My invisible selfie-stick (ES 2551390 B2) solves this technical problem in a simple and elegant way. In fact, it is a so simple and fast algorithm, that could be implemented in real time for video recording.
But it has been a very instructive exercise of writing and ... has been granted in only 8 months!

I'm really surprised. And happy, of course !

Inventor	Granted patents (OEPM)
RODRIGUEZ FERRE,JOSE MANUEL	243
GUERET, JEAN-LOUIS	230
AMMERMANN, EBERHARD	222
LORENZ, GISELA	187
THEURER, JOSEF	166
MUR GIMENO,EMILIO	159
CORMA CANOS,AVELINO	138
WOBBEN, ALOYS	136
SAUTER, HUBERT	132
BIEDERMANN, LUTZ	127

Jose Manuel Rodriguez Ferré, son of the founder of Feber and former manager of his company, stands remarkably with 243 patents and utility models. Unlike the inventors listed in the world top list in the Wikipedia, that appear to sign every single patent their engineers do for their companies (and, therefore, they share the applications with a large number of people), Jose Manuel Rodriguez Ferré is the only person in (most of) their applications. So, he is a particularly meritorious inventor because of the high number of patents and utility models as independent inventor.

In my experience, I know that individual patents require much more effort than the ones that are devised and drafted together.

Another aspect that draws my attention (and we discussed a little later) is the low proportion of Spanish inventors at this "top" part of the ranking. It is true that the world is much bigger than our country and that many multinationals are interested in protecting their inventions here, so it is expected to find inventors of all nationalities in this ranking, but I find our contribution particularly insignificant.

Moreover, it is especially disturbing when you consider that the process of creating patents is slowing down in Europe, while it speeds up in the rest of the world (every time I consult the databases of patents I get flooded with Chinese patents).

The structure of patentados.com webpage is regular and easy access (and faster than OEPM/SPTO website), so I webscrapped it to generate some graphics to help me understand the phenomenon of the invention in Spain.

The following chart can be a bit counterintuitive. First, you must notice both axis are in logarithmic scale, that is, every time a portion advances we increase an order of magnitude. Thus, the initial portion of the figure (the "top" ranking) is actually populated by a very small portion of total 28266 inventors.



As shown in the graph, only 25 people have 100 or more patents registered in Spain.

Only inventors with 6 or more patents are listed. Again, I stress the difficulty of seeing the "long tail" because of the way I draw the graph. For example, the number of inventors with a maximum amount of 8 to 6 patents is 15498, it is represented by three small steps of the green "stair". An uniform sampling would be less readable, especially in area of the most prolific inventors, they would have been relegated to an insignificant region at the corner of the figure.

As discussed above, it shock me to see only a low percentage of Spanish inventors at the "top". The figure below shows the percentages for the first 10, 25, 50 and 100 inventors in the ranking of the website. I'm afraid it is a constant for every section of it, employees of multinationals monopolize our rankings.



Could this possibly be the reason why these data is not directly made public? I do not know.

If someone is embarrassed, just invent!, there are lots of challenges to face. Crisis time is an opportunity time. Although, it seems most of people prefer to sit comfortably in front of the TV while watching football and to follow Unamuno blindly.

This last graph shows the number of inventors in function of the number of patents (and utility models) they have been granted in the SPTO / OEPM, without distinguishing whether they were obtained by passing the IET and the exam.



As can be seen in the overlapping notes, the number of inventors with more than 25 patents does not reach 1200. If we consider that about three quarters are foreigners working in companies that have extended their patents into national territory, I think there would be around 400 Spanish inventors with 25 or more granted patents. Not even  200 inventors reach the 50 patent "plateau".

In the Wikipedia entry about prolific inventors, it is indicated that the average number of patents by inventor in US is 3, so the threshold for considering a inventor as "prolific" is situated at least 5 times at that amount: 15 patents. Tens of thousands of US inventors could fit that category. In Spain, only 4085 people reach the 15 patents granted or utility models mark.

So, where should be located the threshold to be considered as a "prolific" inventor in our country? What is your opinion?

As I promised, here you are the Word template for writing patent applications in Spanish.
The new format follows Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) criteria.
It improves some aspects of the original template which is offered on the OEPM website, such as:

• Style of titles and text is according to the example format
• Document is organized in sections. They correspond to the ones that must be presented in different pages
• Figure section does not have line numbers in the margin
• Text has a uniform color
• Title and company fields are empty, as it should be expeted for a document that will be used to claim industrial property rights
• Author field is actualized by saving the changes in the file.

The previous week I got surprised by the "new" version of the Handbook for Patent Applicants in the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office website. Probably, I has been published long ago, but I read an old version as the only "one".




This book is clear and concise. 
I really enjoyed the 9th section: "How to write a patent application", with a detailed description of each part of the patent, and its preferred format.

However, I also got dissapointed with the proposed Word template for Spanish patents, that can be accesed throught a pair of links in the handbook. 

From the point of view of the sections to be filled, the example is immaculate and it shows small excerpts indicating what should fit in each section. It, even, includes some "unwritten rules", such as using Arial 11 everywhere.
But, from the point of view of the use of Word, it is a disaster.

Word styles are not used to differentiate titles and text  (in fact, if you write in the spots between titles, the font size changes to 12 points because Normal style is set as this).
Drawings section has line numbers activated, so a patent application, which were based in this template, would be inmediately mark as an invalid patent draft.
There are more signs of absentmindedness in this template, for example, author and company fields are already filled:

• Author: IGNACIO J. MARTÍNEZ ROBLEDO
• Title: SISTEMA DE ENFRIADORES Y MEDIOS PARA SU MONTAJE EN MOLDES DE COLADA
• Organization: PONS PATENTES Y MARCAS

In the next post I'll release an alternative Spanish patent template for Word and LibreOffice.

Yesterday, on CyberMonday, Amazon revealed its newest generation fulfillment center utilizing robotics to speed up order delivery times (and to reduce logistics costs) for customers. It was published as a video in BusinessWire website, with some beautiful photos of the new warehouse.




The story has had a significant impact in technology media (Wired, TechCrunch...). 
Amazon Spanish fulfillment center, in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), probably is not equiped with so high-tech robots as the Robo-Stow, but I suppouse it is populated by hundreds of Kiva robots as the orange ones which carry shelves in this video.When I saw a video of Amazon fulfillment centers for the first time, some years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by the coordination among all the Kiva robots and the human personal in Amazon facilities. I think it is a demanding work for humans, who have to find and pick the right items in each of the fetched shelves with a very strict / limited time.Because of my research in the last months, I cannot help noticing the extensive use of codebars. 


They are everywhere:
- floor
- shelves' racks
- products 
- container boxes
- 'traveling' boxes
- packages
- ...

Beautiful and low-cost technology, that we are improving  :-)


By the way, Amazon is investing large efforts in automating the "picking" stage in their logistic pipeline. They are organizing thee first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. It is our goal to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation.

As stated in their website, this competition will challenge entrants to build their own robot hardware and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary lightly populated inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the products and put them on a table. The challenge combines object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. There are nice prices (travel grants to ICRA) and participants have the possibility of being provided a robot to participate in the contest.