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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    IBM wins most U.S. patents in 2008

    Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:41am EST
    A view of the IBM facility outside Boulder, Colorado October 18, 2006. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

    (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp said on Wednesday it became the first company ever to win more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year, citing a new report from research firm IFI Patent Intelligence.

    IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard.

    Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424, according to the report, which compiled data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics had the second-highest number of patents at 3,515.

    A wireless system that detects a child's presence in a baby car seat and a method for blind people to find their way around using radio frequency identification are among the patents IBM Scientists won in 2008, IBM said.

    The company also earned a patent for developing a cheaper way to build nanotechnology used to make chips.

    The Armonk, New York-based company said it plans to increase by 50 percent -- to more than 3,000 -- the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection in an attempt to spur open and wide-scale innovation.

    IBM also said it would contribute the capabilities of IBM Research to a collaborative project that is developing an empirical measure of patent quality.

    (Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore and Anupreeta Das in San Francisco; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)


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