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Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#12FYI: The formatting/rendering of this page is way off for me (Chrome on 16" Mac). The top of the page is missing, and the bottom is cut off and doesn't scroll. Need to look at your UI again.
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#13Pretty sure this website tells the history of claims on imaginary property.
Innovation is neither required nor common. That's a misconception that seems real when immersed in the ideology of this site.
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#14Microsoft seems to hold something over 100,000 worldwide (their main company and through their licensing company). Is there any logic in limiting the number of patents a company can hold? at what point do you simply have too many? is there such a thing as a monopoly from a purely intellectual property perspective?. Just thinking out loud.
Why would we every stop someone from owning all the ideas in the world?
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#15Cool! My first search ("bosch") turned up almost a quarter of a million in the main company. Waay more than e.g. Ericsson, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Microsoft and Google which I searched next. Is there a "leaderboard" page? Edit: found the top lists at the bottom, but I don't want to pick a category, and the list format shows list position but not patent count unless you click each entry, which to me was not very accessible.
Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top ones.
I did an internship at IBM (~15 years ago) and they said that not only does IBM have the most patents, it tries to have the most patents awarded every year. You could just send half arsed ideas to a team of lawyers and they would write it up into a proper patent.
Getting patents in your name was a big part of moving up the internal engineering ladder.
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top ones.
I did an internship at IBM (~15 years ago) and they said that not only does IBM have the most patents, it tries to have the most patents awarded every year. You could just send half arsed ideas to a team of lawyers and they would write it up into a proper patent. Getting patents in your name was a big part of moving up the internal engineering ladder.
But what do they do with them all? Seemingly not much...
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did an internship at IBM (~15 years ago) and they said that not only does IBM have the most patents, it tries to have the most patents awarded every year. You could just send half arsed ideas to a team of lawyers and they would write it up into a proper patent. Getting patents in your name was a big part of moving up the internal engineering ladder.
But what do they do with them all? Seemingly not much...
It's a defensive strategy, so others cannot enforce vague patents against them.
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top ones.
I did an internship at IBM (~15 years ago) and they said that not only does IBM have the most patents, it tries to have the most patents awarded every year. You could just send half arsed ideas to a team of lawyers and they would write it up into a proper patent. Getting patents in your name was a big part of moving up the internal engineering ladder.
Master Inventor is a title that still carries a lot of esteem in IBM, albeit not the financial perks any more.
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#19There's an issue with data concordance (I think that's the term) in that, for example, Snekma is listed as having a few RU patents but that's actually the same company as SNECMA (French aeronautical company) which is listed as having many more patents; but that company is now known as Safran.
A proper historical analysis of companies would need to account for mergers/splits/renames of companies themselves - data which is only really able to be inferred (at best) from patent sources. You'll need company merger records etc..
I wonder if they're also handling misspellings in company data? (Eg Bpsch instead of Bosch, this sort of thing does sometimes get printed on patent documents).
Chinese company names are one of the harder cases, I feel, for example Edwards (pump manufacturer) presence in China appears to go by "Aidehua Vacuum" (which seems to be a roman-script Chinese transliteration of Edwards Vacuum).
It's a hard problem to attend but I think you're going to miss a lot of detail in company-focused analysis if you don't tackle it.
This is all personal opinion and in no way relates to my work."
Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
#20This tool looks amazing.Especially that you can super easily identify similar companies. This helps me for my current client project! Thanks