2013-05-05
New release
Our latest release with lots of exciting and useful new features is out today! To learn more, please visit us at INTA (booth #122) or contact us at info@onomatics.com.
2013-04-02
Meet us at INTA
Today it’s only 100000 more days until the largest annual trademark event in the world, namely the 135th edition of the International Trademark Association (INTA) Annual Meeting, to be held in Dallas May 4 to 8. Onomatics/TrademarkNow will of course also be present, so please come and visit us at booth 122 and be one of the first to see our brand-new features (alas, NameGrid will not be one of them).
If you would like to schedule a meeting with us at INTA, please contact us at info@onomatics.com.
If you would like to schedule a meeting with us at INTA, please contact us at info@onomatics.com.
2013-04-01
New Product: NameGrid
Once again we are enlarging our product portfolio. Our latest offering is the NameGrid™, for those moments when you need the answers really now!now!now! and, for whatever reason, cannot rely on luxuries like computers, Internets, or electricity. It is also perfect for cybersecurity-conscious companies with policies against cloud computing solutions. Here is a prototype (the color trademarkability bug will be fixed in the release version):
Original: CC 3.0 SA by Reanimation Library.
If you’d like to be among the first NameGrid™ users, please e-mail us at info@onomatics.com today!
Original: CC 3.0 SA by Reanimation Library.
If you’d like to be among the first NameGrid™ users, please e-mail us at info@onomatics.com today!
2013-03-22
The 86th Pharmaceutical Trade Marks Group Conference, Hamburg
The 86th Pharmaceutical Trade Marks Group (PTMG) conference was held earlier this week in Hamburg, Germany. I was asked to jump in as a last-minute replacement for our CEO late last Friday afternoon and so it was off to Hamburg for me.
For me (and us) it was a very interesting conference for me, as the general tone especially through the Tuesday morning session seemed to be that searching and administrative tasks are costly and time-consuming, but cutting corners is likely to lead to problems, potentially even major ones, down the line. You can find some of the more specific points together with a few reactions from me in my live tweets from the conference (#PTMG, I guess I was the only one doing this), you can find all of them with this search.
Overall, it seems that the pharmaceutical industry is struggling with the very problems we are doing our best to solve. Indeed, the whole morning session started sounding more and more like our product specification, and I’m happy to say we already have more than half of it in our present release and the rest should be pretty much in place by INTA. Some of the new features we are adding are designed specifically for the pharmaceuticals industry or products in class 5.
To learn more, don’t hesitate to contact us!
For me (and us) it was a very interesting conference for me, as the general tone especially through the Tuesday morning session seemed to be that searching and administrative tasks are costly and time-consuming, but cutting corners is likely to lead to problems, potentially even major ones, down the line. You can find some of the more specific points together with a few reactions from me in my live tweets from the conference (#PTMG, I guess I was the only one doing this), you can find all of them with this search.
Overall, it seems that the pharmaceutical industry is struggling with the very problems we are doing our best to solve. Indeed, the whole morning session started sounding more and more like our product specification, and I’m happy to say we already have more than half of it in our present release and the rest should be pretty much in place by INTA. Some of the new features we are adding are designed specifically for the pharmaceuticals industry or products in class 5.
To learn more, don’t hesitate to contact us!
2013-03-02
TrademarkNow!
New name
Onomatics products are now branded TrademarkNow™. The new name makes our key advantage, speed, stand out; while also making our scope of work clear. The work our system does to check even the most minute details is crucial for you, and highlighted in the new logo At the same time, TrademarkNow™ signifies an improvement in our product portfolio and expanded service packages.
New products
NameRank™ is an entirely new product, not only for Onomatics but for the marketplace altogether. It allows you to rank up to five trademark ideas, even all entirely different, to see which one is safest. And it’s just $29.
NameCheck™ is the new Quick Search. It is not just a new design. It also adds several helpful new features, including the clear Safety Meter right at the top of the search report. Another new feature is the marker for protective owners based on oppositions they have filed. The price is unchanged at $99, or only $69 if you have already done a NameRank™ for the same search.
2013-02-26
Redefining Trademark Clearance with Intelligent Legal Technology (IPRinfo 1/2013)
(Published in IPRinfo 1/2013)
Intelligent technologies have the potential to profoundly transform the market for legal services. The intelligent trademark analysis solutions from the Finnish startup Onomatics are one example of this.
Intelligent technologies have made inroads to many aspects of our daily lives. From smartphones to smart homes, the changes have often been so gradual that it is easy to lose sight of all the advances made over the last decade or two.
On the other hand, in the legal workplace, many of the technologies we would take for granted elsewhere are noticeably missing. Instead we rely on information retrieval solutions designed for the 1970s and are satisfied as long as it is easier than using printed books, together with the occasional cosmetic update. This is about to change.
Prompted by technological developments in the society at large as well as the economy drive of the financial crisis, the market for legal services seems ripe for disruption. For example, the highly influential Scottish lawyer/scholar Richard Susskind has just published his fourth book on the future of legal services and he has received a more and more attentive audience with each new iteration.
To mark the changed paradigm and to avoid the unfortunate connotations of the term AI, I prefer to call the application-oriented field by the name of (intelligent) legal technology. Events such as Legal Hackathons and LawTechCamp/ReInvent Law show great promise, and the ongoing startup boom seems quite contagious and not only limited to the household names in the games business. In the US there are already dozens of tech startups in the legal field, and yes, there might already be one or two of them here in Finland as well...
Onomatics provides a comprehensive web-based system for trademark management. At its core is an artificial intelligence model of trademark similarity (likelihood of confusion) based on the author’s doctoral research in computational legal theory on computational modelling of vagueness and uncertainty in law at the University of Helsinki, currently at its final stages. The system utilizes a carefully designed blend of both rule-based and statistical techniques to deliver results while managing real-world complexity in the trademark domain. After all, in principle a trademark information system has to be able to represent the entire world of commerce in all existing and fantasy languages in one way or another.
The system currently covers US federal trademarks and EU CTMs with data from USPTO and OHIM, but many more jurisdictions will be added in the near future, starting with international trademark registrations with data from WIPO during Q1/2013.
For IP professionals the system offers an expert user interface, which allows for comparative evaluation and prioritization of so called long lists of trademark candidates in relation to prior rights. This process has traditionally been seen as cost-intensive and has rarely been done comprehensively.
The system is designed to make sense for both non-experts and IP professionals. For example, in the results summary, the goods and services are represented by immediately understandable icons in addition to the traditional class numbers of the Nice Classification.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and multiple additional product launches aimed at covering the full trademark lifecycle as well as not directly trademark-related aspects of the corporate and product naming processes are to be expected already later this year.
Anna Ronkainen
Chief Scientist and co-founder, Onomatics, Inc.
More information:
Intelligent technologies have the potential to profoundly transform the market for legal services. The intelligent trademark analysis solutions from the Finnish startup Onomatics are one example of this.
Intelligent technologies have made inroads to many aspects of our daily lives. From smartphones to smart homes, the changes have often been so gradual that it is easy to lose sight of all the advances made over the last decade or two.
On the other hand, in the legal workplace, many of the technologies we would take for granted elsewhere are noticeably missing. Instead we rely on information retrieval solutions designed for the 1970s and are satisfied as long as it is easier than using printed books, together with the occasional cosmetic update. This is about to change.
What is intelligent legal technology?
Research into computational models of law, or the research field currently best known as artificial intelligence and the law (AI & law) is even older than the term artificial intelligence itself (1956). Still, unlike many AI subfields, the AI & law community has struggled to recover from the so-called AI winter of the 1980s. The research community consists of a few hundred researchers, particularly in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Italy, and it has focused mainly on abstract questions of legal theory with scarce attention given to their applicability to practical systems.Prompted by technological developments in the society at large as well as the economy drive of the financial crisis, the market for legal services seems ripe for disruption. For example, the highly influential Scottish lawyer/scholar Richard Susskind has just published his fourth book on the future of legal services and he has received a more and more attentive audience with each new iteration.
To mark the changed paradigm and to avoid the unfortunate connotations of the term AI, I prefer to call the application-oriented field by the name of (intelligent) legal technology. Events such as Legal Hackathons and LawTechCamp/ReInvent Law show great promise, and the ongoing startup boom seems quite contagious and not only limited to the household names in the games business. In the US there are already dozens of tech startups in the legal field, and yes, there might already be one or two of them here in Finland as well...
Legal technology for trademark management
Onomatics, Inc. is a legal technology startup specializing in trademark law, founded in 2012 and based in Helsinki, Finland.Onomatics provides a comprehensive web-based system for trademark management. At its core is an artificial intelligence model of trademark similarity (likelihood of confusion) based on the author’s doctoral research in computational legal theory on computational modelling of vagueness and uncertainty in law at the University of Helsinki, currently at its final stages. The system utilizes a carefully designed blend of both rule-based and statistical techniques to deliver results while managing real-world complexity in the trademark domain. After all, in principle a trademark information system has to be able to represent the entire world of commerce in all existing and fantasy languages in one way or another.
The system currently covers US federal trademarks and EU CTMs with data from USPTO and OHIM, but many more jurisdictions will be added in the near future, starting with international trademark registrations with data from WIPO during Q1/2013.
An intelligent search engine for TMs
Onomatics Quick Search is an intelligent search engine for trademarks, demonstrating the versatility of models of legal decision-making by using one as the foundation for a relevancy ranking of trademarks. It takes into account the role of the goods and services in the assessment of trademark similarity and hence the ranking of the search results.For IP professionals the system offers an expert user interface, which allows for comparative evaluation and prioritization of so called long lists of trademark candidates in relation to prior rights. This process has traditionally been seen as cost-intensive and has rarely been done comprehensively.
The system is designed to make sense for both non-experts and IP professionals. For example, in the results summary, the goods and services are represented by immediately understandable icons in addition to the traditional class numbers of the Nice Classification.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and multiple additional product launches aimed at covering the full trademark lifecycle as well as not directly trademark-related aspects of the corporate and product naming processes are to be expected already later this year.
Anna Ronkainen
Chief Scientist and co-founder, Onomatics, Inc.
More information:
- https://www.onomatics.com/
- http://www.legalfuturology.com/ (the author’s research blog, written together with Anniina Huttunen)
- Related research publications by the author, available at http://ssrn.com/author=1684611
- Kobayashi, Bruce H. and Larry E. Ribstein: Law's Information Revolution. Arizona Law Review, Vol. 53, p. 1169, 2011.
- Susskind, Richard: Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (Oxford University Press 2013)
2013-01-02
State of the Trademark, volume 1
At Onomatics, our business is built on trademark data. Lots and lots of it. (Right now about two terabytes, and growing.) Providing a more intelligent way to access individual marks and potential marks is our core business, but we also like to get creative with data and try to see, what else we can do with it. And so here's the first instalment of our State of the Trademark series, in which we take a quantitative look into the trademark databases in their entirety rather than just the neighborhood of any individual mark. If you have any ideas on what kind of analysis you’d like us to do, please feel free to drop us a line.
To mark the new year, we are starting off with some quick key statistics with more of an emphasis on raw data than presentation, but we’ll get to the more advanced stuff later.
A few quick observations:
Disclaimer: While the information presented is based on official sources, these statistics are by no means official and should not be used as such. Differences between these and official statistics are possible, owing due to differences in interpretation. (For example, USPTO’s annual statistics are calculated based on their Oct 1 to Sept 30 fiscal year rather than the calendar year.)
(Also, the design of this post is still a work in progress, but we thought the numbers would be interesting enough by themselves right now. )
To mark the new year, we are starting off with some quick key statistics with more of an emphasis on raw data than presentation, but we’ll get to the more advanced stuff later.
A few quick observations:
- US registrations grew by 4.3% in 2012, reflecting an earlier growth in applications, whereas the number of incoming US applications in 2012 shows signs of stagnation.
- CTM registrations show the opposite trend: new registrations stayed the same but applications grew by 3.4%.
- There is a massive difference in the registration success rate for applications between OHIM and USPTO.
- There is a good downward trend in processing times for both offices, which also explains why there have been a few years with more registrations than applications at OHIM.
USPTO applications and registrations 2003–2012
| Year | Applications | Registrations |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 225185 | 132021 |
| 2004 | 251373 | 114573 |
| 2005 | 266790 | 122697 |
| 2006 | 280745 | 154310 |
| 2007 | 306561 | 171936 |
| 2008 | 294272 | 195724 |
| 2009 | 269237 | 178527 |
| 2010 | 284048 | 166859 |
| 2011 | 307282 | 182586 |
| 2012 | 307620 | 190426 |
OHIM applications and registrations 2003–2012
| Year | Applications | Registrations |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 56252 | 36760 |
| 2004 | 56980 | 36835 |
| 2005 | 56515 | 63022 |
| 2006 | 64026 | 58685 |
| 2007 | 72197 | 60044 |
| 2008 | 71018 | 72179 |
| 2009 | 71830 | 78795 |
| 2010 | 82189 | 90555 |
| 2011 | 89338 | 80968 |
| 2012 | 92351 | 81048 |
Average processing time in days, by year of registration
| Year | USPTO | OHIM |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 717 | 498 |
| 2004 | 705 | 542 |
| 2005 | 725 | 519 |
| 2006 | 661 | 457 |
| 2007 | 608 | 431 |
| 2008 | 548 | 388 |
| 2009 | 520 | 356 |
| 2010 | 508 | 302 |
| 2011 | 476 | 244 |
| 2012 | 464 | 232 |
Disclaimer: While the information presented is based on official sources, these statistics are by no means official and should not be used as such. Differences between these and official statistics are possible, owing due to differences in interpretation. (For example, USPTO’s annual statistics are calculated based on their Oct 1 to Sept 30 fiscal year rather than the calendar year.)
(Also, the design of this post is still a work in progress, but we thought the numbers would be interesting enough by themselves right now. )
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