Posts Tagged: "IBM patents"

As IBM was preparing to announce yet another milestone achievement, this year receiving 9,100 U.S. patents in 2018, I had the opportunity to sit down for an on the record conversation with Mark Ringes, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for IBM, and Manny Schecter, Chief Patent Counsel for IBM. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but what appears below specifically relates to IBM’s innovation leadership and quest to patent as much of its technology and innovation as possible. We discuss how IBM’s commitment to innovation and how the company is unafraid of pursuing the hardest, riskiest innovations because those will be the most valuable innovations in the future. Of course, even IBM is constrained with a budget, and must report to shareholders, so the philosophy is to obtain patents in a variety of areas and allow the research, technology and market realities dictate where future resources, and company efforts, are placed.

As it has for the past quarter century, IBM today topped the charts for U.S. patent holders, with 9,100 patents granted in 2018. This is the 26th consecutive year that IBM has claimed the number one spot on the annual list of U.S. patent recipients. This year, nearly half of the patents the company received relate to hot button technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, security, blockchain and quantum computing.

On July 27th, a jury verdict entered into the District of Delaware awarded $82.5 million in reasonable royalties to information technology giant IBM after that company asserted a series of patents against e-commerce marketplace provider Groupon. The jury determined that Groupon infringed on a series of four patents asserted by IBM.

IBM inventors received a record number of U.S. patents in 2017, again blowing past their own previous record to sail past 9,000 issued patents. Over the last 25 years IBM inventors have received patents for such transformative ideas as secure credit card transactions, guiding the visually-impaired using RFID, the world’s fastest supercomputers and earthquake detectors. With more than a quarter-century of innovation under its belt, IBM has continued to work on the most contemporary, relevant problems that exist today. This year alone IBM inventors obtained patents in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and Quantum Computing technologies.

Patenting activities in the quantum computing sector have rapidly increased in recent years, with the U.S. by far the preferred jurisdiction for applicants… One interesting finding from the Patinformatics report is that, although Northrop Grumman doesn’t have the largest portfolio in the field, it is well-situated to compete with the biggest players. “One of our main assertions is that, if there’s an organization interested in being competitive with IBM, they may want to contemplate a partnership or acquisition of Northrop Grumman,” Trippe said. Both Northrop and IBM have made significant investments into super-conducting loop qubit technologies and Northrop actually edges IBM in logic gate hardware.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States. Hurricane Andrew bore down on the American Southeast, causing billions in damage after wreaking destruction from Florida to Louisiana. Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show. The Buffalo Bills were in the Super Bowl. Los Angeles saw a string of deadly riots related to the LAPD’s televised beating of Rodney King. And 1992 was the last year during which a company other than American information technology firm IBM (NYSE:IBM) could claim that it had earned the greatest number of U.S. patents… With over 8,000 patents IBM stands supreme in the US patent world, earning the most US patents in 2016 and claiming the top spot for the 24th year in a row.

In terms of sheer numbers, in the CB Insights study, which curiously did not include patent giant and American research juggernaut IBM, Microsoft ranks supreme among this collection of five major tech firms. The Redmond, WA-based hardware and software developer has applied for a total of 16,840 patents over the seven years of the study. In second place is Google with 14,596 patent applications over the same time period. Although exact numbers for the other three firms weren’t publicly released by CB Insights, these two firms are followed by Apple (13,420 patent applications), Amazon (5,186) and Facebook (2,508), respectively. Collectively, these five companies have been pushing towards a total of 10,000 patent applications filed per year. This trend marks a sharp rise in patent application filing activities among the Big 5, which filed 3,565 patent applications collectively in 2009.

Although the type of copyright infringement that gets the most attention today in our digital age is the downloading of music and/or movies, infringement of print and picture medium (such as photographs) is also punishable under the Copyright Act, and are a very real problem for publishers and photographers alike. Indeed, copyright infringement is an unfortunate reality for all content…

IBM has been wading further into the medical fields over the past few years thanks to the strength of its cognitive computing division, especially the rise of Watson Health. Last year, we covered the news that Watson Health had picked up its first major corporate partner in Israeli generic medication developer Teva Pharmaceuticals (NYSE:TEVA). Near the end of May, IBM made a significant hire for its Watson Health division by bringing aboard Dr. Paul Tang, formerly the chief innovation officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO) for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Watson Health already has grown its list of partnering consumer health developers including Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE:MDT)

2016 has gotten off to a strong start for the company as the patent portfolio analysis tools at Innography are showing us that IBM has already earned 1,927 U.S. patents through the first three months of this year. Not surprisingly, much of IBM’s patent activities have been focused on computing devices, data sets, computing environment, storage devices and data structures. Natural language technologies are another area where IBM has pursued recent innovative advances. Likewise, we note a trio of patents recently issued to IBM in automotive and related sectors, starting with the crash damage mitigation technology, technologies for communicating information between vehicles, and enhanced methods of traffic routing involving stoplight timing.

Despite shrinking revenues, IBM may be able to chart its way back to stability if success continues for its Watson cognitive computing platform, the corporation’s fastest growing division by revenues and one which is proving applicable to a surprising range of industries. To profile IBM’s recent research and development related to Watson, we thought that we’d profile a series of data analytic and predictive modeling technologies for which IBM has been issued patents. For example, the evaluation of medical diagnoses for evaluating predictionaccuracy is detailed within U.S. Patent No. 9,235,808, entitled Evaluation of Predictions in the Absence of a Known Ground Truth. It claims a method to evaluate a prediction that a patient has a given disease by collecting a plurality of clinical data from each patient.

IBM once again has topped the list of annual U.S. patent recipients, receiving 7,355 patents in 2015. This is the 23rd consecutive year IBM has received more U.S. patents than any other entity in the world. More than 8,500 IBMers residing in 50 states and territories and 46 countries are responsible for IBM’s 2015 patent tally. IBM inventors who reside outside the U.S. contributed to more than 36 percent of the company’s 2015 patents.

Innovation in the automotive sector was a huge story, both for the types of technologies being developed and the companies pursuing the R&D in that field. Drones and robotics also played a role in other top patent applications which we’re profiling today. Rounding out our list of top 2015 innovations includes an emotion analysis system for financial security, wireless charging schemes, low-power communications for wearable devices and a greenhouse window that can generate electricity while improving crop yield.

2015 was a truly remarkable year for innovation and we saw major trends in self-driving cars, wearable technologies, digital wallets and much more. I hope you will enjoy this top 10 listing, which includes innovations for providing water in arid regions, wireless charging systems for electronic devices and even the collection and retransmission of sunlight. Of course, as with all of these types of lists, the criteria used for inclusion on this list is subjective, based on my own personal preferences. Please feel free to let us know if you saw something particularly noteworthy in 2015.