We are just about finished beta testing a new feature. This new feature provides a visual representation of your prior art analysis. With several mouse clicks, you'll be able to see how many times a particular concept is found in your set of prior art under review. This feature allows a group of reviewers to not only focus their review efforts more precisely, but also determine whether further searching will be required. For joint defendants in a litigation, the heat map will enable more in depth discussions about prior art issues on a group conference call. Counsel for each defendant will be able to see how the group's analysis is proceeding and determine where to focus resources to improve the overall analysis. In the context of crowdsourcing your prior art analysis, you can now visualize how effective the group-based search was for the target concepts.
After the jump you'll find a sneak peak of the new "heat map" feature we are testing.
This is the main screen to select the concepts and claims of interest:
Here is a results screen for the heat map:
The displayed heat map provides a drill-down link to identify the references for each concept and relationship to claims.
In a future post, we'll discuss our efforts at crowdsourcing defense efforts against the Lodsys patent portfolio.