|
Annual List of Top 200 Organizations Receiving U.S.
Patents
PatentCafe’s Top 10 ranking features differences
from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's list.
Sacramento, CA (PRWEB) January 11, 2005 -- PatentCafe
today released the IP200, which includes four lists of
the top 200 corporations receiving U.S. patents, publishing
U.S. patent applications and the top 200 intellectual
property law firms based on patents and published patent
applications.Intellectual Property and Technology Magazine.
The Top 10 list differs from the Top 10 list of private
sector patent recipients for 2004 as published by the
Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO).
PatentCafe’s Top 10 List:
(Ranking as listed by the USPTO is shown with the(*))
(1) (1*) International Business Machines Corporation –
3,254
(2) (2*) Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. - 2,174
(3) (8*) Hitachi, Ltd. - 2,041
(4) (6*) Samsung - 1,934
(5) (3*) Canon Kabushiki Kaisha – 1,875
(6) (4*) Hewlett-Packard Company – 1,836
(7) (5*) Micron Technology, Inc. - 1,764
(8) (10*) Sony Corporation – 1,686
(9) (7*) Intel Corporation – 1,604
(10) (--*) Fujitsu Limited – 1,465 (not listed in
Top 10 by USPTO)
Why the variations?
Andy Gibbs, PatentCafe CEO explains “The US Patent
Office is not required to merge subsidiary relationships
into the parent corporation. The USPTO did merge Compac’s
patents into the Hewlett Packard total, but did not carry
the process through to all other patent recipients. PatentCafe
has created a concordance that ties subsidiary patents
to parent corporations. The process provides a truer picture
of global competitive technology positioning.”
It is interesting to note that the USPTO’s total
patent numbers are smaller for many of the Top 10 than
PatentCafe’s figures. Because of the Patent Office’s
OCR conversion from paper to digital data, errors are
often carried along, making searching nearly impossible.
Other human errors contribute to the confusion in reliably
tracking a company’s technology performance.
The data error problem affects the patent law firms as
well. Patent law firm Young and Thompson found that the
USPTO attributed 1,014 patents to their credit in 2004.
PatentCafe’s numbers showed 1,015, highlighting one
patent listing Young and Thompson as “Young and Thomspon”.
PatentCafe’s filter, name concordance, and Latent
Semantic Analysis technology identified the errant patent,
and credited the law firm appropriately. Discrepancies
between USPTO and PatentCafe figures may be the result
of similar patent data errors.
The 2005 patent landscape is changing.
PatentCafe also tracks published applications. The USPTO
begins publishing U.S. patent applications 18 months after
the patent was filed. Although it may take years for a
pending patent to actually issue as a granted U.S. patent,
following the application trend of companies in any particular
industry segment portends the patent issuance, and patent
ranking, by commercial organizations in future years.
Long term product and investment strategy hinges on access
to this kind of information. Hypothetically, if all U.S.
patent applications published in 2004 issue as granted
patents, the Top 10 List would look greatly different.
Please visit www.patentcafe.com to view the PatentCafe
Top 10 List for corporations with pending patent applications
and the Top 10 list for patent-filing law firms.
Business and investment strategy in the high tech sector
depends on information knowledge. Patent activity is one
data source, if properly utilized, which can provide significant
visibility of future corporate technology or marketing
trends, and perhaps, value. Reliable data remains the
key to support any decision-process.
With more than 85% of the market cap of the Fortune 500
companies resting in intangible asset value, its becoming
increasingly important to know the competitive global
technology landscape. Mining patent data for business
information is becoming increasingly easy with more sophisticated
search technologies such as PatentCafe’s semantic
tools.
What was once the domain of competitive product position,
business intelligence has moved into the realm of patent
positioning, and 2004 closes out with impressive technology
leaders leaving a strong statement to future technology
growth.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/1/emw196597.htm
• Intellectual Property - The 3 Branches: Copyrights, Patents & Trademarks
• Patent - How To Get One
• Patent Expert Offer Free Do-It-Yourself Patent Course to Independent Inventors
News and notices of patent, intellectual property and
related information and resources online. Patents-i.net
|
