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Cargoes

by John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

The themes of the poem “Cargoes” by John Masefield include culture and the development of technologies over centuries. In the second line, Masefield refers to Ophir – the famous region of gold mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament. At Minesoft, a similar reference comes to mind as Ophir Daniel, co-founder and innovation engine, has been integral to fostering a culture of curiosity and to the growth in development and prosperity throughout the history of the company.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Ophir began his career in the electronics and aviation industry in Israel. He went on to design a range of software solutions for leading German and US corporations. After moving to London, Ophir and his wife, Ann Chapman, decided to combine their technical and business skills to start a venture of their own. Then, after a few years developing and selling products for RDS and Questel-Orbit, they began developing Minesoft products, starting with PatentOrder – the high-speed online patent ordering and delivery system.

In 2003, Minesoft and RWS joined in close collaboration to create PatBase, an online database of over 125 million patent documents translated into many different languages. Close working relationships with top patent offices around the world, including the EPO, USPTO and SIPO (among many others!) ensure the patent data is continuously updated. Many programmes run in the background to quality check this data, making corrections where necessary.

PatBase users include engineers, chemists, lawyers and more, from all around the globe. All users, whatever their level of experience, can easily query on PatBase’s web interface. Whether it’s for research and development, competitive intelligence or to avoid infringement.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rail, pig-lead,

Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

In a nutshell, Minesoft’s innovation model is cyclical. Ann, Ophir and their dedicated team of technologists and business strategists develop solutions in close collaboration with their users so that they can quickly and accurately find the information they need to support their innovation processes. By listening to users from an array of professions and backgrounds, Minesoft has developed general and niche solutions to solve their customers’ business problems. These solutions include Pat-KM which links legal, business and R&D professionals through one framework making internal IP knowledge easy to share throughout a corporation. Another example is Chemical Explorer, designed especially for chemists to easily search for and extract chemical structures from full text patent documents. This strategy has led Minesoft to achieving the one of the highest client retention rates in the industry.

Minesoft is optimistically looking ahead to the new year, expecting a roll out of a new and improved iteration of the company’s portfolio leading search engine which includes added functionality in natural language searching and semantics. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic at Minesoft. The company is hoping to develop solutions that can learn from the data itself to enable automatic translation, image and mining technologies. As this decade ends, Minesoft can reflect on all they have accomplished so far with great pride and look forward to further collaboration with partners and users as the IP industry continues to innovate.

Sign-up for your free two-week trial of PatBase here.

Source: Cargoes by John Masefield