What are the best Facebook patents? What are the most similar patents and who owns them?
Cluster Searching was developed to find similar patents to a single patent, or a group of patents. This makes it ideal for reviewing what can even be a large portfolio of patents, and doing the likes of:
- Identifying the most important patents in the portfolio, or;
- Identifying the owners of the most similar patents – both large and small companies.
As an example of this, we have looked at the patent portfolio of a well known company – Facebook. The objective of this search was to ask a couple of questions:
- What are the best Facebook patents for licensing?
- Which companies have the closest technologies to Facebook, ie. are most likely to want a license?
This is all rather straight forward using our subscription based software tool Cluster Searching.
What are the best Facebook patents?
These are presented in the table below, ranked by our proprietory metric AmberScore. AmberScore predicts the importance of patents based on their citation connections. Anything above 1.0 is above average for US patents, so these patents are well above average.
|
Rank |
Patent # |
Original applicant (all are now owned by Facebook) |
Title |
Filing date |
Amberscore values |
|
1 |
New York University |
System and method for dynamic profiling of users in one-to-one applications |
1997-11-14 |
24.5 |
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2 |
AOL, Inc |
Passive personalization of buddy lists |
2002-04-30 |
17.3 |
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3 |
Facebook* |
System and method for dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network |
2006-08-11 |
16.4 |
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4 |
Facebook* |
Tagging digital media |
2006-10-11 |
15.0 |
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5 |
|
Systems and methods for generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network |
2006-08-11 |
13.4 |
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6 |
AOL, Inc |
Method and system for instant messaging across cellular networks and a public data network |
2000-03-06 |
12.1 |
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7 |
AOL, Inc |
Systems for communicating current and future activity information among mobile internet users and methods therefor |
2002-09-11 |
11.8 |
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8 |
ICQ Inc |
Telephone status notification system |
1998-06-26 |
11.8 |
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9 |
AOL, Inc |
Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a members interactions in a social network environment |
2006-08-11 |
11.7 |
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10 |
Facebook, Inc |
Systems and methods for generating a social timeline |
2006-12-26 |
10.4 |
Not surprisingly, all of these patents are closely linked to social networking. Perhaps which is more surprising is that
- Less than half of these top 10 patents were originally filed by Facebook – they have acquired the rest.
- Of the these top ranked patents, three mention Mark Zuckerberg as a listed inventor – in the words of Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg really did invent his own sutff
Amberscore values of 11 to 24 are high, but not the highest we have seen.
Which companies own the most similar and important patents?
We can assess this by determining the total Licensing Potential for the companies that own the most similar patents.
These companies are shown in the figure below. Perhaps surprisingly, AOL heads this list, but Facebook have brought many patents from AOL – which would explain while the two portfolios are quite similar.
The other companies are all recognisable as some of the leading companies in technology.
What were the most similar patents filed by these ten companies?
For each of the above listed companies, we have identifed the most similar patents to the portfolio of granted US patents owned by Facebook.
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What are some similar patents that Facebook or a competitor might want to own – and are owned by smaller companies and potentially available for acquisition?
We can work this out by looking at the most similar patents, and screening out those owned by large corporates. In the table below, we show the most similar five of these patents – but we identified a further 795 patents to consider.
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Again, it is not surprising that these patents are all in the areas of social networking.
How we did it
We based this search on a list of granted US patents.
The rest of these steps are based on our tool Cluster Searching, downloading the results into Excel, and some basic analysis within Excel. We would be happy to discuss the details of this with users or potential users of Cluster Searching.
Who would benefit from this sort of analysis?
We expect that this sort of analysis, for example applied to other portfolios, would be of use to:
- Investment managers or NPEs looking at portolios of patents – for example ranking the patents in the list, and trying to working out who they can enter into commerical arrangements with
- Companies looking for similar patents to a portfolio of interest – which could be the owners of the portfolio, or other companies wanting to do business with the portfolio owner, or to strengthen their commecial position with respect to the portfolio owner.
