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.