PatentCafe Adds Patent Portfolio Management Tool to its Intellectual Property Management Solution; IBM isn’t the Only Company that Can Profit from Patent Licensing
SME to Fortune 100 companies without IBM’s licensing infrastructure can create their own patent licensing opportunities using PatentCafe's ICO Portfolio Manager solution.
Yuba City, CA (PRWEB) April 27, 2005 -- PatentCafe has introduced ICO™
Portfolio Manager, the high value add-on module for the company’s ICO™ Suite of
patent research and intellectual property management solutions for enterprise
(http://www.IAMcafe.com).
IBM’s licensing efforts generate
nearly $2 B annually. With ICO™ Portfolio Manager SME to Fortune 100 companies
without IBM’s licensing infrastructure can create their own patent licensing
opportunities.
“Nokia licenses from Acacia Technologies”; “Samsung
licenses from Universal Display”; “Borland licenses from Certicom”; “Lexar Media
Inc., I-O Data Device and GoVideo license from Microsoft”. Such headlines
clearly echo the dramatic rise in patent licensing, a necessity in today’s
competitive technology environment.
Patent licensing leverages past
R&D investment to boost bottom line profits and grow shareholder value.
Licensing is also used as a defensive measure to mitigate the risks and expense
of patent infringement litigation.
ICO™ Portfolio Manager is the first
patent portfolio management solution that applies advanced linguistic data
mining capability of the ICO semantic patent search engine to a company’s entire
patent portfolio. The module helps patent attorneys, corporate counsel and IP
managers fully exploit their company's patent assets by helping identify new
licensees, mitigate litigation risk, and reduce duplicate R&D
costs.
“For those who identify prospective licensees first, there are
fortunes to be made. It sounds trite, but Fortune 500 portfolio managers agree.”
PatentCafe’s CEO, Andy Gibbs says “A couple of Fortune 100 portfolios ‘go live’
in next week”.
After a one-time setup process, a company’s portfolio is
internally searchable enterprise-wide against more than 21 million patent
documents in PatentCafe’s international patent data center. Thereafter, an
authorized company representative can add or remove patents from their portfolio
through an easy browser interface.
Using LSA’s natural language search
capabilities, licensees can simply copy and paste the full text of a
competitor’s product description into the search box, and identify the most
closely related patents the competitor may be infringing. “No other patent
management solution in the world delivers that capability” says
Gibbs.
“Stick licensing”, or asserting a patent against a competitor in
order to open the door to licensing negotiations, forces a prospective licensee
to weigh the costs of licensing against the more expensive alternative,
infringement litigation.
“Carrot licensing” requires the licensor to
identify potential “friendly” licensees, and making an offer to license one or
more patents that will bring future value to the licensee – the “carrot”.
ICO™ Portfolio Manager makes short work of winnowing huge portfolios
down to the bundle of patents that a licensee would consider valuable to their
business.
Literally, in minutes rather than weeks or months, the
module’s LSA technology can group related patents from portfolios as large as
IBM’s (nearly 40,000 patents), increasing the license value by identifying
long-forgotten or obscure patents sitting at the bottom of the portfolio.
PatentCafe launched the free Open Source Software Patent Search Engine with
IBM’s 500 free OSS patents in early 2005.
Adding standard alerting
functions to ICO Portfolio Manager allows companies to increase cross-licensing
of their existing patents across their divisions and subsidiaries, something
that makes CFOs happy.
The alert feature can boost corporate revenue,
while significantly reducing duplicate R&D activities in facilities unaware
that the parent corporation already has patented technology they can exploit.
Internal cross-licensing can also lead to faster time to market, while reducing
the chance of infringement.
About PatentCafe®
PatentCafe is a leading
provider of patent research tools and intellectual property management
solutions.
The company’s ICO™ Suite of enterprise IP management
solutions is used by legal and business professionals worldwide to transform
patent and technical data into actionable business information.
ICO™
solutions deliver the next generation data mining and analyzing technology for
improved patent quality, superior competitive intelligence, licensing revenue
optimization, and corporate governance compliance.
PatentCafe also
publishes IPFrontline™ Intellectual Property and Technology Magazine.
www.IAMCafe.com - Patent Search
Engine and Management Solution for Enterprise
www.IPFrontline.com -
Intellectual Property & Technology Magazine
For more information, or
to arrange interviews, please contact:
Andy Gibbs
Chief Executive
Officer
Email: e-mail protected from spam bots
Assistant: 530-671-0200
Ext. 203
# # #
Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/4/prweb233438.htm