Managing patents is often a time consuming and disjointed effort, especially for small companies (or even larger ones running lean). Fortunately, a number of companies have been mixing things up on the internet in an attempt to provide order to the chaos.
One new effort is WizPatent [1], a patent management solution offering to “Extract the Juice from your Patents” with downloadable WizPatent Manager and WizPatent Express.WizPatent Express is a patent search and management system integrated with Internet Explorer that abstracts search results directly from USPTO, Espacenet, FreePatentsOnline and Google Patent Search.
WizPatent Express uses Google Patent Search to search for keywords within the text images and has the ability to batch download and save patents from Google.Some highlights include:
- Batch PDF download capabilities and drag-and-drop features.
- Store collections locally on your harddrive.
- View the INPADOC status of EP patents as well as the PAIR status of US patents.
- Copy a block of text into your clipboard and WizPatent Express automatically abstracts out the relevant patent numbers immediately.
Granted, it would be nice if the USPTO would offer these types of functionality on their own but it does help that third parties are eager to fill any niche.
You can download WizPatent Express here [2].
Note to Apple users, this requires Windows XP or 2000 so I couldn’t try it out on my iMac Intel.