West House in Pinner, Middlesex is hosting a free exhibition called Heath Robinson Machines and Inventions until the 17 April. It is in Pinner Memorial Park.

I came across it entirely by accident on a walk, and found it delightful. There are numerous original drawings showing "contraptions" such as devices to help you get up from a chair, or how to clear away the breakfast dishes. They are lovingly detailed and packed with humour.

William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) is the British equivalent of America's Rube Goldberg, and lived at West House for a decade. The Chris Beetles Gallery is hosting the exhibition, and the drawings are for sale (those sold have a red sticker). The Gallery has a webpage with links to many of the exhibited drawings.

I happily spent an hour looking around and talking to the Gallery staff before I reluctantly tore myself away. The Chris Beetles Gallery will be adding the show to a "major and comprehensive" exhibition of work by Robinson during the 25 May to 22 June at their 8 & 10 Ryder Street site, SW1.

I’ve just been given an item that’s meant to help carry shopping: the Yoke® shopper. It’s the size of a small apple and weights 60 grams. The only wording on it is Yoke®, with no numbers.

I set out to identify the IP for it. The ® symbol tells me that they are asserting that it is a registered trade mark. I checked the UK official trade mark database and found on it five entries which included the word “yoke”. The results list showed that one of these used raised arms and a circle within them for the Y, as on the product.

It was Community Trade Mark E6018352, which the database includes as they provide UK protection as well as UK national trade marks. This is what it looks like on the database.

 

This gave me the name of the applicant, Yoke Enterprises of St Asaph, Wales. This company has a page describing the product, where Matt Davies says he had the idea in 2005.

It’s a “sophisticated yet inexpensive design” that would make it easy to carry shopping. It took four years of research to perfect it. The device conveniently locks together shopping bags, and a strap that reels out from it can be used over the shoulder. It retails for £11.99. At the bottom of the page there was this statement:

The Yoke Shopper is fully protected by UK Patent No 0715629.2 and International Patent No PCT/Gb2008/002691. Registered Community Design 1597501

I would have got there anyway with the company name, but this assertion was interesting and gave me useful information. In 2007 Matthew (not Matt) Davies had filed for what became British patent 2451696B, which is indeed granted. Below is the main drawing.

 

(12) shows the slightly flexible piece of plastic which is used to trap the handles of the bags, while (14) is the strap beginning to emerge as deployed or retracted by pressing on button (52). The patent grant can be looked at to see what claims it covers. Others do have the right to challenge it and say it’s been done before, of course.

The PCT system also referred to is for a single publication that provides the basis for numerous offices to decide if they will allow a patent grant in their country or region. The search report at the end helps them decide that. The quoted filing number was published as WO2009/022105, with the title “Apparatus to assist a person carrying one or more bags”. In itself it conveys no protection against infringement, as applicants must respond to the offices that are part of the scheme asking if they will pay fees and, if relevant, provide translations of the patent specification. The offices individually decide if they will grant a patent.

In this case the European Patent Office stated in their official register entry that the application to them for protection in the EU member states and a few other countries was “deemed withdrawn” in April 2010 and hence void. The search report has one X and 2 Y patent documents cited against it (broadly speaking, X means done before and Y obvious improvements) as evidence of "prior art". The three documents are listed here.

The British A document's search report did not list any X or Y objections. The last component mentioned was Community Design 1597501, an EU-wide right, where 7 views of the product are included to show the appearance. This protects against someone using the same look.

What is probably the most valuable element of their portfolio, the trade mark, is not given an ® on the website (which talks of the “Yoke Shopper”, by the way). It is good policy to consistently use the symbol everywhere, and to ensure that valid claims are made about the IP held for a product. 

The most important activity for any start-up (or existing business come to that) is research. If you don’t understand your customers, your market, or your products properly, you will make mistakes. And these could cost your business.

With this in mind, it looks like Guandong Enterprises ltd failed to do their research when producing a piece of memorabilia to celebrate our forthcoming royal nuptials. Although the names are correct on the ‘Royal mug’, the image is of red-haired Harry, instead of his older brother, less colourful brother Will.

Ironically although this mug is not likely to be a best seller, its value is going to go sky-high due to the mistake.

http://www.guandongenterprisesltd.com/

Kate Middleton ‘marries Prince Harry’ on souvenir mug

Numerous patent specifications have been published in the name of Google covering search engines. An early important one was of course their Node ranking in a linked database, filed in 1997 and by Lawrence Page. This is the basis of their PageRank® algorithm (note the pun on his name) for identifying and sorting the results of searches.

Wikpedia has an interesting article on that algorithm, which states that Stanford University, the applicant on the patent, exclusively licenses it to Google. Their payment was 1.8 million shares in the company, it says, which were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

Many of their patents are in the field of filtering and personalisation of search engine results. This is a list of 46 patent documents published by Google through the "World" system on that topic, as G06F17/30W1F is the ECLA class for that concept.

They include Identifying inadequate search content, the main drawing of which is given below.

 
The patent application (since granted in the USA) talks of a statistics search engine, which takes queries made by users; statistics analysis, which divides the queries into topics and provides statistics; the comparator, which identifies topics based on a comparison of the topic statistics and the query statistics; and topic distribution, which notifies users of identified topics.

The idea, apparently, is that if demand for a topic through a search engine exceeds what is actually available on the Web, web publishers are notified and can think about providing that content.

Tottenham Hotspur, the London football club, has announced a five-year kit deal with American sports clothing manufacturer Under Armour from the 2012/13 season.

The club's press release does not mention any details of the "performance apparel" but last Saturday's issue of the Telegraph has an article explaining that the shirts will be able to send signals about the players' biometrics (heart rate and temperature, for example).

Apparently the company would like to share the data with the broadcasters. Imagine if you could be told that one team's players were exhausted, while there was no information about the other team. I can't imagine that the manager and owners of the team would be too pleased.

Under Armour has a patent application published for the concept, their System and method for monitoring athletic performance. Here is the main drawing.

 

 
This is a list of the 17 American patent applications published under the company name.

This week we are celebrating some of the wonderful products made by our success stories, who we have helped in the Business & IP Centre. Each day there will be a chance to enter our competition to win one of their innovative products on our Facebook fan page.

We have made it easy to enter.  Just keep an eye on the Facebook fan page,  and at some point during the day we will post a photo of the ‘Business & IP Centre product of the day.’

When the photo of the item appears, tag it with your name, and at the end of the day we will randomly select a lucky winner who will be sent that item in the post.

We are kicking off with one of my favourites, an umbrella from Squid London which changes colour in the rain.

Are you fed up by the rainy days?

Imagine you are walking down the street, it starts to rain and your ordinary black umbrella interacts and changes colour in the rain, creating a walking piece of art – called a ‘wearable piece of art’ by Time Out New York. The inspiration came from Jackson Pollock who dripped and splashed paint onto white canvases creating a spectacle of colours.

Emma-Jayne Parkes and Viviane Jaeger are the co-founders of SquidLondon, an innovative product design brand based in London. The Squidders won several awards including the Deutsch Bank runners up, the Creative Enterprise Winner and People’s Choice NACUE and the Smarta 2010 award.

Currently SquidLondon stocks its Squidarellas in 8 major cities including London, New York Paris and Tokyo and work with significant artshops including Tate Museums, MoMA New York, the Saatchi Gallery and ArtBasel. The Squidarella has generated some excitement and publicity at BBC Radio, BBC Television and was voted in to the top 5 products in Instyle US.

The Squidders brighten up the wet and gloomy days. A simple idea, a fun gift – who does not have an umbrella? Come squidding along!

The Espacenet patent database has a new look format, Version 5, which will take over from the current format in a few months' time.

The database, hosted by the European Patent Office (EPO), is meant to be for novices, providing a vast amount of patent data such as summaries and classifications as well as the actual patent specifications for many countries.

The new look conforms with the new appearance of the European Patent Register, which gives the status of applications going through the system -- has it been examined yet for novelty, is it granted, and so on. That is meant for experts.

I will miss the cosy feel and colours of the old format. I find the new format rather cold and clinical, partly because of the typeface that was chosen. I wonder if novices would be put off by its official look (and the numerous options). I would suggest that links to it should be to the Advanced Search format rather than to the SmartSearch format which is the link offered by the EPO, as an empty box tends to cause doubt over what to enter.

The Advanced Search offers different fields such as applicant name, title and so on, with suggestions of what to enter. Quick Help, on the left hand side of the page, should be used by anyone unfamiliar with the database to get the best out of it. It alters according to the format that you are in.

Exporting capabilities have been enhanced. CSV or XLS format can be used. A new option is very useful. You can tick the little boxes against each document in the Result List and then on Download Covers (at top). This produces a PDF of the front pages. This option is also available in the My Patents List folder.

If the default "worldwide" database option at the top is changed to read "EP" then the ability to search the complete text is added as an option for EPO documents. This can be valuable for rare wordings, but for common words can produce massive numbers of hits.

I would like to see in future some changes (besides bringing colours back).

 -- The ability to ask for a pie graph of say the top five patent classifications for the results of a search. That would help determine which are the most popular classes found when entering keywords.

-- At present it looks as if you either click on a box when results are in Result List format, or on a star when in bibliographic data format, to select the document for a folder, "my patents list", for later study. Two apparent methods to do the same thing causes confusion. In fact only the star selects the patents ! The star is also used next to the inventor's name in Result List format, and also selects, but it is not obvious what it is there for.

-- There should be the ability to have different, named folders instead of just the one as you may be working on different subjects.

-- Formerly a revised search would show patents already in your folder as ticked so that you do not need to look at them again. This should be restored.

-- You should also be able to mark patents that are not of interest. They too would not have to be looked at again. To prevent their being permanently ticked there would have to be some mechanism so that this can be turned off, perhaps by indicating you wish to remove all negative ticks, and/ or automatically removing them when next in the database.  

-- The ability to create sets of data which can be manipulated using Boolean logic by experts (who do use the database a lot).  

There are other concerns such as the apparent lack of an algorithm so that the most important document rather than the first is credited as the lead document in the results list. It looks odd if for example a Hong Kong document is credited when there is a PCT document in the "patent family".

There is no doubt that the database is extremely useful when properly searched, and when the implications of what is found or not found are understood. Patent searching is not simple, and it is misleading to give the impression that it is. It is easy to do a poor search and think that there is nothing relevant. Hence my advice to take advice from public libraries that deal with patents, or search rooms at patent offices. Europe has a list, as does the USA.

Now that I am in the final stages of planning my once in a life-time trip to the top of Kilimanjaro. I need to get my legs in shape for the 5,882 metres or 19,298 ft climb to the snow-capped peak of Kibo.

For some time now I have been using the stairs at work instead of the lift whenever possible. Although this sometimes gets me to high-up meetings a little out of breath, I can feel the good it is doing me. Even better, I am saving electricity each time I avoid going into the lift. In addition, I gain a sense of control, or at least avoid the frustration of waiting, what can seem like an age, for the lift to arrive.

There is even scientific evidence to prove that taking the stairs instead of the lift at work could save your life.

Banning the use of lifts and escalators led to better fitness, less body fat, trimmer waistlines and a drop in blood pressure, a study of 69 people found. This translates to a 15% cut in the risk of dying prematurely from any cause, calculate the University of Geneva team.

However, that won’t be enough to get me through seven days of equatorial trekking in July, so I am increasing my visits to the stairwell. Initially I was doing a full eight flights to the top of the building at the beginning of each day. but have now increased to twice a day. However, I’m not sure how much I will need to ‘raise my game’ in order to be fully fit for the rigours of the big mountain.

What is nice is that I’m not alone in my use of the stairs as a fitness aid. I now recognise some regulars as I pant my way up and down the floors.

In common with many mundane activities, there is often an extreme approach taken up by those I would consider to be somewhat more eccentric than the rest of us.

The Telegraph newspaper has published a couple of stories about the ‘sport’ of stair running, Stair running: Towers of torment and Could you run a vertical marathon?

And of course the highest building representing the pinnacle of achievement. For these indoor athletes, taking anything less than two steps at a time is for amateurs. And I assume the inside line is fiercely fought over for the advantage it gives. You can read about the buildings, runners and their times here: www.verticalrunning.org; www.towerrunning.com; www.skyrunning.com; Stairclimbing Sport; www.stairclimbingsport.com

Somehow I don’t think I will ever make it running to the top of the erotic gherkin or the Shard. But as someone who is allergic to gyms, using this stair climbing workout regime is a free and handy alternative.

My attitude to the mindset that leads to fitness seekers to drive their cars to their local exercise centres is nicely summed up by this photo from the USA below.