Snark Hunting

Kevin Costner’s oil spill clean up machine & patent

Steve — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:03:19 +0000

At Igor we deal with intellectual property rights every week as we search thousands of trademarks while naming products for our clients. It’s not enough to have a good idea, you need one that you can legally own.

Kevin Costner’s much publicized Ocean Therapy Solutions company developed a soon-to-be-implemented oil and water separation machine. BP has ordered 32 of them thus far to help deal with their latest environmental disaster.

You can view the patent filing, description and drawings for Costner’s oil spill clean up machine here. Click on the pic in the upper right corner to see the full diagrams.

iOS therefore iAM (taken)

Jay — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:25:16 +0000

Steve Jobs just announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference that they are dropping “phone” from the name “iPhoneOS” to become, simply, “iOS”. This is a smart move.

Uh oh. Seems like Cisco Systems runs a big chuck of the Internet on some thing called iOS. It’s deja vu all over again: you may recall back in 2007 when the iPhone was announced that Cisco owned the trademark for the name “iPhone”. Once again, Apple rolls out the strategy of “name it what we want, get legal to make it happen later”. Cool. If every company operated like this, it would make the job of naming companies much, much easier. And put more lawyers to work, recharging our economy in the process.

UPDATE: Kudos to Apple for making a legal deal with Cisco this time before launching the product. Says Cisco: “Cisco has agreed to license the iOS trademark to Apple for use as the name of Apple’s operating system for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The license is for use of the trademark only and not for any technology.”

Patent Search Box for blogs / sites

Steve — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:33:54 +0000

ip.com (as in “intellectual property”) just launched a feature where you can add a Patent Search Box to your blog sidebar, so your visitors can search patents right from your site.

Search Box code available here.

You can do full searches for US Patents, US Patent Applications, Prior Art, PRC (China) Patents and PRC Patents in translation.

So that’s kinda cool.

PATENTS

Babies, teddy bears and flowers!

Steve — Thu, 27 May 2010 20:45:39 +0000

The systematic language of healthcare

Jay — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:21:10 +0000

Working on various healthcare projects lately got us thinking about the language used in healthcare patents:

Apparently, we are all becoming optimized healthcare reception systems.

Wordlab’s awesome name generators

Jay — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:34:40 +0000

Wordlab has a great collection of free name generators that can help you get started if you are trying to name a company, product or service yourself:

Wordlab’s Business Name Generator – 7,223,742 potential company, product or domain names to chose from.

Name Builder – Over 340,000 possible combinations — try it for a company name, rock band, album title, product name, book of poetry.

Restaurant / Bar Name Generator – Over 100,000 potential names for your restaurant, bar, pizzaria, taco stand, tavern, pub, cafe, bagel shop, etc.

Band Name Generator – 4193 band names direct from Wordlab’s personal collection.

Drug-O-Matic – Over 9.3 million potential drug names lurking within this little apothecary’s monster.

Character Name Generator – If you need to name any kind of character, human or otherwise, this is the mother lode. With 379,175,790 potential names, mostly well off the beaten track, you can populate an entire country with uniquely named characters.

Morpheme Machine – If mashing morphemes is your thing (attention Landor!), here are over 151,000 chunks of lingo chum to chew on.

The ACME Namemaker – And finally, when you don’t want to stand out from the crowd, here are over 26,000 ways to blend in quite nicely. I think this one must be the most popular with Igor’s competitors.

Happy naming!

iPad therefor I sue

Jay — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:31:24 +0000

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Beatle Walruses aside, is there really that much difference between “i” and “we”? There is if the next three letters are “pad”. Unless you died over 3 months ago, you are aware of Apple’s newly launched iPad. Now a German company with the delightfully apropos and Onion-like name Neofonie (“New Phony”) will be launching in June an iPad competitor tablet computer called…(pay attention trademark attorneys)… WePad! As in, “We have a Pad too.” Yep, iPad, meet WePad:

Geek.com picks up the story:

It’s everything the iPad was meant to be, according to German-based Neofonie GmbH that designed the device. WePad sports a large 11.6-inch screen and is fitted with a webcam and two USB ports, the two features sadly missing from Apple’s device. WePad runs Intel’s chip and a Linux software that supports both Flash content and Android apps. It’ll come preloaded with an open-sourced office productivity suite, too.

In case you’re wondering, yes – WePad will also do digital magazines. Neofonie teamed up with Europe’s largest magazine publisher Gruner+Jahr that promised to bring its flagship magazine Stern on the WePad.

It gets even better, as the company puts its indelible spin in the power of “We” (perhaps Nintendo might like to jump in here and Wii all over Neofonie as well), which is just so much more awesome than “I” (or “i”):

And if all of that wasn’t enough, Neofonie is dragging the Cupertino rival through the mud with its unapologetic marketing talk. For example, here’s how they defend the name choice:

Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me. We beg to differ. To us, the power of many beats the power of one.

“Some people”, indeed. Unfortunately for Neofonie, “some people” also have an army of lawyers standing by to slice the “Pad” right off of their “We”. So if Apple sucessfully keeps them from using “Pad”, and Nintendo jumps in and says they can’t use “We”, they might be left with WePad, or eeP, at least until Asus’s legal eagles claim a risk of confusion with their Eee PC, and take away their “e”.

I think this padacious upstart should just go with truth in advertising, and call it the Neofonie. Ask any “Expert, texpert”. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all Neofonie… And here are some major recently-granted Apple iPad patents that Neofonie would do well not to tread on:

Methods and apparatuses for operating a portable device based on an accelerometer (3.30.10)
Multipoint touchscreen (2.16.10)
Electronic device having display and surrounding touch sensitive bezel for user interface and control (2.2.10)
User interface gestures (2.2.10)
Proximity detector in handheld device (1.26.10)
Automatic detection of channel bandwidth (1.26.10)
Systems and methods for color managing content elements on a display device (1.26.10)
Identifying contacts on a touch surface (11.17.09)

More: Here are 82,212 ‘tablet computer’ related patents for your viewing pleasure.

Down the rabbit hole: Patent searching for patent search patents

Jay — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 05:27:15 +0000

On a slow day in hell, you can keep your home fires burning by getting all self-reflexive. Hence the ever-popular Company Names of Naming Companies name taxonomy.

Today’s exercise in self-reflexivity: Patent searching for “patent search” patents. Here’s a few to whet your whistle, from IP.com’s cool new Global Patent Search engine:

OK, that’s enough fun for one night. Go out and try it yourself. While you’re at it, see if anyone has a patent already for the latest new invention you’ve been tinkering with in the basement.

Wordlab reloaded for the future

Jay — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:34:32 +0000

Our sister site Wordlab, created by one of Igor’s founders (me), just re-launched today in a big way. I completely re-designed and re-coded the site, changing it 100% from the old Wordlab that had remained largely unchanged since it launched in 1998.

The new Wordlab is a full-fledged social network for naming and wordplay, collaboration and creative thinking. As such it is structured a bit differently than what you are used to if you were a user of the old Wordlab and its Wordboard forum, but the opportunities for interaction and collaboration are much greater and more powerful.

Check it out, sign up for a free membership, and join in the fun, either as someone looking for naming help, someone who can lend suggestions and advice to other users, or both.

Xfinity – a Dunder Mifflin idea

Steve — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:47:25 +0000

There has been much speculation and pontification on whence the name Xfinity came, but look no further than the looming Comcast-NBC merger. Whilst kicking the NBC tires, surely even a beast as slow-witted as Comcast fumbled across the NBC property ‘The Office”.

The Dunder Mifflin logo sports an infinity symbol

Xfinity is meant to signal Comcast’s foray into the future of high tech possibilities, while at Dunder Mifflin, “Infinity” is the name of the internal initiative to bring technology to the failing paper company.

Why would the comedy writers of “The Office” chose the name “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” for the high tech effort? Because it is silly, obvious, pitiful and ridiculous, in keeping with ambiance of the show.

The name was such a hit that DunderMifflinInfinity.com is the show’s official fansite.

In the second episode of the fourth season titled “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”, regional manager Michael Scott best summed up the idea of “Infinity” (or Xfinity, for that matter):

“Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me, the choice is easy.”

“Comcast Xfinity. The possibilities are mindless”