Press release
Minesoft Wins Best Exporter At Regional Chamber Of Commerce Awards 2014

London, Friday 31st October: Minesoft has been announced as winner of the ‘Best Exporter’ category at the annual business awards, organised by the Richmond Chamber of Commerce – one of the accredited nationwide British Chambers of Commerce. The awards are a recognition and celebration of regional business success, and the judging panel awarded Minesoft ‘Best Exporter’ for its achievements in rapidly growing global export markets in the Intellectual Property information field.

Director Ann Chapman was presented with the award by the Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable, the Rt Hon MP Zac Goldsmith, Cllr Steven Speak, and the award-winning television presenter and journalist Lynne Fauld-Woods, at a Gala Dinner held on the 17th October at the world-famous Twickenham Rugby Stadium. On accepting the award, Chapman explained that “almost 90% of our annual revenue is generated outside the United Kingdom, with a client base ranging from very large corporation to specialised intellectual property law firms and patent attorneys.”

Working in the niche field of patent information, Chapman added that “although Minesoft is a well-known name and leader within the industry, broader recognition is always welcome. Minesoft won the Queen’s Award for International Trade in 2009 and this latest business award is great recognition once again of our international reach – reflected in an ever-growing global client base, a worldwide team of dedicated multi-cultural and multi-lingual staff and the continual expansion and enhancement of our patent information products to provider greater coverage of and accessibility to patent data for users across the globe.”

Minesoft Director Ann Chapman receiving the Best Exporter Award at the Awards Gala Dinner

Minesoft was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Richmond-Upon-Thames in Greater London, with offices and representation globally including Germany, USA, Japan, China, Israel and India. Minesoft specialises in patent information software solutions encompassing IP research, monitoring and analysis, IP document retrieval, patent archiving and competitive intelligence systems.

Press release
Corporate Tree Enhances Company Searches In Patent Information Platforms PatBase And PatBase Express

Minesoft and RWS Group Introduce Corporate Tree To Their Patent Search Platforms

London, 30th October. A new Corporate Tree feature has been added to the global patent search platforms PatBase and PatBase Express to enhance company name searches.

PatBase – developed in partnership by Intellectual Property solutions provider Minesoft and search and translation firm RWS Group – is a professional platform for searching, reviewing and analysing over 100 million patent publications from 101 worldwide patent-issuing authorities. PatBase Express is the end-user version of PatBase, drawing on the same comprehensive patent coverage and offering a streamlined interface designed for casual or endusers. The Corporate Tree has been added to both systems to offer enhanced patent assignee searching for all levels of user.

A patent assignee is the owner of the patent – the person or corporate body to whom all or limited rights under a patent are legally transferred. Company name or assignee searches are a starting point for many patent search projects, and become particularly important when undertaking competitive analysis tasks. Ann Chapman, Director at Minesoft, explains, “We aim to make searching by company as straightforward and effective as possible in PatBase. Variations in spellings, transliteration across languages and patent filing practices in general all contribute to the challenge patent searchers face when trying to gather a conclusive set of results based on company names. When we first launched PatBase in 2003, we made a Browse Index available from the outset to make it easier for users to look up company names in the index and identify variations.”

The new Corporate Tree lookup tool goes a step further, providing a quick and easy way to identify subsidiaries and other affiliations of a chosen company, so that all related companies can be included in a single search. The tool will “help searchers overcome some of the complexities of searching by company name arising from mergers and acquisitions or complicated parent-subsidiary relationships,” adds Chapman. “The newly added Corporate Tree minimises the risk and delivers better results”

Furthermore, Users can take advantage of the new, integrated PatBase Analytics software to extract meaningful insights from their search results and analyse competitor portfolios in even more depth.

Data for the Corporate Tree is derived from a corporate relationship database compiled and maintained in-house by Minesoft & RWS Group.

Press release
Minesoft and RWS Introduce Powerful New Patent Analytics Software and Corporate Tree Feature to PatBase Express

London, September 24th,  2014 – PatBase Express, the online searchable patent database created by Minesoft and RWS Group, benefits from powerful new Patent Analytics software, a Corporate Tree feature and sophisticated patent Legal Status review functionality.

Gain Competitive Intelligence With PatBase Analytics Software

Brand new patent analytics software has been added to PatBase Express, enabling users to analyse extensive sets of tens of thousands of patent records instantaneously and gain insights into technology trends, opportunities and competitor activity. The software, developed in-house by Minesoft’s patent information specialists, has been designed to process large patent data sets at high speeds to produce interactive, clear graphs and charts in minutes, with additional customisation options including an analytics dashboard with widgets.

Ann Chapman, Minesoft Director, said, “We designed PatBase Express to be a versatile, intuitive patent search platform for end-users. With the growing emphasis on extracting meaningful insights from search results and producing clear, visual reports, introducing a sophisticated Analytics module to the interface was the next logical step.”

Corporate Tree Tackles Complexities Of Searching By Patent Assignee Name

In conjunction with the Analytics software, Minesoft and RWS Group introduced a Corporate Tree feature to PatBase Express in September. Currently available in BETA, the Corporate Tree provides a quick and easy way to identify subsidiaries and other affiliations of a chosen company in order to include all related companies in a single search. Based on a corporate relationship database complied in-house, the “Tree will continue to grow as more corporate affiliations are identified – over 20,000 companies have already been added. The new tool helps searchers to overcome the obstacles of complex corporate mergers, acquisitions and ownerships,” added Chapman.

These new features follow the introduction earlier in 2014 of a sophisticated patent Legal Status tool to PatBase Express, with an interactive Timeline designed to speed up the review of complex patent legal status information and a Reassignment Browser to help users understand the history of ownership of a patent.

Press release
Minesoft Launches New Responsive PatBase Express Website For Patent Research

PatBase Express – the online searchable patent database created by Minesoft and RWS Group – has been redesigned to provide a seamless and consistent user experience across multiple devices and platforms. 

London, September 23rd, 2014 PatBase Express – the online searchable patent database created by Minesoft and RWS Group – has been redesigned to provide a seamless and consistent user experience across multiple devices and platforms.

PatBase Express is the global patent database designed for end-users in an organisation, offering a simple and intuitive way of searching and reviewing worldwide patent literature. The remodelled website automatically adapts according to screen size and orientation, responding dynamically to the device without the user having to continuously resize and scroll to carry out their patent research. The new responsive design means that navigating PatBase Express and viewing search results is a fluid experience, whether the user is accessing it from a PC, a tablet or a smartphone. Optimisation for viewing across all major platforms, including iOS and Android, makes PatBase Express accessible and user-friendly in any environment.

Ian Perriman, Minesoft’s Design Manager, explains, “Increasing numbers of our users are accessing PatBase Express on mobile devices, so we wanted to ensure that the website is optimised for display across these platforms as well as for desktop users. In addition to automatic resizing and orientation adjustment, tablet and smartphone users will be able to move through patent search results fluidly by simply swiping across and benefit from features such as the interactive patent drawings carousel.”

Across all platforms, the redesign improves the user experience with new touches like bolder icons, a fixed toolbar and a bright new colour scheme – making PatBase Express easy to use for any user, anywhere, on any device.

 

Press release
New Chinese Interface For PatBase

Minesoft and RWS Group announce the release of a Chinese-language version of PatBase, the global patent database. 

Patent, Intellectual Property and information professionals in China stand to benefit from the launch announced today of a Chinese language interface for the Advanced version of the patent research platform, PatBase. For the growing numbers of PatBase users based in China, the ability to navigate the database in their native language will facilitate wider access and greatly improve search efficiency.

The full PatBase Advanced interface, including search forms and help files, has been translated into Chinese, strengthening the position of the database as a vital global corporate resource for R&D and Competitive Intelligence. PatBase Advanced (designed for patent search professionals) is already available with full English and Japanese interfaces, whilst PatBase Express (the end-user version) is currently available in English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

Ann Chapman, Director at Minesoft, added “From the outset we have been focussed on not only the scope and quality of coverage in PatBase, but also its accessibility. The new Chinese interface will improve the search experience for our existing Chinese users and open up PatBase to native speakers in China and elsewhere who have yet to discover what it offers. Combined with powerful cross-lingual search functionality including the Language Explorer, searchable translations, and on-demand machine translation tools, this latest development offers a great advantage to Chinese-speaking patent searchers.”

To further boost functionality in PatBase for Chinese-speakers, over 20 million European, PCT and US patent documents have been machine translated into Chinese and will soon be easily searchable from the new interface.

Minesoft and RWS will be showcasing the new Chinese interface at the Patent Information Annual Conference of China (PIAC) in Beijing, at the China National Convention Center on the 12th and 13th of September.

 

Press release
Advanced New Legal Status Tools Added To PatBase

Minesoft and RWS Group introduce sophisticated new Legal Status review tools and a Similarity Search to PatBase, the global patent database. 

The issue of access to current, interpretable legal status data has been high up on the agenda of many patent conferences, user group meetings and online forums since the end of 2013, and enhanced legal status functionality has been developed as a priority for PatBase.

Is this patent active? 

The advanced new functionality speeds up the review of complex patent legal status information, displaying a high level of detail and allowing users to drill down to pin-point specific events e.g. occurring in a specific country or selection of jurisdictions or in a certain month. The augmented Timeline provides a fully interactive graphical display of legal events over the lifetime of a patent application with colour-coding to indicate the event group – is it dead or alive for example? As with the concise legal status Table, the information displayed can be tailored to requirements with filter options, and links are available to view abstracts or to check on current status at the national patent office registers.

Patent ownership 

With company mergers and acquisitions and transfer of patent ownership increasingly common occurrences, the new Reassignment Browser is a significant new addition to the legal status toolset in PatBase. It neatly displays the entire history of ownership of a patent, also referred to as Chain of Title in the USA. The most recent reassignment event only for each patent can be shown, or the table can be expanded to display the whole chain of events.

Legal Status information is an essential component of a patent search, and these latest enhancements are designed to make it easier than ever to ascertain the status of a patent in order to make informed business decisions.

Similarity Search 

Released at the same time as the Legal Status tools, another popular search function – the Similarity Search -has been added PatBase at the request of users, having been introduced to the end-user interface PatBase Express in late 2013. This intelligent semantic-based search option enables similar patents to be rapidly retrieved based on a section of text input from a patent or another scientific document imported into PatBase from other sources.

 

For further information about PatBase, contact Minesoft on [email protected] or +44(0)208 404 0651