from Hacker News

Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

by l7l on 11/5/21, 12:10 PM with 33 comments

• by hungrigekatze on 11/17/21, 4:04 AM

  I've noticed a recent uptick in suspect 'new companies' debuting on HN. By that I mean I think someone is testing what sorts of company ideas, products, etc. gain traction with the HN audience, but to what end, I'm not sure...

  GoodIP's Twitter presence is limited to a MatthewBunchOfNumbers username... https://twitter.com/Matthew99770523/status/11792742969480683...

• by 1cvmask on 11/5/21, 12:57 PM

  I checked a number of companies that I know that have IP and patents and they came out empty. Maybe it is only accurate for public companies? Or maybe just partially accurate?

  This seems to be more of a partial source and not a definitive resource.

• by unwind on 11/5/21, 1:00 PM

  Cool!

  My first search ("bosch") turned up almost a quarter of a million in the main company. Waay more than e.g. Ericsson, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Microsoft and Google which I searched next.

  Is there a "leaderboard" page?

  Edit: found the top lists at the bottom, but I don't want to pick a category, and the list format shows list position but not patent count unless you click each entry, which to me was not very accessible.

• by pbhjpbhj on 11/5/21, 5:07 PM

  There's an issue with data concordance (I think that's the term) in that, for example, Snekma is listed as having a few RU patents but that's actually the same company as SNECMA (French aeronautical company) which is listed as having many more patents; but that company is now known as Safran.

  A proper historical analysis of companies would need to account for mergers/splits/renames of companies themselves - data which is only really able to be inferred (at best) from patent sources. You'll need company merger records etc..

  I wonder if they're also handling misspellings in company data? (Eg Bpsch instead of Bosch, this sort of thing does sometimes get printed on patent documents).

  Chinese company names are one of the harder cases, I feel, for example Edwards (pump manufacturer) presence in China appears to go by "Aidehua Vacuum" (which seems to be a roman-script Chinese transliteration of Edwards Vacuum).

  It's a hard problem to attend but I think you're going to miss a lot of detail in company-focused analysis if you don't tackle it.

  This is all personal opinion and in no way relates to my work."

• by have_faith on 11/5/21, 12:55 PM

  Microsoft seems to hold something over 100,000 worldwide (their main company and through their licensing company). Is there any logic in limiting the number of patents a company can hold? at what point do you simply have too many? is there such a thing as a monopoly from a purely intellectual property perspective?. Just thinking out loud.

• by ccuqui on 11/5/21, 2:31 PM

  I got curious and went to consult Amazon's patents. Among several others, in the same line, I found this one in particular: WO2020264431A1 2020-06-26 Connection pooling for scalable network services. I visited the patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020264431A1/en And essentially it's the (detailed) description of how a connection pool works. "Ipsis litteris" !!! Is it just me who thinks this kind of patent is simply nonsense? IMHO, the only purpose of this type of patent is to intimidate or trolling other companies with less money to spend on giant legal departments and non-sense patent disputes.

• by woodgrainz on 11/5/21, 3:24 PM

  FYI: The formatting/rendering of this page is way off for me (Chrome on 16" Mac). The top of the page is missing, and the bottom is cut off and doesn't scroll. Need to look at your UI again.

• by mnewtech on 11/6/21, 7:57 AM

  Without expecting any results I looked up Nike to see what was coming out and they have plenty of patents. Then I looked at adidas, same thing. That's crazy! https://goodip.io/iq/assignee/adidas-ag

• by motohagiography on 11/5/21, 2:23 PM

  Holy crap this is powerful. Is the company simlarity done using a clustering measurement on the corpus of language in the patents? I can't think of a product manager whose job does will not depend on this.

• by M_True on 11/5/21, 5:37 PM

  This tool looks amazing.Especially that you can super easily identify similar companies. This helps me for my current client project! Thanks

• by _n_b_ on 11/5/21, 1:37 PM

  I like it!

  I wish you could click on individual patents to see the full text of them, even if that was hosted elsewhere…