Patent Championships 2009

Last year IBM won the most number of patents. That is a championship the big Blue has won for the 17th time in a row! IBM has this image of being a very conservative company. That has changed a lot in the recent past. It has gone through couple of transformations. While it was previously synonymous with big iron, it earns a large part of its revenues through software services now! So, looks can be really misleading. Somehow the innovations must run pretty well if they have to manage this for 17 years consecutively! I am sure IBM is still not as casual as a Google or one of the start ups. Yet, this is running the innovation machine so well. There are a couple of really interesting things about the roll of honors. The second in line, Samsung managed to get significantly less number of patents. IBM received 4914 patents while Samsung received 3611 patents.

The other interesting aspect of the list is that out of the top 10 spots, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and HP are the only American companies. The others are from outside the US: the likes of Samsung, Canon, Panasonic Toshiba, Sony and Seiko Epson. A couple of trends become obvious. Things are going global without a doubt! And companies think that patents are an important tool in the global playing field.

Cisco Acquires Pure Digital

Pure Digital is the maker of Flip Video cameras, very affordable video cameras. They have released a new high definition version too. One of the reason for their popularity besides the low price is that you can directly hook up on USB and upload the video to the sharing sites. Cisco has just completed a deal to acquire the company.

Combine it with the announcement that they are moving into the blade server space with their California offerings and it starts to look like these are bets against the recession by diversifying the portfolio. Thy'll have to go head to head against companies like IBM, Sun and so on. So the product they are going to offer better be good. Not only that, to be able to break into existing market they'll have to offer very clear differentiating features on their products. Interestingly IBM seems to be bent on acquiring Sun for a price of somewhere between $6.5 to $8.x billions!

Both are growth areas despite the recession. Particularly the video segment, the video share segment is growing hugely. Servers also should be growing. There's speculation Cisco is interested in personal/home video conferencing. Let's see how all this plays out!