Blog and news

The INTA's TMAP conference is starting today at the Washington Hilton and if you are participating at the conference you will be able to get a first look at the new Markify search platform in our exhibition booth. 

We have together with US and European clients been working hard with our new search platform that we think will change how you approach trademark searching, what you expect from a search platform and what you have to pay for it.   

Beta tester?

There is still some work that has to be done on the new platform so the official launch is first in a couple of weeks, when I will also explain the new platform more in detail. But already next week we will start to let a few beta testers in. 

If you would like to be one of our first beta testers, just send us an email at support@markify.com with the headline "beta tester". 

Why is accuracy in trademark search so important?

Trademark practitioners of course know the answer but often have a hard time explaining it to their clients or to their organizations.  

"Because without that accuracy you do not know, if it is safe to launch the new brand. And a future conflict is not something you want to risk." 

Even if that should be rather easy to understand for trademark owners, there are a lot of premium trademarks launched without accurate clearance work done. It is our objective to change that with four unique Markify properties:

1. Find All Potential Conflicts

The Markify technology is the world's only statistically proven trademark search algorithm. Built on more than 12.000 actual cases where a government official in the US or the EU have concluded that two mark names are confusingly similar.

So we know we find the potential conflicts (+99%). We are not guessing. See the independent research study.  

2. Less Noise 

Our statistical method also let's us reduce the "noise" in reports and rank all results according to their statistical risk. 

3. Fast and Easy Work-Flow

This full availability search just takes one minute. And the available tools to get the clearance work done are both powerful and easy. 

4. Best Price and Free Trial

Taking a risk with a less accurate trademark search report is something very few companies can afford. We at Markify believe you should be able to combine top quality in a comprehensive report with a low price, so you never have to take that risk.

Visit the Markify exhibition booth (#1316) in Orlando for a demo and get your free trial.

If you are not there, send me an email at benoit@markify.com.

For the first time you can now get an automated, full common law search included in your US trademark clearance report. And still not pay more than $129 for the whole report. 

On demand from our US clients we have expanded our common law coverage with some of today's most important content. The US Full search report's common law part now includes six different sections:  

• Web search - New
• Image search - New
• Social media search - New
• Social name search - New
• US company names
• Domain names 

It is hard to imagine a relevant result that could not be found within these groups today. Ten years ago there were still a number of printed sources, like telephone books and magazines, with "trademark" names that did not show up anywhere else. But that is not the case anymore. 

So we think this makes the common law section for the US Full truly full/comprehensive. 

The trademark results section was already full, with both federal and state trademarks, all processed with the best similarity algorithm in the world. 

Same low price

And we decided to add these new sources without changing the price - $129 - which is by far the best price in the industry for a comparable comprehensive - full availability - US trademark clearance report. Other providers are charging more than $600 for such a report.   

In order to keep the search fast and not drive extra costs, our search is fully automated, with the below described settings for the US Full trademark search report: 

- - -

Web search - New

Scope of search: An automated, "intelligent" web search where known biases as region and personal search history have been eliminated. The search combines the trademark name with important keywords provided during the order. 

The top 30 results are included as links and short descriptions. Optional: You can add screen captures of the relevant pages where also the keywords have been highlighted.  

Note: The web/social media is so big that even the best keyword search may retrieve a million search results. This means that no search report, automated or human, can guarantee that there are no potential common law conflicts out there. All we can do is minimize the risk.    

Images - New
Scope of search: The same search settings as the Web search. The top 30 results are included.

Social media search - New 
Scope of search: A search of the use of the trademark name in the world's largest social networks: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest. The top 20 results from each social network are included. 

Social names - New 
Scope of search: A search if the trademark name is registered as a user name in any of 80 social networks.

US company names 
Scope of search: A search among more than 20 million secretary of state business records from all US states and Washington DC. Identical and very similar results.

Domain names 
Scope of search: Identical and very similar results from more than 1000 TLD's, covering both gTLD', ccTLD's and New gTLD's. See full list.

Federal trademarks (USPTO) 

Scope of search: The world's best similarity algorithm, finding more than 99% of potential conflicts. Official data updated daily from the USPTO .

US state trademarks 

Scope of search: A search among all the 50 US states' trademark records. (Same similarity algorithm as the federal search.)  

- - -

The average turn-around time: 5 min. And you can choose to include or exclude any of the above sections in your report. 

If you have not yet tried our full availability report, send me an email and I will set you up for a free trial. 

If this is not the best US full availability report, please tell me what is missing or what should be changed? The best suggestions will be rewarded. 

Since we started Markify six years ago our aim has been to build and improve the world's best trademark search algorithm. Finding all potential conflicts but with as little noise as possible.

Now we are releasing our next step in that work - our statistical Risk analysis. 

The ranking of our results is based on a statistical analysis of more than 10.000 official cases of confusingly similar trademarks in the EU or the US. These come from OHIM decision and from USPTO 2(d) citations and TTAB decisions. 

The main difference between these two sources are the number of languages they handle. While the USPTO largely concentrate on English, and Spanish to some extent, the OHIM/CTM decisions handles 28 countries, all with a mix of languages.  

Instead of showing the individual risk level for every result, we have gouped the results in four "Risk level" groups. Each level indicate statistically how big risk there is that you will find a potential conflict in this group.  

Level 1 - Very high risk.

Of all conflicts in Europe or the US, 20% have these types of similarities. 

This group of results typically stands for less than 1% of the total amount of results. 

Level 2 - High risk. 

Of all conflicts in Europe or the US, 40% have  these types of similarities. 

This group of results typically stands for only 5% of the total amount of results. 

Level 3 - Medium risk. 

Of all conflicts in Europe or the US, 25% have these types of similarities. 

This group of results typically stand for 20% of the total amount of results.  

Level 4 - Low risk. 

Of all conflicts in Europe or the US, 15% have these types of similarities.  

This group of results typically stands for 75% of the total amount of results. 

As you can see above, the lower the risk, the longer the result list. The last group of results contain 75% of all results, but with only 15% of the potential conflicts. 

This is frustrating for us developing the algorithm and for our clients, who have to analyze all results. Just think how much easier trademark clearance work would be if you could just skip Level 4. But unfortunately there are so many conflict cases in this group that you cannot neglect it. 

However, in some cases I know that the attorney does skip the lower part of the results list. This is often the case when he wants to save time and money for the client and maybe when the client feel that an opposition is not the end of the world. 

For other clients, with a marketing start in the near future, that would not be an option. They would not want to risk the first six months of marketing investments... 

Risk levels are currently not included in downloaded reports. Our thinking is that most of our clients' clients will not understand the meaning of "risk". It is just there in the online report to make your job faster and easier. 

Please send me your feedback at benoit@markify.com.

Notes

The "signal-to-noise ratio" - the scientific name for measuring accuracy - is tested as the best in the trademark search industry (see independent Benchmark Report). 

The Markify Comprehensive Search Algorithm finds more than 99% of potential conflicts, but does it with a total number of results that on average is 50% lower than comparable reports (Full /Comprehensive reports) done by other providers. 

Today we are launching an upgraded design of our logged in pages. Our two main objectives with the new design have been to:

• make the site easier to access for first time users.
• make the work with large reports easier and faster. 

You will find most things where they used to be but there are some important news:

1. Foldable left navigation bar to save valuable space. 

Since many of our trademark search reports are quite broad, we decided to let the left navigation bar fold when it was not used. This way you can see more of the result table without having to scroll left-right. 

Note that the navigation bar can be locked in it's open position by clicking on the top arrow. 

2. Larger type face to increase readability. 

When you work with large amounts of data, the readability is extremely important. Our former typeface was generally a bit to small to be easily read in all conditions. So we have made it a bit larger.   
  
3. A more informative "head" for online reports.

Above each full search and watch report there is head with four blocks of information. These are: 

• Ordered search details
• Results meta data and access to file dates
• Risk analysis - See below. 
• Customized and created reports 

This way you get a quick and good overview of all relevant data concerning your report.

4. Risk analysis of trademark search results

We have always ranked our trademark search results statistically, from top to bottom, according to their risk level. But we have not explicitly shown the borders between different groups. Now we have added a "Risk level" to every result row, so you can easy and fast see the risk level.

Every mark has it's own risk level but we have decided to bundle them in four groups: 

• Risk level 1 - Very high risk
• Risk level 2 - High risk
• Risk level 3 - Medium risk
• Risk level 4 - Low risk 

This way you can easier see when a set of results is becoming less relevant. 
This Risk analysis will be presented in detail in a coming blog post. 

5. Downloaded reports get a Table of contents for easy navigation.
 
New PDF reports, and other formats, now have a clickable Table of contents. This way you can fast and accurately navigate in a large report. 

Please send me your personal feed-back to benoit@markify.com.