Blog y noticias

During the INTA (International Trademark Association) Annual Meeting in Dallas last week we choose once again to be an exhibitor. It was our third Annual Meeting after San Francisco 2011 and Washington DC 2012. These meetings gather more than 8000 trademark attorneys and domain name professionals. For a start-up it is always difficult to decide where to put your limited marketing dollars. But I must admit that I love these types of exhibitions or trade shows. There are four major reasons why we choose to invest in these events:

1. Market overview. You get a very good sense of what services are out there and you get a chance to talk to the different service providers.
    
2. Future sales. The contacts for future sales are very valuable. I would argue that the people coming in to your booth, probably are some of your most motivated, potential clients. I ended up with +400 business cards from people I believe can become some of my most important clients.
    
3. Product feedback. The detailed feedback you get and the possibility to develop your product together with the potential client.
    
4. Meeting competitors that may become future partners.

If you run a company and don't do trade shows, I would recommend you try one. If you are in the trademark or domain name business, I suggest we meet at the next INTA annual meeting, in Hong Kong 2014.

Once again we have looked at all EU and USPTO trademark applications the last year - 2012 - and done a quick analysis of what words are used.

Raw lists of the popular 1000 trademark words can be found here: Top 1000 USPTO trademark words 2012, Top 1000 CTM trademark words 2012

The total number of different "words" are over 130.000. The distribution is as usual: 90 percent are used less than 5 times, like PINTEREST and JABRA, and the top 10 percent are used up to 2000 times, like ONE and LOVE.

Popular USPTO trademark words

What words were popular 2012 when it came to getting a US trademark registration?

A new word on the top list is CLOUD, wich was strong already in 2011 with 372 occurrences and this year made it to the top list when it showed up in 454 trademarks applications. Compare that with 2006, when CLOUD only showed up in 28 trademark applications.

Other trademark words moving up on the list are: WATER, FREE, STAR, BODY an NATIONAL.

Single letters are very popular in trademark filings, like T, N and E. A rising star here is the letter M, which appears in more than 700 trademark applications last year compared to 450 the year before.

Words moving down on the list are GREEN, REAL, USA and SOCIAL.

The top 100 USPTO trademark words 2012:

Note that we have eliminated the most common "stop words" like  THE, IS, AT, YOU, AND etc, and some company attributes like INC, LLC, COMPANY and GROUP.

Popular EU trademark words

We have also done a similar analysis of the very popular EU trademark registration called CTM (from OHIM). A CTM (Community Trade Mark) covers 27 countries and many languages. Surprisingly there is not a large  difference between the EU trademark list and the US trademarks. English is the dominating language, at least in the  in the pan-European trademark registration CTM.

A couple of trademark words you find in the CTM top list that you don't find in the USPTO top list: ECO, HOTEL, LONDON, QUALITY, ROYAL, EASY, EUROPEAN and PARIS.

Markify's trademark search engine just became a lot more global. We have added another 650.000 international trademarks to our trademark search engine.

All these trademarks come from the WIPO trademark database, sometimes called "ROMARIN". (WIPO is the United Nation's organization that administrates the Madrid system, through which you can get a trademark registration in approx. 80 countries.)

I think this means that Markify today is the world's only free trademark search engine that covers both the US (USPTO), EU (CTM/OHIM) and international (WIPO) trademarks.

A total of almost 4 million live trademarks, updated every 24 hours with 400.000 new marks per year.

We are also the only free trademark search that gives you a proper list of confusingly similar trademarks, where there could be a likelihood of confusion.

Some of the other providers try to do this with "fuzzy search". The problem with "fuzzy search" is that it is "fuzzy". It misses too much and gives you to much noise. A good similarity algorithm should not be "fuzzy" but very distinct, based on statistics.

We have based our algorithm on more that 10.000 actual cases where a government employee has said that these two trademarks are confusingly similar.

So now you can get the best trademark search results, including all classes, also for WIPO trademarks - for free.

Trademark attorneys should know that we have added the WIPO trademarks - without raising our price of $100 - in our premium products: US Comprehensive Trademark Search and EU Comprehensive Search.

Entrepreneurs and start-ups that uses our Trademark Registration should know that these Comprehensive Search reports are always included in our Trademark Registration service.

All our Trademark Watch and Monitor customers will now also be getting international WIPO results in their reports. At no additional cost.

After months of work the Markify trademark registration service is launched. When we set out to build the world's best trademark registration service we made the following list of criteria:

1. Easy and fast trademark application.
   • Start-ups and brand builders expect a web service to be easy and fast. Anything else is failure.
2. Help from experienced trademark attorneys.
   • Sure, you can do a trademark registration without the help of a trademark attorney. But in most cases it's a bad choice because of:
     • the time it takes,
     • the small money you save and
     • the risks involved.
   • We have put together a small network of independent trademark experts in the US and in Europe. Some of them run their own trademark law firm. Some work for big IP focused law firms. They all have in common that they are passionate about trademarks.
3. Focus on EU and US trademarks.
   • A CTM trademark registration from OHIM covers 27 EU countries in one application. With a government fee of only € 900 it is often the best deal for ambitious start-ups. CTM is also the fastest growing trademark registration in Europe.
   • A USPTO trademark registration protects your brand in the world's most important market, the US, and the government fee is only $325 per class.
4. Leverage the Markify comprehensive search technology.
   • Every Markify trademark registration gives you a Comprehensive Search that finds 99% of all confusingly similar brands (CTM, USPTO, Domains and Common law).
   • You also get a Comprehensive Trademark and Domain Name Watch that will help you protect your new brand.
   • These two services are included and only available through Markify.
5. Cheaper than any other trademark registration service.
   • Our attorneys could give us rock-bottom prices, since we are giving them a new client on a "silver platter". All client and trademark details are filled in and all fees are payed for.
   • The pricing goes from $199 (Core package) to $499 (Full package) + government fees for a USPTO trademark. And from € 299 (Core) to €499 (Full) + government fees for a CTM/OHIM trademark.
   • Another reason our pricing can be so low is that the Comprehensive Search is relevance ranked, which makes the job much easier and faster for the trademark attorney.

How do you think we can improve the trademark registration service? Send me an email at benoit followed by our domain name!

The Markify trademark search has since the start 18 months ago been recognized as the most accurate and comprehensive in terms of finding confusingly similar trademarks. Now we add new databases and new features to make it even more useful in our two main markets: the US and the EU.

To our current databases, USPTO and CTM, we now add:

• US common law – A search among more than 15 million registered US businesses.
• Domain names –  Confusingly similar domain names in .com, .net, .org, .info, .us and .biz. Identical hits from approx. 200 ccTLDs.
• WIPO – More than 600.000 international trademarks.

The new Comprehensive Search Report from Markify has four features no other search provider have:

1. Superior accuracy

We are the only search provider that can give you a result list that finds 99% of all confusingly similar trademarks (see benchmark report where Markify was ranked number 1.

Our result list also contain much less “noise” than other full availability reports. Instead of going through a list of say 2.000 results, you get a list of 300 results. This ofcourse saves you lots of time.

How is it possible for us to give you all the relevant results but skip the bad ones?

The Markify trademark search s is a built on a statistical method using more than 10.000 actual cases where a likelihood of confusion has been established by a governement official, in the US or in Europe.

To our knowledge, no other trademark search algorithm is built like that.

2. Relevance ranked results

The Markify Comprehensive Search Reports are relevance ranked (so is in fact the free trademark search also). This means that you in most cases will find your potential conflicts on the first pages. Talk about time saving.

The relevance ranking is also built on the statistical case law data.

3. Custom branding

You can easily customize the report and put your own branding on it if you choose. Once you have bought the data, you can customize and download as many variants of the report as you like.

4. Unmatched price: $100

We believe every brand deserves a safe start.

Most entrepreneurs and start-ups work on a very tight budget. Until now most of them have skipped a full availability search, because a price of $300-$600 has not seem attractive.

We aim to change that. We start by putting a rock-bottom low price on our two Comprehensivie Search Report packages: only $100 for the US Comprehensive or the EU Comprehensive.

Read about the other new services launched by Markify in May:

Trademark attorneys can now afford to give all clients a global watch & monitoring service

Global domain and trademark watch included in new Brand Protect Kit

Markify launches powerful trademark and domain services at INTA 2012