Rolf Claessen of IP Newsflash fame as well as patent attorney and partner with the patent law firm v. Kreisler Selting Werner in Cologne, Germany, brings us the new Free Patent PDF Download tool.  It’s free. It’s easy to use. It has broad coverage (espacenet database). My only small peeve is that you need to […]

LegalZoom, co-founded by Robert L. Shapiro of People v. O.J. Simpson fame, is a do-it-yourself website for getting legal documents but not legal advice. But, of course, this raises the question: if they’re not giving you legal advice, what is it you’re getting for your money?  Well, it appears you get some forms filled out […]

Planet Eureka! In the category of solutions looking for problems to solve, Planet Eureka! is a new on-line marketplace for patents and other intellectual property rights by Eureka Ranch Technologies in Cincinnati, Ohio. Planet Eureka! Offers the USA National Innovation Marketplace as a way to bring together buyers and sellers of intellectual property. The Marketplace […]

If you’re like most people, you come across a lot of documents in your life. Many go into the trash — and deservedly so — but many just can’t seem to find a home. You want to keep them for reference or for sharing but you don’t know where to put them. Enter docstoc.com. Aptly […]

IdeaTango is a social networking site that is set up to allow inventors a place to post, request and exchange ideas, inventions, intellectual property and patents — the MySpace of inventions. Companies can search the database of ideas for possible products for their company. The founder, Bryan Daigle, contacted me and asked if I would […]

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, a patent management solution offering to “Extract the Juice from your […]

PatentFizz is a site that claims to be a place where members of the community can comment on individual patents and it also has a few tricks up its sleeve. They recently rolled out some improvements to their FirstPage Reports product, which gives you a single .pdf document containing the first page of every patent document […]

A new internet launch, SparkIP is an a new online intellectual property exchange for connecting the scientific community with patent information. Described as a “visually rich, categorizing information into a fully-searchable innovation landscape of over 35,000 SparkClusters(TM), self-organizing and self-naming groups of patents and new inventions.” As new innovation is submitted, SparkIP’s arrangement of clusters […]