And, just 12 months after its launch, the site receives around 15 million 'hits' each month. He warned that where commercial interests are at stake, however, restricting a novelty search to such free services is hazardous. Trained professionals are required to operate the more powerful information tools used by patent offices and professionals, and to interpret their outputs. Commercial patent information providers, a number of which were represented at Patinnova, fill the gap between these two systems. According to Thierry Sargentini of Questel Orbit's Qweb service, SMEs in particular need pre-processed information, rather than raw data.
Information is of no value when there is too much of it.
Several speakers predicted that such patent information services would soon lead to the on-line trading of intellectual property rights themselves. Issues like IPR do not readily attract their attention. We approached it as a matter of risk management - a perspective companies relate to directly. BIX provides interactive IP diagnosis, identifying the risks to which users are exposed by their current IP strategy - or lack of one. Initial response from users has been so positive that BIX is now being rolled out to other industrial sectors.