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13 January 2011 ,
Written by Dhruv Tanwar
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IBM has said that its inventors received a record 5,896 US patents in 2010, its 18th consecutive year at the top of the list of the world’s most inventive companies. IBM's first 5,000 patents came over a period of five decades since it was established in 1911.
The company received patents for a range of inventions this year. Over 7,000 inventors across 46 different US states and 29 countries contributed to the company's unparalleled 2010 patent tally, with those residing outside the US contributing over 22% of the patents in 2010, 27% more than international inventor contributions over the past three years.
Among the inventions IBM patented this year are:
- a method for gathering, analyzing, and processing patient information from multiple data sources to provide more effective diagnoses of medical conditions;
- a system for predicting traffic conditions based on information exchanged over short-range wireless communications;
- a technique that analyzes data from sensors in computer hard drives to enable faster emergency response in the event of earthquakes and other disasters; and
- a technology advancement for enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light instead of electrical signals, which can deliver increased performance of computing systems.
Samsung, Microsoft, Canon and Panasonic were the other four of the top five companies who were awarded patents in 2010. |