Free Patent Searching
FreePatentsOnline.com announced
a professional-level patent searching database, including powerful
searching and document organization features, a reminder service, and
more, for free.
$95 per month or more to search their database, charge a substantial
fee to simply download a patent is ridiculous. FreePatentsOnline.com
provides patent searching and downloading for free,” says James Ryley,
President of FreePatentsOnline.com. Ryley was previously the President
of Patent Complete, LLC, a patent searching firm specializing in
technology-related inventions.
FreePatentsOnline.com uses a custom patent database that provides
powerful searching features such as word stemming, search term
weighting, and proximity searching, and allows U.S. patents and patent
applications, and European patents to be searched simultaneously.
Patent images are available in TIFF or PDF format.
FreePatentsOnline.com also provides account features for the
professional patent searcher, including an alert service, portfolios to
organize documents, the ability to share portfolios with other users,
and the ability to export document data to Excel.
How do they do it? Volume! Oh, sorry, they have Google ads – a small price to pay. The link to their web site is here.
[Hat tip: The Invent Blog]
Bill Gates Announces Arrival of New Software Architecture
Both Bill Gates and one of his CTOs, Ray Ozzie, have written memos to
Microsoft staff about a sea change in the software industry that could
swamp the company. There's been lots of main stream press about the
memos here, here and here. You can read the actual memos here.
This will eventually have a big impact in health care because a number
of market trends make the benefits of the technology that Gates
describes very attractive. With the drive to adopt EMRs, EHRs and
RHIOs, we are rapidly reaching the point where “single vendor
solutions” are no longer practical. Even if someone like GE bought a
bunch more companies, they'd need this type of technology just to
integrate the acquired products. Vendors looking to bring products to
market in the next couple of years should look hard at this because it
is already being bolted on to legacy HIT platforms and built into new
products in health care.
Resistance is futile.
[Hat tip: Slashdot]
Blogging for Success
Here's an interesting interview with a guy hired to write a corporate blog (or weblog). You can read his blog here to see a pretty good example of corporate blogging. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz also has an opinion. I've noted health care blogs before here and here,
and you can visit some of the best health care blogs via the blogroll
links in the right hand nav bar. Blogging for an FDA regulated company
would be challenging because everything published by the vendor is
considered product labeling and thus subject to FDA regulations; with
the right internal processes I think it could be done.
