AmberBlog

Ambercite's Ben Palmer, our Director of Software Development, presented on 'Big Data" to the Churchill Club this week (a group focused on IT and startups). Ben was standing in for our Managing Director Doris Spielthenner, who was unavoidably detained elsewhere working on another big data project for the Australian government.

Ben was one of three excellent speakers. Ian Holsman, consultant & Former Chair of the Apache Hadoop project, spoke about the work he had done on data mining for a large consumer news website. This at one stage included real time feedback from the newspieces they were posting on the website, allowing the website to fine tune articles of interest for their audience.

Peter Buckingham from Spectrum Analysis Australia spoke the work he did in predicitng the best location for new franchise outlets, based on sophisticated data analysis. He also discussed a recent court case in Australia, where a franchisor was successfully sued by a franchisee over misleading representation made by the former over likely sales for a new franchise. When asked on what basis these predictions were made, the franchisor admitted to 'scientific guessing'. The judge was not impressed.

Ben spoke about some earlier work he and his team had done for the Australian government on predicting air traffic movement all over Australia, and in particularly deviations from expected movements, in real time, i.e. while these planes were in the air. Ben also previewed recent developments in our patent searching software. 

Despite the variation in areas of interest, some common themes emerged from all three speakers and the followup discussion:

• The real value in big data is not the data itself, but what we do with it. Visual presentation of the resulting analysis can help end users make the most of this value.
• Data quality, even from reported reliable sources, can be very patchy. There will be lots of hole. This in turn creates opportunities to identify this missing data, which can be very important.
• Timely analysis can be very important

All of these concepts have been taken on board in our development program:

• We have been told that our visualisations are the best in the business, but we aim to go beyond anything we have done before. 
• Like others, we also need to clean up the data we are using. We are tackling the problem of missing data in ways that we think will surprise and delight many people. Certainly our internal panel of patent attorney testers are more than excited by what we are showing them, and the additional information being made available when compared to other patent data sources.
• And while we don't necessarily need to process patent data faster than planes can fly, we understand that clients want results in real time when use patent analysis software, and that new patent data is published every day that our clients will want to know about.

Interested in knowing more? Come back to us, and we will keep you fully informed about future product releases.

A recent story which many of us might have seen, highlighted the importance of visualizations in jury trials. In many ways the value of visualizations are self-evident. Yet many of us in the patent space are slow to embrace the power of visualizations to make the complex stories we tell easier to explain.

An analogy we like to use in presentations is the hypothetical new visitor to New York. They do their homework - they determine that the subway is a good way to get around. But they have a choice on how they receive information about the subway system - either as a spreadsheet list of subway stations, or a subway map showing how the stations link together.

Of course this hypothetical visitor is almost always going to select a subway map over a list of subway stations. Yet the majority of patent search results are supplied as a list, or use simple visualizations that might show how a given patent is connected to their nearest neighbors, but no more than that.

The technology now exists to turn patent data into sophisticated visualizations that turn data into insights. Consider the smartphone patent 'battlefield map', which summarises 7100 smartphone patents that have either been litigated, or are closely linked to patents that have been litigated. This single map, produced using Network Patent Analysis (NPA™) provides a unique perspective on a complex legal space in one picture. Further examples of these types of visualizations can be found in the smartphone patent white paper.

Improved insight can help companies make better decisions, but this may only be one benefit. Just as NPA can help our clients understand how their patents fit into the technology environment they are competing in, NPA can also help patent owners market their IP to the world. In the first public NPA™ study we published, we highlighted the importance of hybrid car patents owned by Paice Corporation, an early mover in the hybrid car space. This was not because Paice was a client - to this date there has been no commercial relationship between Paice and either Griffith Hack or Ambercite. We were just reporting on what we found. However Paice were quick to pick up on our endorsement of their patents, and now use our analysis of their patents on their website (and with our permission).

The ability of NPA™ patent analysis to provide compelling marketing support for NPA™ owners is being picked up by our clients, and understandably. We all face the challenge on telling our story in a busy world. Any improved delivery of this story has the potential to make a positive impact on how the story is received by your various stakeholders, such as licensing targets, commercial partners, suppliers, clients, board of directors etc.

Want to know more? Check out our smartphone or hybrid car papers. However this is only part of what we can now do, and where we are going to take patent visualization in the future. Our aim is to change the way you think about patents and patent data, and we are already heading down this path.

If you think you are ready to move your IP marketing to the next level, contact us to arrange a presentation of what we can do, and our client case studies. You just might surprise yourself about what is now possible with the right tools.