Schlagwort-Archive: California

Four Regional U.S. Patent Offices To Speed Up the Patent Process

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced plans to open regional USPTO offices in or around Dallas, Texas, Denver, Colorado, and Silicon Valley, California. These offices are in addition to the already-announced first USPTO satellite office to open on July 13 in Detroit, Michigan. The four offices will function as hubs of innovation and creativity, helping protect and foster American innovation in the global marketplace, helping businesses cut through red tape, and creating new economic opportunities in each of the local communities.

The offices will help the USPTO attract talented IP experts throughout the country who will work closely with entrepreneurs to process patent applications, reduce the backlog of unexamined patents, and speed up the overall process, allowing businesses to move their innovation to market more quickly, and giving them more room to create new jobs.

Selection of the four sites was based upon a comprehensive analysis of criteria including geographical diversity, regional economic impact, ability to recruit and retain employees, and the ability to engage the intellectual property community.

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA), signed into law by President Obama in September, requires the USPTO to establish regional satellite locations as part of a larger effort to modernize the U.S. patent system over the next three years.

Grow your own mushrooms – at home!

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Do you like mushrooms? Ever thought of growing your own ones? With the mushroom garden from Back to the roots it´s pretty easy.

Within ten days the grow-at-home mushroom kit lets you grow up to 1 1/2 lbs of oyster mushrooms per box. Believe it or not, but they grow on recycled coffee grounds.

Want to know who came up with this innovative idea?

As written on the homepage back to the Roots was founded by Alejandro Velez & Nikhil Arora during their last semester at UC Berkeley.


Two months away from graduation, and heading into the corporate world of investment banking & consulting, they came across the idea during a class lecture of being able to potentially grow gourmet mushrooms entirely on recycled coffee grounds.

Inspired by the idea of turning waste into wages & fresh, local food, they experimented in Alex’s fraternity kitchen, ultimately growing one test bucket of tasty oyster mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds. Soon they decided to forget the corporate route, and instead, become full-time urban mushroom farmers.

California leads the USA in innovation, or does it?

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Remember? We already told you about Utility patents. They are the most common patent type and a primary means of protecting intellectual property and technological innovation. IFI CLAIMS®Patent Services recently announced its top-50 ranking of global companies awarded the most U.S. utility patents in 2011. IBM remains in the first position, as it has for 19 years in a row, with a record of 6180 utility patents. Samsung trails second with 4894 and Canon replaces Microsoft in the third slot with 2821.

According to IFI, the USPTO issued 224.505 utility patents in 2011, an increase of two percent over 2010’s record breaking total. While preparing the 2011 Patent Intelligence and Technology Report, IFI analysts took a closer look at the 2011 US patent grants and in particular the location of the inventors named on these documents. Despite the obvious surge of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese companies in the Top 50 assignees, 50% of US patents in 2011 named US inventors.

Diving deeper into the US inventor information the IFI analysts could rank the States based on inventor data. In this case a patent is credited to a state if at least one of the patent’s inventors resides in the state. The top 10 states are shown below:

State
 2011 US Utility Patent Grants
California 32,715
Texas 9,407
New York 9,263
Massachusetts 7,106
Washington 5,737
New Jersey 5,583
Illinois 4,933
Pennsylvania 4,746
Michigan 4,644
Minnesota 4,609



As you see California is the clear leader with respect to the overall volume of patents accounting for 15% of the total number of US utility patents granted in 2011. However when you factor in population, IFI analysts find Vermont at the top of list along with Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The figure below shows a graph of the top 10 states by number of utility patents granted, and the number of patents granted per 100.000 residents.


So what exactly is going on in Vermont that accounts for its performance? The IFI analysts looked at the assignees and found IBM accounting for most of the patent activity. How come? IBM has a large facility in Burlington that designs and produces semiconductors.