It is with no little personal pleasure that this blogger can write a word or two about
AISTEMOS, which so far as he can tell is the first IP business intelligence tool to aggregate, analyse and visualise the criteria that driver patent risk and value for the wider business community.
AISTEMOS launched a Beta version of its first product, CIPHER in June
[there's a short video of the launch here]: this was recently demonstrated at
Intellectual Asset Management (
IAM) magazine's IP Business Congress 2014 event in Amsterdam, which was timed to coincide with the publication in IAM of an article, "Big Data solutions to determining IP risk and value", by AISTEMOS CEO Nigel Swycher (a one-time student of IPKat blogmeister Jeremy).
Early progress has so far been impressive. The company has assembled a Pilot Group which includes many organisations that have never factored into their considerations the vast amounts of publicly available information that is available about IP assets and related events, such as litigation and licensing. This group includes major companies, banks, accountants, law firms, patents attorneys, consultants (you can check out the full list
here).
There are many reasons why it is inly now that a product of this sort has been developed. These include the significant increase in and the availability of data and the reduced cost of the computing power necessary to analyse the data. Supply of data and low-cost computing was a necessary condition, but not however a sufficient one: there also had to be market demand, plus the increased recognition that IP is a vital and valuable asset class means that access to fast, comprehensive and comprehensible data is essential.
CIPHER is built on the belief that all patent data has an impact on either risk or value, and that risk and value are relative and not absolute measures. When depicted graphically, this enables any company to be plotted relative to other companies that own similar IP. Here on the right is a representation of the CIPHER Grid. AISTEMOS refers to CIPHER as a big data solution. By this, they seek to convey that the strength of their product is its ability to aggregate a number of large and varied datasets, including Derwent (from Thomson Reuters), ktMINE (patent licences), Lex Machina and Patent Freedom (IP litigation), not to mention other specialist datasets relating to corporate ownership and patent strength. So while it is right to be sceptical about any company that claims to be first at anything, it's easy to see the significant challenge that AISTEMOS has taken on.
Disclosure: this blogger is a member of the AISTEMOS advisory board.
