Posts Tagged: "IBM patents"

Just a few months after establishing this health and wellness cloud platform, IBM has secured its first Foundational Life Sciences partner for Watson Health in Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (NYSE:TEVA) of Petah Tikva, Israel. Statements from senior Teva officials indicate that the world’s largest manufacturer of generic pharmaceuticals will use the personal health cloud to connect more directly with physicians and patients and enable individualized treatment optimization options. It’s hoped that the Big Data tools available through IBM’s Watson analytics will be powerful enough to help Teva and others come up with more effective treatments for the millions of people worldwide suffering from chronic health conditions such as migraine, asthma or neurodegenerative diseases.

IBM cloud computing technologies span an incredible scope of solutions for data analytics, enterprise apps, human resource management, marketing and even gaming. By the end of 2017, about half of all large enterprises are expected to have hybrid cloud deployments operating. IBM holds a great many U.S. patents in the cloud computing sector, receiving 400 cloud computing patents thus far in 2015 and a total of 1,200 patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over the past 18 months.

IBM is involved with the development of medical technologies for fields other than oncology, as is evidenced by the issue of U.S. Patent No. 9064306, which is titled Bidirectional Blood Vessel Segmentation. The method for segmenting blood vessels protected here involves receiving an angiogram frame, processing the angiogram frame by applying a Butterworth bandpass filter to suppress high and low frequency background noise, performing both bottom-up filtering and top-down segmentation of the angiogram frame and repeating that process until the results of the top-down segmentation from consecutive iterations equals or exceeds a threshold value. This process is useful for the analysis of angiogram images captured through cardiac catheterization as it can reduce the amount of feedback noise in those images.

IBM’s most recent quarterly earnings report indicates that the company is seeing rapid growth in its cloud business revenues, which increased 75 percent year-over-year, resulting in total cloud revenues of $7.7 billion in the twelve months leading up to the end of 2015’s first quarter. Even given the recent success of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, these most recent financial figures show that IBM’s cloud computing services are outperforming Amazon’s by more than $2.5 billion over the last year.

Interestingly, we noted a great number of innovations filed by IBM that extend into the field of financial services. The company has already been working to develop Bitcoin-style systems, especially the “blockchain” digital currency transaction list supporting Bitcoin, that are capable of serving as digital cash and payment mechanisms for major currencies.

We found another pair of patents related to digital worlds, an area where IBM has been active of late. A system for ensuring that the highest number of objects contained within a three-dimensional scene are seen by a person navigating the scene is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8970586. The patent claims a clairvoyance method for a 3D scene by acquiring parameters associated with a clairvoyance camera and a clairvoyance viewport, determining a 3D scene to be rendered according to those parameters, rendering the 3D scene to obtain a 2D image presented in the clairvoyance viewport and composing the 2D image presented in both a clairvoyance viewpoint and a general scene viewport. This system overcomes issues of inconvenient manipulation virtual contentand low efficiency in modifying a 3D scene view to uncover an object.

Software and method patents may appear to have fallen out of favor because of recent court decisions and legislation. However, recent trends indicate that they comprise surprisingly high portions of four US companies’ recent grants. Of the 2,599 US patents granted last year to Google, 1,522, or 59% were in the methods classes. Microsoft, with 2,847 patents received, had 1,575, or 55%, that fall under the heading of methods.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently announced that it received a record number of patents during 2014, obtaining a staggering 7,534 U.S. patents in 2014. IBM is thoroughly committed to innovation. They do it because IBM has a culture of inventing, a culture of patenting, and over the years the company has invented and re-invented itself over and over. As you might expect, IBM is heavily involved in computers, particularly cloud computing and security. In fact, the company’s record-setting 2014 patent output was led by more than 3,000 patents – 40% of its overall annual total – covering a range of cloud computing, analytics, mobile, social and security inventions.