Anyone wanting to search “over 3.5 million US patents going back to the late 1960s” can scuttle on over to a new web site, SparkIP, which describes itself as “an intellectual property exchange improving the pace of innovation by connecting the scientific community and the information critical to them”.
Only time will tell if the new venture, with some heavyweight founders from Johns Hopkins and Duke University, will carve out for itself a sustainable niche on an increasingly crowded Internet. But the concept of a “fully-searchable innovation landscape” certainly has its appeal.
The idea seems to be to do something a little more intelligent than many a search engines. They reckon to have developed “algorithms that group and name related intellectual property into discrete clusters”. It will be interesting to see if those algorithms can make those quirky off-the-wall connections that can turn out to make a packet.
They throw out the invitation “If you are a university, a corporation, or a research lab interested in posting licensable technologies on SparkIP.com, please contact us to learn more. We will also soon allow anyone to post technologies directly to SparkIP.com.”
Unfortunately, the search fell over when we tried it in Firefox. It worked fine in Internet Explorer. A search for “plastic electronics” threw up an interesting patent for a “Tactilely enhanced visual image display”. Certainly qualifies as an odd idea, but do I really want to feel my screen?
