By Mark Costello, vice president, General Patent Counsel for Xerox
A patented invention is a statement of potential. Consider these ideas:
A better experience on the Web: If we know which Web page you will go to next, we could serve it up a lot quicker. That’s the idea behind an invention that tracks users’ page visits on the Web. With this information, the tool can determine where a particular user will go next. Knowing this, the next page you visit will be cached on your computer in advance so that it will be ready for viewing when you are. John S. Ulinski and Manish Dixit discuss this idea in US 8676741.
Tickets that tell us how transit systems are used: Transit tickets that are tagged with data about the user’s location allows us to identify how a city’s transportation system is used. The results allow transit managers to explore how their systems might be updated with (for instance) better routes that can attract new riders, which helps reduce traffic congestion. Big data and analytics are key components of the advances discussed in US 8713045, which was awarded to Guillaume Bouchard, Luis Ulloao Paredes, Victor Ciriza, Lionel Cazenave and Pascal Valorgra at the Xerox Research Centre Europe.
These are two examples of how our researchers around the world are thinking of ways to make life a little bit easier and bit more manageable, one patent at a time. In 2014, Xerox received 1,114 U.S. patents adding to our portfolio of over 12,100 active U.S. patents that help businesses and organizations work.
IFI Claims, a research company that compiles an annual patent list, ranked Xerox as 36th in its 2014 report based on 967 patents. When you add the 834 patents from Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., our joint venture in Japan – as well as patents from our wholly owned subsidiaries, such as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) – the Xerox group has 1,949 patents, placing us at No. 12 on the IFI Patent Intelligence list worldwide.
Xerox scientists and researchers apply their expertise in areas such as imaging, data analytics, automation, personalization, and sustainability to innovate simpler ways of doing business. More inventive ideas from Xerox are available on Simplify Work’s Innovation page.
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