Posts in Technology & Innovation

There’s almost no limit to the range of practical items that could be created through 3D printing equipment. A team of chemical researchers working at the University of Illinois have created a 3D printer capable of creating small molecules less than 900 daltons in molecular weight for the manufacture of pharmaceutical agents. A similar project at Glasgow University in Scotland resulted in the development of a 3D printing process for creating a series of precise reacting chambers which could be injected with chemical reagent “inks,” also performed by the printer, for making complex molecules. Specialized 3D printing equipment has been created for fabricating dental devices such as permanent crowns and denture frames. There’s even a 3D printer designed to use filaments of graphene, an incredibly hyped substance which is essentially a two-dimensional lattice form of carbon.

Significant consensus was reached between representatives of small business and universities at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on March 19, 2015. The hearing was held to take testimony relating to proposed reforms to the U.S. patent system. The day’s discussion prompted Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) to make the comment that the argument over…

Interestingly, we noted a great number of innovations filed by IBM that extend into the field of financial services. The company has already been working to develop Bitcoin-style systems, especially the “blockchain” digital currency transaction list supporting Bitcoin, that are capable of serving as digital cash and payment mechanisms for major currencies.

Claiming to be the ”Pharmacy to the Developing World”, India argues that their lax intellectual property rights regime is critical to their ability to provide low-cost, quality generic drugs. They are wrong on two counts. First, India needs to honor IP rights, because without effective intellectual property rights, new pharmaceuticals will not be developed and the “Pharmacy to the Developing World” won’t have anything to provide to the developing world, or to anyone. Second, given the quality crisis in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, they shouldn’t be the pharmacy to anyone.

It’s impossible to actually support the idea that patents harm smartphone innovation because there is no consumer product that has changed so much over the past decade thanks to innovation. And if patents would get in the way of anything, it would definitely get in the way of an industry which accounted for one out of every six active patents. But more smartphones are being sold than ever before and new improvements continue to be developed, from curved touchscreens to waterproof phones to dual-screen phones.

The pursuit of pi, the numerical constant which represents the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, is a subject which has driven mathematicians to extremes. The date 3/14/15 coincides with pi calculated to five digits (3.1415). The next time this will occur will be 100 years from now, making this year’s Pi Day a once in a century event.

”A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.”

There are certainly some signs for hope. One of them came recently from Princeton University, where graduate students worked on a project which identified a treatment for blocking an enzyme which is important for metastasis, or the spread of cancer through a patient’s body. Many methods of treating cancers can be incredibly damaging to a patient’s body. Today there are many cancer treatments that are developed with an eye towards minimizing the difficult side effects caused by a regimen of chemotherapy or radiation.

We found another pair of patents related to digital worlds, an area where IBM has been active of late. A system for ensuring that the highest number of objects contained within a three-dimensional scene are seen by a person navigating the scene is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8970586. The patent claims a clairvoyance method for a 3D scene by acquiring parameters associated with a clairvoyance camera and a clairvoyance viewport, determining a 3D scene to be rendered according to those parameters, rendering the 3D scene to obtain a 2D image presented in the clairvoyance viewport and composing the 2D image presented in both a clairvoyance viewpoint and a general scene viewport. This system overcomes issues of inconvenient manipulation virtual contentand low efficiency in modifying a 3D scene view to uncover an object.

2014 witnessed dramatic expansion in Internet Domain Names. To brand owners, each new TLD multiplies the opportunity for the unscrupulous to cybersquat, typosquat, infringe and dilute their flagship brand. Here are 10 key tools for whacking each mole when you find it.

Microsoft pays a premium for R&D but its investment has paid off as the company currently holds one of the world’s strongest patent portfolios. Just recently the company decided to flex this patent muscle in a big way by filing a patent lawsuit against Kyocera; Microsoft is seeking an injunction. The company was 5th overall during 2014 in terms of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with 2,829 U.S. patents last year. That’s a slight rise from Microsoft’s 2,814 U.S. patents in 2013, which was good for a 6th place finish in that year.

With an eye toward taking a step forward on the regulatory front, on Sunday, February 15th, the U.S. Federal Aviation Industry released a proposed framework of regulations for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, that the agency and many drone operators are hopeful will lead to the greater incorporation of drones into American airspace. However, some of the proposed regulations would effectively squash certain commercial applications of drone aircraft being developed by Amazon and others, or at least postpone them for the time being.

Shell maintains a significant investment into research and development within its own corporation. The company’s 2014 fourth quarter earnings report showed that Shell invested $428 million into R&D during that quarter, increasing their expenditures over 2013’s fourth quarter R&D costs of $363 million. During the entire 2014 fiscal year, Shell spent $1.2 billion on R&D. Decades-long investment into natural-gas-to-liquids (GTL) technologies on behalf of Shell has recently resulted in the development of a clear base oil derived from natural gas, a cleaner burning fossil fuel. Shell has also committed millions of dollars in just the past few months on educational initiatives and academic research, such as the $3.5 million it contributed to the University of Houston last October for energy and engineering education programs.

Softcard’s patents and their ability to protect Google Wallet against any potential legal challenges from Apple may be a much more important aspect of the acquisition than Softcard itself, which had struggled financially and laid off workers in the weeks leading up to Google’s purchase. There are many reasons for Softcard’s woes, including a need to rebrand the company after its original name, Isis, was co-opted by the Middle Eastern terrorist organization.