Ten Years of Apple Trademark Filings
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.
What’s Happening Here?
There’s a trademark party going on and you’re invited.
Well, it’s more like a gathering than a party. CI Sense knows trademarks don’t have a reputation for being exciting, but we’d like to show you that they can indeed be riveting.
CI Sense is a new trademark search service. But, unlike other services, we won’t merely alert you to new trademark filings. We’re doing something smarter. We present and analyze data in a clear way so that you can keep an eye on your competitors, find new competitors, identify emerging industry trends, etc.
From a comprehensive trademark search to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis, CI Sense is your crystal ball into new brands and products headed for the market. Trademarks can provide a picture of what’s happening in your industry and even make it easier to concoct new product idea. Competitive intelligence made clear.
These are some examples of stories we’ll be covering on our blog:
How to incorporate trademark intel from CI Sense into an overall competitive intelligence strategy, why categorization is important for CI, solid overviews of key trademark topics, fun posts about strange trademarks, informative pieces about the world of trademarks, as well as monthly posts spotlighting the top five creative trademark filings that month.
We won’t be covering legal issues around trademarks, like conflicting marks, opposition cases, etc. For a legal lens on trademarks, check out The Trademark Blog or Likelihood of Confusion.
Now back to the second part of our introduction – we don’t want to do all the talking – we know how dull that can be at any party. We’re sincere about your place in this conversation: while we will be providing our thoughts about the world of trademarks, we’d love to hear from you and what you think about these posts. Are you learning anything new about competitive intelligence? What frustrates and excites you?
We are looking forward to some great discussions!
Get All the Information You Need to Stay Ahead
Dave Wieneke has recently written a compelling post on Useful Arts offering tips on how marketers can “stay ahead of their competitors”.
One of his suggestions is to “watch for new competitor trademark applications”. He correctly states that the government site USPTO is a good starting point, but should not be your only source, since it “can spot exact hits, but not close calls” and does not compile information from other sources (e.g, incorporation listings, company directories and product announcements).
Dave suggests supplementing with a service which allows you to search for trademarks and be alerted of new filings:
“…so that when a named competitor registers a new mark, you’ll be notified in time to plan opposition or a marketplace response. You can register to receive notices each time a named competitor files a mark, or when marks are filed in a specified industry.”
“Early Warning” competitive intelligence is critical. But while like Thomson Reuters and similar services provide good information – they can be quite limited, especially in terms of how data is reported and they tend to be very expensive.
We try to avoid tooting our own horn, but in this case we think CI Sense provides a better – and more comprehensive – solution. Rather than merely alerting you to new trademark filings, CI Sense presents and analyzes data in a clear way and provides you with unique information, in report form – making your job much, much easier.
So you can watch your competition, find new competitors, identify emerging industry trends and even get brainstorming ideas.
All this means you don’t simply find out what your competition is doing – but have real tools to “stay ahead”.
