2020 Vision
Looking ahead to next year.
28th December 2019
As we prepare to enter January, named for the two-faced Roman god Janus who could look forwards and backwards at the same time, we’ve been looking back at the past twelve months whilst planning for the next.
As we’ve been recounting the activities and achievements of 2019, we noticed somewhat of a cosmic coincidence… just as ‘PATENTLY’ is almost an anagram of ‘PLANET’ (I said almost), many of the key Patently events from 2019 coincided with achievements and discoveries in outer space, almost as if ordained in the stars.
Kicking 2019 off in spectacular fashion, on New Year’s Day no less, was an amazing set of photographs from the New Horizons spacecraft. Sent to investigate differences between distant bodies and those nearer the sun, the spacecraft was guided past the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule. The asteroid looks different to those of the inner Solar System, as it shows unusual surface texture, relatively few obvious craters, and nearly spherical lobes. Its shape is hypothesised to have formed when two objects — Ultima and Thule — collided ‘gently’ and stuck when the solar system was still young.
Ultima Thule literally means “ Beyond the borders of the known world”, a perfect name for the farthest asteroid yet visited by a human spacecraft. We entered uncharted territory of our own in January as we made the journey to our new office space. Adorned with our company livery, natural sunlight and The Espresso Room just around the corner it has proven to be a great place to work. If you’re ever in the area and fancy a chat, we’re always happy to meet new people.
March arrived and we saw the lunar occultation of Saturn, when arguably the two most recognisable objects in the night sky were visible side-by-side.
And at the time Saturn was joining the Moon in the night sky, Patently was joining PatCom.
PatCom, The Patent Committee, is an organisation of the worlds major commercial IP information providers. Members are competitors, nonetheless, share the common goal of obtaining high quality, timely patent data from IP Offices globally. We find it beneficial to work together on issues which lie at the heart of the IP information profession. Membership of PatCom will allow us to do our part in helping expand the provision of IP information for the benefit of all, while (we hope) simultaneously sending a message to our users that we are leading members of the IP data community.
April 2019 marked more major milestones, both for astronomers and Patently. The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first ever picture of a black hole. Their image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87. If you think ‘supermassive’ is silly word, how would you describe something 6.5 BILLION times more massive than the Sun?
Not to be out done, at the same time Patently released our own state-of-the-art images. For years we have been perfecting an intuitive way to view and understand complex patent families. In April last year we finalised initial development and began trials of our new and improved C-Tree™. We’re unabashedly proud of this revolutionary and, dare we say, beautiful feature upgrade. We love it, and hope you will be to.
We’re happy to report that beta user trials are almost complete and after a planned round of adjustments based on feedback, we are aiming to launch later this coming year — watch this space (no pun intended).
In July we were treated to possibly to most awe inspiring event in the calendar — a Total Solar Eclipse. I say “we were treated to…” but in reality, we weren’t actually able to travel to Chile to see it first hand. The closest we got was a few pints in the Sun Tavern with a team of Argentinian patent attorneys that we met at AIPPI in September. We can’t claim to have chosen such a perfectly named venue on purpose, had we made the connection at the time, a few more Tequila Sunrises may have been on the menu.
As the year began to draw to a close, in October the Draconid meteor shower sent shooting stars racing across the sky, and was closely followed, in November, by the astonishing spectacle that is the Transit of Mercury. Seeing the tiny dot as it travels across the enormous disc, and remembering that that tiny dot is an entire planet, really hammers home how immense the Sun is.
We were on our travels around that time too. The EPO’s Patent Information Conference in Bucharest, IP Service World in Munich and several other trips around the UK saw us clock up over 15,000 km in a little over six weeks.
And before you ask… Yes, we did offset the carbon. We think it’s important to look after this planet of ours. As you may have gathered from this blog, at Patently we’re pretty interested in astronomy and space travel. So it should come as no surprise that we’re big fans of the late, great Carl Sagan, and have practically memorised his famous quote about ‘a pale blue dot’:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
So as the bongs of Big Ben approach, we’d like to wish you all the best for the coming year and beyond, and ask you to join us in our New Decade Resolution, inspired by another hero of ours, Mahatma Gandhi:
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
Happy New Year! See you in 2020…
For information on Patently, please visit patently.com and email us at ask@patently.com.
