The Cisense Blog » industry specific

Come On, Everyone’s Doing It

tev — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:13:37 +0000

When you look at trends in trademark filings, it can be surprising how many Individuals (as oppose to the usual corporate players) file trademarks. Here’s an example of that phenomenon in the beverage industry.

In 2008 Individuals (as opposed company entities) filed over 1900 trademark applications which cover the non-alcoholic beverage industry.

It seems like everyone’s developing their own line of energy drink or enhanced water these days. Perhaps it’s thanks to the number of private labeling, bottle manufacturing and custom flavor companies? Whatever the case, all you need these days is a good name and some money to spare and you’re well on your way to making a name for yourself in this hyper-caffeinated world.

Does Your Competitor Still Have a Pulse?

tev — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:56:52 +0000

Is your competitor still ticking?

While glancing through recently filed trademarks, sometimes you’ll come across a trademark filing from your competitor who seems to have been dormant for awhile. Just seeing this indicates that they’re still alive and kicking (and have something in the works).

Of course, filing a trademark is not exactly a huge investment, and certainly some companies have filed a trademark and gone under shortly afterwards – but for the most part seeing a new filing indicates of a sign of life.

A sign you’d be wise to pick up on.

Ten Years of Apple Trademark Filings

tev — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:56:23 +0000

This reporting widget displays the prominence of sundry terms in Apple’s trademark application filings for the past ten years.

To create this widget, we parsed ten years worth of Apple’s trademark filings. We grabbed the descriptions for each trademark, removed the stop words and produced this tag cloud. The technical term in the trademark filing is actually ‘goods and services’, but essentially it’s a description of the trademark’s intent.

Drag the slider from left to right to see how the emphasis changes.

A few observations:

Charming 90s terms like ‘CD-rom’ and ‘multimedia’ disappear immediately.
‘Audio’ and ‘video’ starts tiny, and grow big over time.
‘Handheld’ comes out of nowhere in 2005. Likewise, ‘mobile’ is huge by 2007.

Of course, as Apple fans know, they can be rather cagey when filing their trademarks. In 2006, they alledgedly filed a trademark for iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago using a front company called Ocean Telecom Services. And, of course, they like to file trademarks on the opening of MacWorld. Very cheeky.

This is just one of the many kinds of reports we can create at CI Sense. You may want to check out our free Trademark Explorer, which enables you to complete comprehensive trademark searches to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis

Photo by Terry Johnston.