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? 

Michael Mock of Rapidform responds to some questions about the feasibility of printing a functional wrench from scan data from a Z Corp 3D scanner, as seen in the video embedded above, which has seen over 5.4 million views on YouTube.

Design prototyping technologies are the modern tools of inventors and other companies, like 3D Systems and Axis Prototypes also appear to be doing interesting work for innovative clients.

Who else is using amazing technologies to help inventors visualize and prototype their innovations? Let us know in the comments below.

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 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.

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?

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®.

Among the topics Tom will be addressing are:

• Patents defined. (What a patent is and is not; different types; rights and protections of a patent; ways to get around a patent.)
• Assessing the need for a patent. (When/under what circumstances should an individual inventor be going out and be spending money on a patent?)
• Alternatives to patenting. (Covering defensive publishing, trade secrets, use of Non-Disclosure Agreements, or NDA, in advance of patent application, and use of search to determine validity.)
• International filing. (How to protect in other countries. And... Manufacturing in China and what that means with respect to an inventor's patent rights.)

Please help spread the word on your blogs and Twitter. And don't forget to tune in at 8pm EST on Thursday, April 14.

How to tune in? Just go to http://www.gotinvention.com and click on the "Live" tab.

The discovery, she said, came in 1985 after 13 years of intense team work and laboratory experiments. She said: "We were looking at various disorders in vascular contraction when we came across this new class of compound that could relax blood vessels. I have heard people call it a lifestyle drug but I don't think of it like that. It has caused men to think differently about their health. It has de-stigmatised erectile health and as someone who had to review all the letters of patients, who say 'It has stopped me killing myself' or 'It has stopped me hitting my wife', that I realise what a good medicine it is," she said.

Since becoming available in 1998, sildenafil, the chemical name of the little blue pill known as Viagra, has been the a leading treatment for erectile dysfunction; its primary competitors on the market are tadalafil (Cialis) and vardenafil (Levitra).

Pfizer's patent 5,250,534 in the USPTO for Viagra will expire on March 27, 2012, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on its website here, at which point any drug company will be able to make and sell a "generic" version of the blockbuster erectile dysfunction (ED) drug.

So, what will happen when Viagra goes generic?

IP.com

The world’s most innovative corporations entrust IP.com with defensive publication through our acclaimed Prior Art Database — an industry-recognized go-to source for patent examiners and searchers worldwide.

Go beyond just searching — discover an interconnected world of intellectual property at IP.com.

Our weblog, Securing Innovation, designed as a resource for the intellectual property community, includes links to other interesting blogs and useful IP Resources.

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Do you know of another intellectual property resource that should be considered for inclusion in this list of helpful IP Resources? Help us out here. Please let us know in the comments below, and we'll add more to our blog's sidebar. While we're updating our blog sidebars, are there additional Intellectual Property Blogs that we should include in our blogrolls? Something new? We're always looking for new IP Blogs, Tech Blogs and Business Blogs that would be of interest to our readers.

What preceded the grant of this patent to Alexander Graham Bell over his competitor Elisha Gray is the stuff of intellectual property legend, the classic "race to the patent office" as it is often characterized in the telling.

It's interesting, today, while Congress considers a bill named the "America Invents Act" an act to amend the Patent Act, in which one of the fundamental changes proposed it a move to a first-to-file system, similar to many other jurisdictions, versus the current US patent system based on first-to-invent priority.

The legal significance of this proposed change in the Patent Reform Act of 2011 is being discussed this week on leading patent blogs, like Patently-O, here and here. It's interesting, today, as a backgrounder to the story of the Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray patent application controversy, the details of which are summarized in Wikipedia.

Alexander Graham Bell was a tutor for the deaf while pursuing his own research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph". Bell formed a partnership with two of his students' parents, including prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to help fund his research in exchange for shares of any future profits.

Elisha Gray was a prominent inventor in Highland Park, Illinois. His Western Electric company was a major supplier to telegraph monopoly Western Union. Bell was in competition with Elisha Gray to be the first to invent a practical harmonic telegraph.

In the summer of 1874, Gray developed a harmonic telegraph device using vibrating reeds that could transmit musical tones, but not intelligible speech. In December 1874 he demonstrated it to the public at Highland Park First Presbyterian Church. On February 11, 1876, Gray included a diagram for a telephone in his notebook. On February 14, Gray's lawyer filed a patent caveat with a similar diagram. The same day, Bell's lawyer filed (hand-delivered to the U.S. Patent Office) a patent application on the harmonic telegraph, including its use for transmitting vocal sounds. On February 19, the patent office suspended Bell's application for three months to give Gray time to submit a full patent application with claims, after which the patent office would begin interference proceedings to determine whether Bell or Gray were first to invent the claimed subject matter of the telephone.

At the time, the USPTO required the submission of a working patent model for the patent application to be accepted, with the acceptance process often taking years, and with interference proceedings often involved public hearings—although the U.S. Congress had abolished the requirement for patent models in 1870.[1] However, Bell's lawyers argued strenuously for an exception to be made in their case, likely on the basis of the Congressional amendment to the patent law.

On February 24, 1876, Bell traveled to Washington DC. Nothing was entered in his lab notebook until his return to Boston on March 7. Bell's patent was issued on March 7. On March 8, Bell recorded an experiment in his lab notebook, with a diagram similar to that of Gray's patent caveat (see right). Bell finally got his telephone model to work on March 10, when Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson both recorded the famous "Watson, come here" story in their notebooks.

How differently might the controversy have played out between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray if, back in the day, they'd had today's intellectual property technology, like the Creative Registry and the Prior Art Database, to establish authoritatively, who was the first to invent?

Is it the President’s or the Presidents’ day? "As innocuous as President’s Day seems, it actually has quite a sordid history," as told today on the West Law Insider, the original date for the holiday being February 22, George Washington's birthday, before it was later fixed as a Monday to create a holiday weekend.

The date for observance was set as the third Monday in February, which always falls between February 15 and 21, never on Washington’s actual birthday. This positioned the day of observance between Lincoln’s birthday (February 12) and Washington’s birthday.

What started out as a President's Day (Washington's) it has become over the years, Presidents Day.

It's interesting from an historic perspective, coincidentally in Black History Month, to think about the impact of Washington, Lincoln, and Obama -- slave owner, emancipator, and the first Black President.

Last week, President Obama met with some of the most innovative business leaders in the country, over what was billed as a tech dinner. Interesting how far we've come from the time of the first Patent Act in 1790, when African-Americans couldn't own intellectual property, but were property.

The contributions of African-Americans to innovation is not a story often told. It seems this might be as good a day as any to share this part of American history.

Visit the Black Inventor Online Museum ™ a look at the great and often unrecognized leaders in the field of invention and innovation.

For more than 300 years, black inventors have served as pioneers in the field of science and have made enormous impacts on society. As African Americans sought freedom and equality, many among them, scientists, educators and even slaves, developed the tools and processes that helped to shape the modern agricultural, industrial and technological landscape. While some are famous, many remain unknown, but their contributions have assured that their stories are not only about black history, but about world history.

 One more interesting bit of patent history, for Presidents Day, according to Wikipedia, the only President of the United States to hold a patent was Abraham Lincoln for a "device to buoy vessels over shoals"; it consisted of a set of retractable floats mounted on the sides of riverboats. Buoyah!

The system allows for the processing of dynamic and focused search strategies. The user can input a plurality of search features into the GUI of the system and can assign their priority. One of them can be classified as focused/high priority search feature over others. The system also allows for inputting plurality of keywords into the GUI to help ranking of the result. In a preferred embodiment, keywords, or portions or complete sentences or paragraphs can be listened by utilizing text to speech conversion technology. This allows users to go through a long list of patents/publications without requiring to read them.

That should be a welcome innovation for a new generation of patent searchers, who can't yet read. ;-) 

Now, stop searching patents and go home and play with the kids.

Anyway, because our readers seem to insist on equal time for Nikola Tesla, the forgotten wizard, we'd like to share this YouTube video.

You see, we're big fans of Tesla, and not just the roadster and the new sedan that bears his name. But if you're more interested in Tesla electric cars and the patents associated with Tesla Motors' Electric Car Technology you'll find all their patents and patent applications here in IP.com's Intellectual Property Library.

Everyone happy now?

Ronald Reagan as President of the United States proclaimed February 11, 1983 as National Inventors' Day, Proclamation 5013, to ..call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. In recognition of the enormous contribution inventors make to the nation and the world, the Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law 97 - 198), has designated February 11, the anniversary of the birth of the inventor Thomas Alva Edison who had over 1,000 patents, as National Inventors' Day.

Today, on his birthday, Thomas Alva Edison would be pleased with the work of these students, who put together a YouTube video as part of their eighth grade project. No doubt he'd be amazed to find that his name a trending topic on Twitter, too. Happy Birthday, Mr. Edison.

Patent Attorney Vincent LoTempio looks closely at the details of this remarkable achievement by IBM.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted an all-time high 219,614 United States utility patents in 2010 – up 31 percent over 2009. All but one of the companies in the Top 50 are up from 2009, most shattering records and many posting double-digit percentage gains.

IBM continues to hold down the #1 patent rankings position, which it has done for 18 consecutive years, with a record 5,896 patents, up 20 percent from 4,914 in 2009. IBM is the first company to Break 5,000-Patent Mark in a Single Year.

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.

Big Blue still tops the list of the most patents issued by the USPTO in 2010, with 5,896 assigned to IBM, while Apple has emerged as arguably the leading innovator in consumer electronics today, with a 94% increase in the number of patents issued to Apple by the USPTO over the prior year.

Apple has come a long way since 1984 when a young Steve Jobs presented to the world the first Macintosh computer.

This week, Apple announced  that there have been 10 billion downloads from its App Store for its iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

You can browse the patent applications and patents assigned to Apple in one quick search of IP.com's Intellectual Property Library.

Well-established intellectual property blogs like Patently-O, Patent Baristas, Patent Docs, Chicago IP Litigation Blog and IP Kat are perennial favorites, and deservedly so. But this past year has seen the rise of a few newer blogs, from established professionals in the field of intellectual property, that are worth special mention in 2010.

Gene Quinn has transformed his long established website, IP Watchdog, into one of the leading intellectual property blogs with a focus on patents.

Vincent LoTempio has, in his first year blogging, created an intellectual property law blog that speaks personally to inventors as well as patent professionals.

Duncan Campbell has grown his company, Think IP Strategy, into an international organization of patent strategists and ip professionals with a great blog, IP Think Tank, that provides a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in intellectual property with a global perspective.

David Kappos, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is communicating with inventors and intellectual property professionals with his Director's Forum blog and engaging the public with the USPTO website, blog, and other social media.

Building on the success of the weekly Director’s Forum blog, we expanded our use of social media channels in 2010. By using popular social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter we are able to share information with a much wider audience. Our website will always be the news source of record for the USPTO, but Facebook and Twitter allow us to engage and interact with the public in new ways and to reach a broader audience.

Looks like 2011 will be a good year for inventors and those in the intellectual property community that share information on the internet. We at IP.com wish you all the very best for a happy and prosperous new year.

With its built-in Wi-Fi system, you can control the Parrot AR.Drone using the built-in accelerometer in your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad device. On-board cameras (one forward facing, one facing down) let you see in real time what the pilot sees as you complete complex flight maneuvers. You have to see it to believe it.

This looks like something 26 year old Ashish Bhat, the inventor of the world's smallest unmanned aerial vehicle, would have dreamed of when he was a young boy. Bhat has been recognized as one of the outstanding innovators under the age of 35 on Technology Review's TR35 list for development of the world’s smallest and lightest autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle he calls the Carbon.

The best toys often seem to be carbon copies of the latest inventions and, with tomorrow's technology today, the sky's the limit. What innovative toys and gadgets are on your wish list?

IP.com's Intellectual Property Library has a feature called "More-Like-This" powered by TextWise, an affiliate company of the Manning and Napier Group of Companies.

Semantic Signatures® are a new way of representing and analyzing semantic information (meaning) in text. Semantic Signatures, produced by TextWise’s Trainable Semantic Vectors (TSV) technology, provide a rich semantic representation of the multiple concepts and topics contained in a body of text. Semantic Signatures can be constructed for a wide range of texts including individual words, phrases, word lists (e.g. metadata), short passages (such as text advertisements or image labels), web pages, or full text documents (e.g. technical articles).

Here's a funny informercial spoofing the LOL Cats meme that shows how it works.

(AdRants was all over this, and we can see why --  very creative way to conceptualize sophisticated technology, with humor, and cats. We'd like to see more like this! LOL)

The More-Like-This feature in IP.com's Intellectual Property Library uses a sophisticated semantic engine to locate publications based on concepts rather than a keyword (text) search. To search using this engine, enough information to allow the formation of an accurate semantic signature is required. Note the engine is presently restricted to English language documents and queries.

One method of creating a More-Like-This query in IP.com's Intellectual Property Library is to use a pre-existing document. This is why documents in the Library with a reasonable amount of English content have an option to perform such a query. In addition to using a Library document, this page also enables the use of the engine with text gathered from a web page or manually entered text.

Is that cool technology, or what? And, of course, there are patents.

Intellectual Property of TextWise

Below are the patents issued to MNIS, TextWise LLC, and to Syracuse University (with full commercial rights to TextWise)