IT firms lead the patent table

Bangalore: Though the recession has impacted on technology firms worse than other sectors, in terms of patent applications they are dominating. Technology majors such as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are placed on the top in patent application list, as per a recent survey by IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. These companies got scores of 3505, 2796 and 2747 respectively.

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The results are based on not only the number of patents owned by the companies but also various measures of patent quality such as how often a given patent is cited.

Similar to the previous year's list, electronic majors like Hitachi, Matsushita, Xerox and Sony retained their positions in the electronic category. In the telecomm equipment category, Cisco, Nokia and Motorola remained on the top.

In computer peripherals and Storage section, electronic ink company E Ink secured the third position only with a pipeline score of 914 behind Seiko Epson and Ricoh. Amazon is using E Ink's technology in its Kindle e-book reader.

The survey also said that the new patent applications are growing at an ever-increasing rate, and now over double the number filed a decade ago.