Pokemon GO: Aistemos sheds light on the state of patents in the area of augmented reality

Following yesterday's post on the potential for unlocking IP value at Nintendo in light of the Pokemon GO craze, this blogger has just seen today's blogpost from Aistemos—"Patents surrounding Pokémon Go – has someone caught them all"? Aistemos was established by Nigel Swycher, a long-time friend of this blog, who had a lengthy and illustrious career in London as a leading lawyer in IP transactions and strategy before deciding to follow his passion for IP analytics as a means of improving IP decision-making for businesses and their professional advisers.

The blogpost provides fascinating information and data about the patent position of Augmented Reality. The post notes in summary that--

"Augmented Reality (AR) technology has seen a surge in innovation since 2010;

AR relies on many technologies and has many applications;

Main technologies are head-mounted displays and image processing;

Siemens were pioneers and hold a large and mature patent portfolio."

In summary, the post proclaims—

"Pokémon Go has proven that AR is here to stay."

As we suggested yesterday, the jury is still out whether Nintendo will ultimately enjoy sustained commercial success from AR technology. In seeking to answer this question, Aistemos has provided useful information and more food for thought. The post is well-worth reading (and reading again).

Patent analytics for business and finance: a handy information source

But how could Einstein have foreseen
the computerised processing of Big Data?

Covent Garden, London-based Aistemos is one of a number of companies providing services and expertise in the field of patent analytics. Its objective is to organise intellectual property data of all kinds in such a way as to make it intelligible to, among others, those who buy and sell IP rights, those who finance those deals and anyone who seeks a clear view of the strengths, weaknesses, currency and dynamics of the IP portfolios of other players in the same market.  Aistemos is also a supporter and a prime mover behind the launch earlier this summer of ORoPO -- the Open Register of Patent Ownership.

This blogger, who is a member of the Aistemos Advisory Board, has been helping his friends at Aistemos to build and sustain a cheerful, user-friendly weblog that is designed to provide comment and insight into IP analytics and what might be termed adjacent topics. He is also moderating the company's LinkedIn Group, which seeks to offer a community resource for the discussion of Big Data, analytics and other topics of mutual concern. The company's Twitter account, also under this blogger's supervision, is strictly professional.

A handy check-list of items posted on the Aistemos weblog over the month of August can be found here.

The trillion dollar tipping point: a report, and a product launch

Not just "a" Westbury ...

Later today this blogger will be wandering down Mayfair to London's (The) Westbury Hotel to join the formal launch event for CIPHER, described by its creators at AISTEMOS as "the world’s first intellectual property analytics tool for the business community".  This launch coincides with the release of The trillion dollar tipping point: Exploiting the untapped value in patents, a report [edited by this blogger, who is a member of the company's Advisory Board] assessing the barriers and solutions to the monetisation of the intellectual property assets which are now said to account for up to 70% of enterprise value. 

Not all data is digestible --
nor can everyone digest it

The origins of CIPHER are quite interesting: it is the fruit of a pilot project involving over 60 organisations, which include BAE Systems, Marks & Clerk, GE, PwC and Slaughter and May. Their objective was to develop a business intelligence product that could aggregate, analyse and visualise data relating to patents and related events including litigation and licensing.  This data was already available in one form or another -- but it could be indigestible or hard to assess in the hands of people who needed it in order to take business decisions.  Using databases licensed from Thomson Reuters, Lex Machina, Patent Freedom, ktMINE, 1790 Analytics and Relecura, the CIPHER tool has the capacity to search across 30 million patent families and all the world’s patent-owning organisations in real time.

This shouldn't be the standard response
to a request for a patent-backed loan

This post does not seek to promote CIPHER: if it is any good, people who try it out and find it useful will continue to use it; it will become successful and no doubt breed competitors, as is only natural.  Rather, this post seeks to draw the attention of readers, particularly those in the financial sector, to something mentioned in The trillion dollar tipping point and which has become increasingly a matter of concern: there seems to be a disjunction between the high value of intangibles such as patents in court and in transactions, on the one hand, and their relative lack of appeal as security for loans on the other. Faced with a request for finance backed by such intangibles, banks sometimes appear to behave as though the choice before them lies between taking a bad risk and making no loan at all. This is not the result of malice or wilful blindness, but stems from the paucity of information on which banks can assess the nature of the risk they take in lending on intangible securities. CIPHER is one way in which banks can better calculate risk and make their loan decisions with confidence based on understanding, not caution based on ignorance.

If anything interesting is said at the launch, this blogger will do his best to relay it to you tomorrow.

The trillion dollar tipping point: Exploiting the untapped value in patents [which also contains a Foreword from Professor Sir Robin Jacob] can be accessed here

If you are too busy to read the whole report, there's a short summary of it here

If infographics are your scene, there's one here for you