The Crystal Ball of Data Analytics – Ep. 27 [Podcast]

Summary

In this week’s episode of Stuff You Should Know About IP, Thomas Colson and Raymond Guarnieri welcome special guest Tony Trippe to discuss patent data. Patent data can reveal trends and indicate where a field is headed. The best way for a smaller company, like Jawbone or Fitbit, to compete with a larger company, like Apple or Nike, is to have a great patent portfolio. If a smaller company doesn’t have a great portfolio of its own, it can be beneficial to acquire another company’s patents. The earlier the priority date of a patent application, the better; nothing published after that date can be used to invalidate the patent. Each feature of a product can be covered by its own patent. A savvy investor can analyze public information in patent portfolios and then use that information to guide investments. Companies with well-developed patent portfolios tend to be traded at higher values. A company can use patent information to find new technologies and for competitive intelligence. Patent information can also be used to predict new products that will be released. Patent applications are published eighteen months after having been filed. Tony Trippe predicts that Northrop Grumman, a company in the quantum computing field, might form a major partnership with an established player in the field. In just a few hours, a quantum computer can solve an equation that a huge network of supercomputers would need hundreds of years to solve. Quantum computers present cybersecurity concerns, and they also have applications for chemistry, molecular modeling, other multiple body problems, and encryption.

Transcript

Raymond Guarnieri:

What if I told you that you don’t need a crystal ball to see the future? What if I told you that instead you could use data, but not just any data, the best data that there is, patent data. We’re here with the man, the legend of patent data, Tony Trippe. And we’re going to talk about Stuff You Should Know About IP. Tom, Tony, take it away.

Thomas Colson:

Great. Ray, thank you. We have Tony Trippe and by the way, Tony and I have actually known each other for like 20 years or so. Right? Since back in my IP.com days. And I think it was back in your P&G days, but we’ve known each other a while now. And I agree with Ray, you’re the man, the myth, the legend about patent data. But tell us, can you actually predict the future with patents?

Tony Trippe:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s just like any other big data project that once you start looking at indicators and once you start looking at trends, it’s easy to follow where these things are going to go. And yeah, they can be very instructive, they can absolutely tell you where a field is headed based on where it’s already been.

Thomas Colson:

So tell us how do we do that?

Tony Trippe:

Okay. Let’s use an example. All right. So once upon a time there was this company and it was called Fitbit, Okay? And now everybody knows Fitbit because once upon a time, all of us had, right now we might have an Apple watch or some other type of device. But we’re wearing something right now that’s monitoring us in a variety of different ways, counting our footsteps and so on and so forth. And one of the big ones that first came out in this was Fitbit, but they had this rivalry. All right. And this rival was called Jawbone. And Jawbone actually was much better known for earpieces. A couple of us probably had those earpieces that we were listening to our phones on, we look super cool because we had an earpiece.

Tony Trippe:

And Jawbone versus Fitbit was a big deal. It was a really big deal. And around the same time, Apple was busy suing Samsung. So there was a lot of news about patents and patent litigation and the importance of patents. And what did all this mean? And so, as I’m looking at this as an analyst, I’m saying, you know what? This looks like the same type of situation as Apple and Samsung, where we’re about to get into a situation that these two companies might end up suing each other. And these are two really small companies fighting against the likes of Nike and eventually against Apple and against these huge companies. And the best way for a small company to compete against the big company is to have a really great patent portfolio. And so I started to look very closely at each one of these companies and what their patent portfolio looked like.

Tony Trippe:

And I’ll tell you what I found. I found babka. I found nonsense. I found garbage. I found a handful of documents that didn’t cover very much at all, and these guys were just lands going off to the slaughter. As soon as they got any sort of market share whatsoever, they were just going to get murdered by these folks. And as I was looking at this, I was saying, you know what these guys really need to do? You know what both these companies really need to do, they need to invest. They need to start buying some additional patent portfolios. They need to start bulking up because there’s no way that they are going to be able to compete against somebody like Apple.

Tony Trippe:

And for that matter, this really looks like it’s going to come down to a battle between the two of them. And it may end up being the patent litigation is going to be what happens here. So while I’m looking at this I thought, well, if I were them, what would I buy? What would I go out and look for? As far as the type of patent portfolio that I really thought was going to help me for the future? Now, how am I going to take care of my company? How am I going to make sure that I can protect our revenue by making sure that I have a patent portfolio that’s fit for purpose?

Thomas Colson:

Wait, Tony, before you go on, so you’re just at the set up to this point is, when you said they had buckets, they had no patents.

Tony Trippe:

Okay. Relatively speaking, Fitbit had 15 patent families. All in the US, none of them granted, all of them on a particular type of device.

Thomas Colson:

So all patent applications that were still pending?

Tony Trippe:

Exactly.

Thomas Colson:

Published, but not granted yet. So they weren’t actually patents yet.

Tony Trippe:

Exactly. They were just pending applications and very narrow. [crosstalk 00:04:37]

Thomas Colson:

Okay. And that’s important because when you talk about narrow patents, sometimes you could have a very broad patent that covers a whole bunch of stuff. And sometimes you can have patents that are so narrow, they call them picture patents, because they’re good on your wall, but they don’t actually enable you to enforce your rights. And you’re saying there were a bunch of very narrow patents, maybe even some picture patents.

Tony Trippe:

Absolutely. Especially on the Fitbit side, Jawbone was a little bit better. Their attorneys had clearly taken some time to broaden out the scope of what they could potentially be getting. And they had a few grants and they had some coverage outside the US.

Thomas Colson:

Okay. So Fitbit’s all of theirs were in the US and once again, just so people who might not know this, a patent is only enforceable in the nation that grants the patent. If you want protection in the US, you need a US patent. If you want protection in China, you need a Chinese patent. And you’re saying that Fitbit, all of their patent applications were filed in the US and they didn’t have anything that you saw that was outside of the US and they had nothing granted. Whereas Jawbone had both patent applications and a few granted patents, and they had some more international coverage.

Tony Trippe:

Exactly. That is I think, a very nice summary of the key differences between them at the time. But both of them were far too small to be able to compete against somebody like an Apple or a Nike.

Thomas Colson:

Are you saying that because Apple and Nike had more patents, or they’re just so big that they’d eventually dominate you in the marketplace, unless you have patents to slow them down.

Tony Trippe:

Both, but mostly the latter. Because the only way a small company is going to be able to compete in the market against a dominant market player, is to be able to negotiate somehow or work out some sort of a partnership deal. And their key leverage to being able to do that is traditionally a patent portfolio.

Thomas Colson:

Yeah, because otherwise, if there’s no patents, you can do anything, right? The world is wide open. The only thing that stops you from doing something is your capabilities in business, which are all the classic business things or intellectual property, namely patents. So you’re saying that Fitbit and Jawbone were way too small to compete head-to-head in all the classic ways that businesses compete with an Apple or a Nike. But if they could have the great equalizer, the patent, they could compete, but they didn’t have enough. They simply didn’t actually have any, technically they didn’t have any granted.

Tony Trippe:

Yes, absolutely. They were both in terrible shape. And it’s the solution… my suggestion what I thought they ought to do if they were, if I was working for them, if they were one of my clients, my solution was going to buying spree. Go and buy some more patents, go and bulk up your portfolio. In this particular study, that’s exactly what I then started to look at. If I were them, who would I bought? All right. And there’s a couple of key indicators, but the bottom line was in this case, after I looked through everything I thought, you know what, there’s this company out there called BodyMedia. And I thought that the BodyMedia portfolio looked really great. It was old enough. So it had these earlier priority dates. And for those of you who are a little bit new to the field, that priority date is when your protection starts and people can’t invalidate your patent unless they find something that happened before that priority date.

Tony Trippe:

The earlier priority date, the higher the likelihood that your patent is going to stand up the litigation, because there’s not very much priority out there that’s going to be able to invalidate it. I’m looking for something like that. I’m looking for something that’s highly cited. We have this idea of forward citations and patent documents. And usually when somebody cites another group’s patents, it means that they have an interest in it. They found it was innovative or useful. Highly cited patents are inherently more influential or more valuable than ones that have never been cited before. And as I’m doing all of this work, as I’m looking for all these different criteria that I’m looking at, BodyMedia jumps out. I mean, just literally jumps of the analysis that I’m doing and screams at me that this is the portfolio that you want to buy.

Thomas Colson:

Okay. So you’re doing this though all in your head, you’re not actually working for either of these two companies at the time.

Tony Trippe:

That’s your correct.

Thomas Colson:

If I did, this would be great.

Tony Trippe:

Oh yes. And I have done this for clients. So don’t get me wrong, I’m using them…

Thomas Colson:

So you actually do this, right?

Tony Trippe:

Oh yeah.

Thomas Colson:

Tony, the client will come to you and say, “Hey, we need to bulk up our patent portfolio. What do you recommend?” And then you’ll do your magic and figure out what companies are out there that have patents that could be useful to their portfolio. By the way, Tony, one other quick question, before we go on, somebody might think that why would there be more than one patent in the industry of Jawbone or Fitbit? I mean, once you have a patent, don’t you cover the whole product? Like why would there be more than one?

Tony Trippe:

Yeah. That’s great. And because there’s a couple of different ways to answer that. First of all, if you take a look at something like a personal fitness monitor, there are dozens. It’s a little bit like a cell phone. It’s not nearly as complicated, but a similar type of situation. There are literally dozens of individual inventions that go into making up that device. There’s the molding, the overmolding that keeps the sweat out of it. There’s the circuit boards. There’s the communications. There’s applications for counting stairs or measuring heartbeat, or there’s all the diagnostics. There’s all the communication with regards to transmitting that data to a device. There’s the use of that data for various health related instances. There are literally dozens of different individual inventions that go into this one product. So a single patent, isn’t going to cover that.

Thomas Colson:

Yeah. So what you can do though, cause patents give you the right to prevent other people from making and selling the features and the patented features and functions of a product. So you’re saying that if Fitbit or Jawbone had more patents, they could prevent the other party from adding features or functions. If they’re patented that the customers might want and give them an advantage in the marketplace.

Tony Trippe:

Oh, absolutely. Let me give you one quick example of where that happened. There was a company out there once called… They’re still out there. They still sell that Allure Energy. Allure Energy, arguably invented the smart thermostat. Okay? They wrote this enormous patent application, hundreds and hundreds of pages covered every possible aspect of a smart thermostat. And what they did is, the day after Nest went ahead and had a press release on what features would score, were going to be in the Nest thermostat. The very next week Allure filed a new patent application that covered every single of those features in each individual claim. They put it through accelerated examination. Got it granted the day after they sued. Nest had since been acquired by Google. Google has settled a little bit low. And so the amount wasn’t disclosed, but Allure got a very big cheque on guessing from Google, because of what they did putting together their patent portfolio for DBM with.

Thomas Colson:

Now, just so that we’re clear, again, I don’t know how much D how much the people that are watching know about patents. But you’re not saying that that Allure upon seeing the press release thought, wow, those are good ideas. We think we’ll file patent applications because you can’t do that. You have to actually be the inventor, right? So you’re saying that they had already developed those things before the press release came out and had priority in terms of invention. And now that’s changed a little bit filing, but that’s what you mean, right? They actually had invented it and just hadn’t filed yet.

Tony Trippe:

Oh, it was all in their specifications. It was all in their original document, every possible permutation. They wrote new claims and that’s exactly. So they had anticipated that this was going to happen. They anticipated that’s what really key to building a powerful patent portfolio, is to not just think about what do I need today, but where could this go tomorrow? And when you see those….

Thomas Colson:

And that’s just what is in your product today?

Tony Trippe:

Yeah.

Thomas Colson:

And not just what’s in your product, you’re going to market with, but what might other people go to market with?

Tony Trippe:

Or how else could it be applied? Yeah. It could also be useful. What other vertical are you talking about?

Thomas Colson:

With Jawbone and Fitbit, you had some great ideas. And if either had hired you to acquire the portfolio you suggested, it would have not just given them an advantage vis-a-vis one another, but really more importantly, as compared with Apple and Nike downstream.

Tony Trippe:

Absolutely. Because his body media portfolio was not only early, but it covered some of the key aspects of what you’d expect or what a consumer might expect in this sort of device. Now the punchline…

Thomas Colson:

Yeah. That’s what I wanted to get to, what happened?

Raymond Guarnieri:

I am on the edge of my sit. Jawbone, what happens next

Thomas Colson:

I’m hoping this is not the end. Right?

Tony Trippe:

Literally, two weeks after I published these findings. After I shared them initially, there was an article in, in gadget and there was an announcement that was made that, Jawbone had bought BodyMedia for $10 million.

Thomas Colson:

Wait after you had published it, on your own newsletter?

Tony Trippe:

Yes.

Thomas Colson:

Wait. You think your publication drove that decision?

Tony Trippe:

Oh, absolutely not. Okay. So lets say…

Thomas Colson:

So it would have been somebody else, but you’re saying that, you essentially predicted what was going to happen with one of these two companies. One of these two companies was going to buy BodyMedia.

Tony Trippe:

Yes. That is exactly what my contention was..

Thomas Colson:

And that happened.

Tony Trippe:

Exactly. Yes. It absolutely happened. It’s documented. I have lots of people who’ve seen the original work. As a matter of fact, I was teaching a workshop going through this example, when one of the students said, well, did you know that BodyMedia was purchased by Jawbone? I’m like, get the hell out of here. You know, shut the front door. You’re kidding me. Right? And they’re like, no. And so I like rushed back to my hotel that evening and I looked it up, I’m like, Holy crap, that’s so cool.

Thomas Colson:

That’s amazing that you didn’t even know while you were teaching it, that happened.

Tony Trippe:

Yes, it happened. And that was under me. After I presented it, a few months ago by I’m using the case study for something else and a student of mine tells me that this happened. But again I had this other client I was working for. I said, hey look, they specifically hired me to find patents. That was the specific element of this project. Find us people to partner with. We’re a mid-sized player. We want to be a big player. We know we’re up against the gargantuan player, help us find somebody to help us compete. And I suggested two companies and within six months, their big competitor, bottom booth.

Thomas Colson:

Do you know what I like about this story? That first, the BodyMedia story is, If you are an investor, a Savvy Investor, and you had this information, which would be public information, it’s not insider information. You just know that their portfolio makes them a fantastic acquisition target. That would be a company to invest in. I mean, I don’t know if BodyMedia was public. I don’t know if you could have invested, but the concept is, you can use patent information just to buy stock acquisitions of small companies that look like they’re right. In light of everything, Tony Trippe knows about what’s happening in the marketplace. This company is going to be acquired.

Tony Trippe:

Yes. That happened all the time. And either speaking of which, I mean, we were thick. We were also going to talk about the quantum computing report and that’s happening there. All right. We’re getting the original quantum computing report was published a year or two years ago about to do another update to it. And it’s one of those things that I picked that topic, because I could actually make some predictions there and stand a good chance of being in front of the market. That the market wasn’t mature enough yet it really is starting to take off, but hadn’t taken off yet. So that anything that I might say or suggest about where it was headed had yet to happen.

Tony Trippe:

And so you’re not using hindsight, that’s pretty straight forward. This is really forward-thinking, forward-looking as to what could happen. And to give you an example in that particular field, there’s this company called psych quantum. Okay. And in psych quantum, they did another funding round and they, I want to make sure I got the number right here. Yeah, they’ve raised $230 million as a small quantum computing startup. And the darling of the field is a company called Rigetti, and they’ve really only raised about 75 million. And the amazing thing about psych quantum is that psych quantum has an enormous patent portfolio for their size. I mean, literally if you compare Rigetti again, another comparable type company, they have something on the order of three times as many patents as Rigetti, which is the media darling it’s been written up in technology review.

Tony Trippe:

It’s been, everybody’s talking to Chad Rigetti the founder’s name used to be the key quantum scientist at IBM. And IBM is the 900 pound gorilla in that particular field. But it became pretty clear looking at their patent portfolio, that this is a company. And Microsoft ended up being one of the investors, even though they’ve got their own quantum program. And they went in again, it’s one of the largest early stage funding rounds ever, much less. And it’s certainly the biggest one in quantum computing. And it’s all based on the fact that they’ve got this great technology and they are to quote Steve jobs, they’re patting the shit out of it.

Thomas Colson:

Wow. So thoughts would be CY quantum. Is that what you’re calling it, CY quantum.

Tony Trippe:

CY quantum.

Thomas Colson:

They are a good acquisition target.

Tony Trippe:

Absolutely.

Thomas Colson:

And also Rigetti’s a good equities and, but they’re well known. The one that’s more secretive, not secretive, but less known, less appreciated is CY quantum. And that’s one that if they happen to be public, that would be a good one to buy some stock in, based on the Tony Trippe mix view of the world.

Tony Trippe:

Yes, absolutely. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. That there’s a correlation between patent portfolio development and looking at patent portfolio by a variety of different metrics and the likelihood that, that company is going to be traded at a higher value.

Thomas Colson:

Yeah. Ray, I think my connection might be breaking up a little bit.

Raymond Guarnieri:

You might have a bit of a delay. Thomas left without a delay

Thomas Colson:

I don’t want to ruin our podcast. So Ray carry it along.

Raymond Guarnieri:

Yeah. Well, so I’m curious that if you can talk a little bit about, I mean, you already touched on it, but other than buying, they’re making acquisitions. What are some ways that companies can analyze patent data to make decisions within their company? I mean, the only thing that my non IP expert brain can think of would be investing in new technology. So what does it mean to, use patent analytics for institutional decision-making let’s just say,

Tony Trippe:

Yeah. For instance, what you were just talking about, companies do this all the time. In a sense that one of the things that big companies are always concerned about is disruptive technologies. They’re going to be Amazon eyes as it were. And so in most industries, keeping track of new technology developments is a great way to make sure that you’re always on the bleeding edge, as far as technology developments that are going to lead to customer value. And so big companies are always looking for how is it that we can deliver a better customer experience through the implementation of technology. And patents are a great way to do that and to find partners, to make sure that you’re always on the bleeding edge. But another thing that companies do frequently, and I get asked to do this all the time, is they use this for competitive intelligence.

Tony Trippe:

And so when I was working at Procter & Gamble for instance, we scrutinized and I mean, scrutinized everything that L’Oreal published. Because P&G has a lot of different segments, their health and beauty segment, for instance, L’Oreal is a huge competitor. And L’Oreal would get tricky for instance, and they’d only publish things in French. So the initial stuff that would come out would only be in French. So if you were looking at the French patent office, and if you couldn’t read French, well, you had a hard time understanding what they were doing, but P&G intentionally hired people and knew to go look at those sources and to read French in order to be able to pick that up. And again, most of my clients have some type of competitive intelligence program where again, would Proctor&Gamble. They’re always very interested in what Unilever was doing.

Tony Trippe:

Always very interested in what Kimberly-Clark was doing. Always very interested in any of the other food companies that they might’ve been competing against. When they own the Pringles brand and the Sunny Delight brand and the Folgers Coffee brand, all of these individual areas have a technology focus associated with them. And by examining the patents that come out, we make Nestle, that’s another big exam that Greg’s Nestle is one of the world’s most prolific patent filers. And they cover an enormous number of different health and wellness, infant formula, chocolate, sauces, all types of different foodstuffs. And anybody who works in the field of consumer products, especially consumer packaged goods that have anything to do with the food industry, has to be paying attention to what Nestle is doing and needs to be seriously looking at the amount of money they spend on R&D that you can directly reflect the amount of money spent on R&D to the number of patents that get filed and get a really good idea of where they might be heading as far as new technology developments and new consumer products by looking at the patents.

Thomas Colson:

So you look at patents and if you’re smart about it, you can predict what products will be coming out down here.

Tony Trippe:

Absolutely. And you can even justify it to the degree that you can say, we’re going to look back five years ago. All right. And this is what they were patenting. And then jump ahead two and a half years, say from there three years from that point and say, how many of those things actually became new products? And that allows you to then say, okay, well, this is what they published yesterday. And what is the likelihood based on everything that we know, everything we studied up to that point, that this is going to be a marketed product another 18 months from now.

Thomas Colson:

Now there’s one issue, that’s the lag. Right? Tell us a little bit about that problem.

Tony Trippe:

Yeah. And not to get too far into the weeds, too much inside baseball, but patent publications come out 18 months after they’re originally filed. Okay. So that’s what this lag is that everybody talks about. So if you’re talking about a technology field that moves very rapidly, and there are the idea of a blank sheet invention to a marketed product is going to take less than say, 18 months or a year? Patents aren’t a good indicator because of course they’ve got an 18 month publication lag. But most technologies don’t move that fast. Pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, a lot of these things take more like three to five years to go from a blank sheet invention to the time when it actually shows up in front of a customer. And when you’ve got a window that is that large, then patents are great because it halfway through, or about a third of the way through to that window you’ve got an idea of what’s coming and that gives you enough time to have a strategy to compete.

Raymond Guarnieri:

So I got to ask the obvious question, and maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not. What are some of your predictions? I mean, you’re in this world, right? You know, you must have some cool, exciting predictions about some of the technology that we’re going to see in the coming years. And maybe quantum computing is one of them, but because that’s a really fascinating space just on its own. But what do you say to that? Or maybe not, maybe you don’t, maybe you want to keep them secret.

Tony Trippe:

No I’m actually pretty open about these ones. Now, of course, the majority of it, I can’t talk about because I do this for my clients, so that’s why they hire me to do work like this so they can take it to get an advantage of this type. But in the quantum computing field, in particular, there’s a company that people don’t talk about very much. I mentioned them last year, from what I can tell, from the new updates that I’m doing, there’s still a major player that nobody talks about and that’s Northrop Grumman. And so my key keep an eye on is Northrop Grumman, I think. And it would also be Intel. When I first did the report. I thought it’s really interesting that there’s really not much here from Intel. There’s only some inklings, well, now Intel’s jumped into the top 10.

Tony Trippe:

And so Intel is also killing it. So, those are the things that I thought were interesting and are starting to bear out. It wouldn’t shock me at some point to hear about a major partnership between Northrop Grumman and one of the established players at some point, maybe a D-Wave for instance. Along those same lines, there’s lots of different ways to generate a cubit to make a quantum computer. And there’s this one really kind of wild idea that could totally revolutionize the idea of the size and the temperatures at which a quantum computer is run. And Microsoft seems to be the leading company with the technology. And they’ve got dozens of patents on this speculative technology that if the science actually ends up working out, and there’s a ton of different academic research facilities that are working on this approach. If they can crack it, they’ve got leverage, they’ve got coverage.

Tony Trippe:

They’re going to corner the market on this mechanism for generating a quantum computer. And they’re going to leap out in front of everybody else, even though they’re already an established leader. Things like that, I think happen all the time. There’s also this, this idea that, that the Chinese, a lot of people were interested in the quantum computing report because of the discussion of the Chinese. And it’s very clear from the research that Asian companies are all about taking advantage of the device itself. And it’s the North American and Canadian companies that have been about developing the device. So there’s this idea of the difference between building a quantum computer and using a quantum computer. And the US is beginning to accelerate. There’s a handful of companies that are working in the quantum software field that are making huge strides and doing some really exciting research, but the Chinese and the Japanese have been doing it for the last five to 10 years.

Tony Trippe:

They have a huge head start on us in that capacity. And so as these products become commercialized, these devices become available. The Chinese and Japanese are already way ahead of us and being able to corner the use of them. And so that’s a real concern so much, so that actually one of my clients, I can’t really talk about the details of the project. But I was in fact hired by the US government to look at this area and to make some very specific comparisons between the Chinese efforts and the US efforts, in this from a national security perspective.

Raymond Guarnieri:

So just in case anyone out there doesn’t know which I certainly didn’t before we met, what is so significant about quantum computers that makes this so interesting because I’m listening to , your predictions here, and I’m thinking this is fascinating because I have like a very fleeting idea of what a quantum computer actually is. But if you could explain it just as though you were talking to a small child, and then I can understand it. Because it’s really fascinating the capacity of these machines.

Tony Trippe:

Yeah. I mean, the very simplest explanation without getting into any of the technology that’s involved is that for some computing tasks, a quantum computer can solve an equation or solve a problem in a few hours. That would take a huge network of supercomputers, literally hundreds of years, to do that same calculation. And where this primarily comes, there’s lots of different applications, but the one that everyone’s most concerned about is cybersecurity. These 128 bit encrypted messages that are currently that’s standard for cybersecurity. Theoretically, a quantum computer could crack one of those in a couple of hours, as opposed to today. It generally agreed upon that, that conventional supercomputers would take hundreds of years to be able to crack that same message. And so that’s the real, that we get right down to it.

Tony Trippe:

Again there’s lots of other applications for chemistry and molecular modeling and various other types of multiple body problems. But that’s the one that everybody is focusing on and communications while being able to encrypt a message and deliver it from a satellite and create a message that nobody can crack. So even if it’s intercepted along the way, it can’t be decoded because it’s quantum encrypted.

Thomas Colson:

Well, Ray, that sounds fascinating. I Think Tony is the guy, if we ever want to do any patent analysis and anyone else who wants to do patent analysis, but we should probably wrap up because we’re at about 30 minutes.

Raymond Guarnieri:

Yeah, no, this was really fascination, Tony. I appreciate you taking the time to come here and talk to us about IP analytics and patent data and how you can use it to essentially have a crystal ball into the future. So if anyone out there is watching and you thought this was an exciting and interesting topic related to IP, please subscribe to us on YouTube, hit the like button, share comment on LinkedIn, wherever you’re watching. And I guess I should take this opportunity to also mention that probably by the time you are all watching and listening to this, we’re also on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and a handful of other pretty much any of your favorite podcast listening platforms. You can find us there now, too. Please spread the word and thanks everyone.

Thomas Colson:

Thanks guys for being here with us.