg Review, the roundup of some of the best law blog posts of the previous week a few times before here on IP.com's Securing Innovation blog--on Dia del Inventor, on Father's Day and, last year, on the International Day of the World's Indigenous People.
As it's hosted every Monday on a different blog, often marking a special day or theme, this is not the first Memorial Day Blawg Review. It's not even the first time a law blog concerned with patents has hosted Blawg Review on Memorial Day. Stephen Albainy-Jenei, a patent attorney well-known and highly regarded by readers of this blog and his peers in the intellectual property community hosted Blawg Review on Patent Baristas on Memorial Day a few years ago--a stunning presentation, including this poignant photograph.
“Behind each hero, there is a family. Behind each sacrifice, there is a story of survival.”
Some heroes, like John Hochfelder's father, made it home from war and, for them. the memories of those who didn't are most cherished.
This week, Eric Mayer at the Military Underdog blog wrote in a Memorial Day letter to dad, "In these times, I question what to do at Memorial Day. What, with the War on Terror and all the other stuff happening, it seems honors for Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines occur every day. It makes me wonder why we even have a Memorial Day."
A Soldier's Perspective on President Obama's Memorial Day Proclamation.
For over two centuries, brave men and women have laid down their lives in defense of our great Nation. These heroes have made the ultimate sacrifice so we may uphold the ideals we all cherish. ~ President Barack Obama
Kevin Gosztola on WL Central, writes about Memorial Day in America: What the US Government Wants Americans to Remember vs. What WikiLeaks Thinks Should Be Remembered.
In other news, U.S. Archivist Agrees to Release Pentagon Papers after 40 Years…Except for 11 Words.
Paul Kennedy at The Defense Rests wrote this week about All the King's horses...
Meanwhile, Scott Greenfield says, "The underlying story is one of those that makes your head explode from its sheer stupidity."
Across the pond, a blawger with whom American lawyers enjoy a special relationship, CharonQC, wrote about injuctions, twitter, and the death of blogging?
Not for Eric Turkewitz, who welcomed new readers, in droves, to his law blog this past week.
Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter points to Read Write Web's coverage of military tech, a Memorial Day Special.
The IPKat's Peer-to-Patent seminar offers you a unique opportunity to discover what Peer-to-Patent is all about, how the UK Intellectual Property Office's experiment will work, how it feels like to participate and what the experts think of it.
Chicago IP Litigation Law blogger Dave Donoghue is enjoying his last days with Lord Stanley's Cup, as Boston Pizza rebrands itself "Vancouver Pizza" --because it's all about good taste.
Speaking of good taste, Matthew David Brozik at Likelihood of Confusion reports on the Tyson tattoo trouble.
Gene Quinn at IP Watchdog wrote about Extortion Patent Style: Small Business in the Troll Crosshairs.
On the Forbes blog, She Negotiates, Victoria Pynchon asks, "Which patent infringement litigation parties (if any) benefit from the inefficiencies in the process?"
Patent Docs reports on the decision and dissent in Therasense while the USPTO tries to make sense of this important case about inequitable conduct.
Much more here in the General Global Week in Review 30 May 2011 from IP Think Tank.
Apparently, the IP Blogdex will be a work in progess.
Finally, lest we forget.
These are the faces of the fallen.
Maybe the best way to honor the fallen...
Blawg Review has information about next weeks host, and instructions on how to host one of the upcoming issues on your blog if you're up for the challenge.
Intellectual Property attorneys affiliated with the Shark Tank Season 2 production contacted IP.com in 2010 to perform FTO/Clearance searching on the innovations and products being marketed by the contestants of the Shark Tank Season 2 cast.
Freedom to operate searches identify potential patent barriers to the commercialization of products or technologies.
IP.com conducted over 60 freedom to operate research projects on various aspects of the products being marketed by the contestants in order to provide the attorneys affiliated with the show the information necessary to perform due diligence analysis of the intellectual property associated with the contestants' inventions, products and services.
There's a similar show in Canada, Dragon's Den, on which we saw a Canadian inventor, Ben Gulak, pitch his invention, the Uno, a motorized cycle. Benjamin Gulak has filed a patent appliication with the USPTO for this motorized cycle.
"Why not take this invention to Toyota?" say the Dragons. Or, let's say, Honda.
Honda is a leading innovator of motorized cycles, personal mobility devices, robotic balance and agility. Just ask Asimo.
Yikes! We saw a cyclist riding the streets of Toronto, Canada, on a Yike Bike, the brainchild of Grant Ryan, an inventor from New Zealand, who has filed an international patent application for this.
Steve van Dulken, Information Expert with the British Library Research Service, recently wrote on The Patent Search Blog about the international patent application for the YikeBike®.
Earth Day is "a time of year when the voice of the environmentally conscious is at its loudest. It's a time to a talk about the state of the planet, energy innovation and what all of us in the mainstream can do to help curb climate change."
Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Founded by the organizers of the first April 22 Earth Day in 1970, Earth Day Network promotes environmental citizenship and year round progressive action worldwide. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect change in local, national, and global policies. Earth Day Network enjoys partnerships with 22,000 organizations in 192 countries that are all dedicated to diversifying and mobilizing the environmental movement. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities. More than a half billion people participate in Earth Day Network campaigns every year. This year's campaign is a billion acts of green.
Earth Day seems as good a day as any to note the contributions of leading corporations that have joined together in partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to make their patents available for the common good.
Eco-Patent Commons, launched by IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony in partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), was founded on the commitment that anyone who wants to bring environmental benefits to market can use these patents to protect the environment and enable collaboration between businesses that foster new innovations.
Since the launch of the Eco-Patent Commons in January 2008, one hundred eco-friendly patents have been pledged by eleven companies representing a variety of industries worldwide: Bosch, Dow, DuPont, Fuji-Xerox, IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes, Ricoh, Sony, Taisei and Xerox.
We hope more companies join in the Eco-Patent Commons and that this important initiative expands beyond patents to include technical disclosures of innovations that would be helpful to the environment and the future of planet earth, making every day "earth day."
For over 40 years, Earth Day—April 22—has inspired and mobilized individuals and organizations worldwide to demonstrate their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. What can we do?
As indicated in our original post about the Eco-Patent Commons, IP.com would really like to contribute to this very worthwhile initiative by providing the publishing platform to broaden the scope of the project to include innovations and inventions useful to the environmental movement well beyond those patents that have been contributed by the project's founding companies, some of which are already using the IP.com Prior Art Database. We've got technologies available that could very quickly take this green initiative to a whole new level of global participation.
Together, let's save our planet; we're really not going to discover another earth.
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Links on a variety of IP issues (Archives)
"Although Google, Google Patents and the USPTO’s electronic databases are commonly declared favorite research tools by patent researchers throughout the world, an important niche of knowledge is imperative not to forget: the world of non-digitized information. This week, the Top 5 Unexpected Places to Find Prior Art have been gathered from the best and brightest AOP Study Submissions – from non-digitized favorites like old manuals, to the interesting world of looking for prior art in non-related industries." Great article by Article One Partners at the link above
"When most people talk about the dot-com boom and bust they talk about the money that was made and lost in the process. What they don’t talk about so much is the innovation that created completely new and world changing technologies. From my perspective the money is interesting but the real conversation needs to be about the rate at which a new technology is adopted, the speed with which new companies are gaining market share and the disruptions that are happening as new technologies and companies supplant the prior generation’s most popular products," writes Ben Keighran, CEO & Co-Founder of Chomp, a search engine for mobile apps.
Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will. People, companies, investors and even countries can’t stop this transformation. The only choice you have is whether you join the side of innovation and progress or you don’t.
MIT calculates that its living alumni have founded 25,800 companies that currently provide 3.3m jobs for people around the world. These firms have combined annual revenues of some $2.2 trillion.
George Will, conservative icon, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post last week extolling the virtues (and the necessities) of innovation and government support for it ("Rev the scientific engine"). Kevin Noonan at Patent Docs reviews the piece in a blog post at the link in the blue headline above.
eMarketer estimates that, even with the hype around newer social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, nearly two in five US companies will maintain a public-facing blog this year for marketing purposes. This usage is on the rise as firms will increasingly realize the value of the blogosphere to further a variety of corporate functions, such as communications, lead generation, customer service and brand marketing.
IBM, Nokia, Sony, and Pitney Bowes teamed up with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to create the Eco-Patent Commons, an organized effort to make freely available patents that "reduce waste, pollution, global warming, and energy demands." The Commons allows global businesses to share environmental innovations, turning the patent-long the emblem of all that is the opposite of sharing-into a vehicle for collective innovation.
Facebook’s new community pages have created a lot of confusion for businesses. Many companies have been surprised (and many angry) to find their brands showing up in community pages that are fully outside of their control.
Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results. For more information, read Danny Sullivan's blog post on Search Engine Land at the blue link above.
With the red-hot acquisition dance between Google and Groupon sucking up all the attention, it’s easy once again to ignore the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space–LivingSocial. Read Kara Swisher's article in Boomtown, a columns in the Wall Street Journal's Digital Network. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
As noted in the link above, according to a report from Reuters, the court ruled that IPCom’s amended patent, which protects technology that connect phones to networks, was valid. [Readers of IP.com's blog, Securing Innovation, will recall that, since the commencement of this patent dispute years ago, we have made it clear that IP.com is in no way related to IPCom GmbH KG, a company in Germany that is involved in patent litigation reportedly involving 17 billions of Euros in claims. [For the latest news about IPCom GmbH, including our clarification to avoid confusion with IP.com, just search Google for IPCom GmbH.]
The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington...As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.
America’s biggest corporations have dramatically increased their participation in Twitter, according to “The Fortune 500 and Social Media,” a yearly report from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Infamous “balloon boy” hoaxer Richard Heene is at it again, hitting America right where it itches. The determined dad is trying to raise scratch for his wife and three sons by hawking his own “Bear Scratch” itching post in a YouTube commercial that makes him come across as an even more excitable version of late, leather-lunged pitchman Billy Mays.
The National Archives is home to some of the nation’s most prized historical documents. But a new audit by the Government Accountability Office has found that it’s not doing a good job of keeping track of them. The audit was prompted in part by the loss of the Wright Brothers’ original patent for the flying machine. It was last seen in 1980 after being passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. Maps for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also checked out by military representatives in 1962, and haven't been seen since.
Links to Prior Art (Archives)
Methods, systems, and computer program products for disabling a mobile phone suspected of being a trigger for a bomb are provided.
Deciding whether to contact a particular friend, classmate, or coworker often hinges on where the person is located and what that person is doing. Such a decision typically has to be made in a limited amount of time with a limited amount of information. Further, when a person arrives at a particular location, such as a park or shopping mall, they often want to know if someone else they know is also at the same location. There is thus a need for systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members. The present invention relates generally to web-based social networks, and more particularly to systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members, is the subject of a patent recently obtained by Facebook.
This patent, assigned to Apple, relates to text-based communication devices. The proliferation of computers and compact portable devices has led to vast amounts of text-based communication. One problem with text-based communications is that there is no way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.
The present invention relates to a method of production of graphene, notably employing a stage of annealing under irradiation.Graphene is a two-dimensional crystal in the form of a sheet of carbon, in which the atoms are positioned following a regular order of hexagonal structure, the thickness of this sheet corresponding to that of a carbon atom, thus corresponding to a thickness of less than a nanometre.
A UAV is a remotely piloted or self-piloted aircraft that can carry cameras, sensors, communications equipment, or other payloads, is capable of controlled, sustained, level flight, and is usually powered by an engine. A self-piloted UAV may fly autonomously based on pre-programmed flight plans. UAVs are becoming increasingly used for various missions where manned flight vehicles are not appropriate or not feasible. These missions may include military situations, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, target acquisition, data acquisition, communications relay, decoy, harassment, or supply flights. UAVs are also used for a growing number of civilian missions where a human observer would be at risk, such as firefighting, natural disaster reconnaissance, police observation of civil disturbances or crime scenes, and scientific research. An example of the latter would be observation of weather formations or of a volcano. As miniaturization technology has improved, it is now possible to manufacture very small UAVs (sometimes referred to as micro-aerial vehicles, or MAVs).
A fuel cell system comprises a fuel cell, a reactant gas pipe for supplying a reactant gas to the fuel cell, and an injector for controlling the state of the gas on the upstream side in the reactant gas pipe and supplying the reactant gas to the downstream side by driving a valve element with an electromagnetic drive force at a predetermined drive cycle to separate the valve element from a valve seat. The injector is provided integrally in the fuel cell, and hence the vibration and noise of the injector can be absorbed and suppressed by the fuel cell as a heavy article. -- US Application Publication (Source: USPTO) Publication No. US 2010/0209797 A1 published on 19-Aug-2010
A system for deploying a cover over an oil spill, to collect the spilled oil, uses a plurality of gas propelled rockets are attached to lines arranged around the periphery of the cover. Outward projection of the rockets spreads the cover, the weight of the expended rockets then pulling the edges of the cover below the water surface to trap the covered oil.
A weather-based financial index is based at least in part on weather. The index may take into account any of a variety of weather factors, such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, number of sunny or overcast days in a period of time, number of freeze days in a period of time, etc. Weather factor value(s) are combined with one or more financial components to provide the weather-based financial index. The index may be traded on an exchange, such as the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).
A method and apparatus for testing a blowout preventer (BOP) wherein a pressurization unit applies fluid to an isolated portion of the throughbore of the BOP.
This idea is to enable the silent operating engines/vehicles to broadcast signal over a specific frequency within a short distance where a receiver can detect the signal and produce appropriate alert signals.
The Self-Sustaining Electric Engine Enhancement (SSEEE) specification modifies the process by which electric car engines consume and replenish electric power and dramatically extends the distance a car can travel before the need for pit stops to recharge the energy source, i.e., batteries, fuel cells, etc.
The present invention relates to an oil spill identification system and oil spill identification sensors to be used in connection with this system. The system is used primarily on fixed offshore structures, but may also be used on fixed onshore constructions.
http://ip.com/patent/US7009550
A shark-repelling surfboard or flotation board made of polymer foam with coating. The surfboard or the flotation board has a locator device for locating large aquatic animals, and an alarm device for alerting a rider of large aquatic animals, such as sharks, located by the locator device.
http://ip.com/patent/US7731554
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