PatForum, the Front Page for Intellectual Property Professionals
In my efforts to stay up-to-date regarding news, events, and developments in the patent industry, I discovered that there is no central information point where as many of the relevant news as possible come together. Of course, there are the websites of the patent offices, numerous newsletters, magazines, and blogs that report on recent developments or comment on them. But it was challenging for me to keep track without investing a lot of time.
So I created a news hub to fill just this gap: PatForum. Inspired by aggregator-websites such as Reddit, PatForum enables all visitors to have an up-to-date and easy-to-grasp listing of all patent industry news. The details of a news entry can then be reached with just one click.
The idea is that PatForum is set as the default home page in your web browser, or visit it once or twice a day to see everything that’s new. In addition, PatForum is also designed with mobiles devices in mind and e.g. can be added as a button to the home screen of your phone for quick and easy access.
All content is pre-sorted to show you only the most relevant new entries based on your geographic region. For example, a visitor from the US by default sees news related to the USPTO and WIPO, and to organizations associated with those offices, while a visitor from the United Kingdom would see news related to the UKIPO, EPO, EUIPO and WIPO instead. In addition, all entries are categorized into sub-forums such as “Patent Attorneys” or “Inventors”. Another feature is to save news entries: since only the most recent messages are displayed and may disappear, it is possible to add entries to a personal list to save them permanently and quickly find them again later.
PatForum is completely free and all content is publicly available. To publish entries yourself or leave a comment under an entry, a free user account is needed. I hope that you become a regular PatForum visitor as well—if you have any questions or suggestions please contact me!