I am an IBM Master Inventor, which means that, in addition to having wide experience with patenting (I have over 20 issued US patents, plus 1 patent issued in China), I help people with less experience get started and be successful with patenting.

Challenges

• Help novice inventors understand the requirements around patenting (for example, why their idea, while an interesting feature, is not patentable)
• Keep people interested in patenting, even when it requires extra work
• Find ways to pull more people into the patenting process.

What I do

• Review patent ideas, giving feedback to less experienced inventors, to help them improve their ideas
• Come up with new patent ideas, working solo or in teams
• Help determine where patentability opportunities exist in new products and features
• Meet with non-inventors, to encourage them to try patenting

A few interesting recent patent applications

Here are some of the applications that were sent to the US patent office in recent months.

Patent Application 20150052129 : Weighting Sentiment Information. This application describes a way to assign different weights to sentiment information (e.g., twitter feeds), so that information about the posters is factored into the weight. For example, someone with a large network, or in an influential position in a company, or who works for one of your customers, is likely to be of greater importance than other posts.

Patent Application 20140244363 : Publication of Information Regarding the Quality of a Virtual Meeting. This application describes a method for capturing information about who are good meeting presenters or chairs, using various quality metrics in a meeting, such as thumbs-up and clapping emoticons, time spent by participants in the meeting (and time spent with focus on the online meeting), other more standard sources (such as surveys), and publishing that information to social collaboration systems, where it can be used to help determine who might be best at performing these tasks.

Patent Application 20150195312 : Allowing a User to View Network Contacts of Other Users When Visiting An Environment of a Different Organization. This invention application provides a method for determining how to scope network contacts in social network systems, to control who is able to see the network contacts of a user in another company, in a multi-tenant environment. The conditions involved might be access due to working on a project together, or due to the status of the person in the other company (such as a contractor working full-time with another company). This application talks about a system for setting up policies and rules that allow both flexibility and protection.