Attorney feedback behind Markify's new search and watch services

“Listen to the customer” is a popular, and often a very good, advice when you develop your products and services. We didn’t just listen, we sat down with some of our best trademark attorney clients and discussed for hours.

“How can we at Markify help you serve your clients better?” was our main question.

The core answer, from both small and big firms, was rather simple:

“We like your searching and watching services. We love the accuracy of your trademark search algorithm. And the Markify pricing is amazing.

But, your services need to cover more trademark, domain name and common law databases.”

So the last year our team have been busy adding new databases to our comprehensive searching and monitoring services for trademarks and domain names.

Our geographical focus in this process has been the 28 EU countries, the US and the new gTLDs. We start here, but we will not stop here . . .

You find detailed descriptions, samples and pricing of our new offers here:

Comprehensive Search reports

Trademark monitoring

Domain name monitoring

We truly understand the value of your feedback. It is what helped build these services in the first place. So any more feedback is highly appreciated!

Markify adds international WIPO trademarks to the free trademark search

Markify's trademark search engine just became a lot more global. We have added another 650.000 international trademarks to our trademark search engine.

All these trademarks come from the WIPO trademark database, sometimes called "ROMARIN". (WIPO is the United Nation's organization that administrates the Madrid system, through which you can get a trademark registration in approx. 80 countries.)

I think this means that Markify today is the world's only free trademark search engine that covers both the US (USPTO), EU (CTM/OHIM) and international (WIPO) trademarks.

A total of almost 4 million live trademarks, updated every 24 hours with 400.000 new marks per year.

We are also the only free trademark search that gives you a proper list of confusingly similar trademarks, where there could be a likelihood of confusion.

Some of the other providers try to do this with "fuzzy search". The problem with "fuzzy search" is that it is "fuzzy". It misses too much and gives you to much noise. A good similarity algorithm should not be "fuzzy" but very distinct, based on statistics.

We have based our algorithm on more that 10.000 actual cases where a government employee has said that these two trademarks are confusingly similar.

So now you can get the best trademark search results, including all classes, also for WIPO trademarks - for free.

Trademark attorneys should know that we have added the WIPO trademarks - without raising our price of $100 - in our premium products: US Comprehensive Trademark Search and EU Comprehensive Search.

Entrepreneurs and start-ups that uses our Trademark Registration should know that these Comprehensive Search reports are always included in our Trademark Registration service.

All our Trademark Watch and Monitor customers will now also be getting international WIPO results in their reports. At no additional cost.

How can the cheapest trademark registration also be the best for start-ups?

After months of work the Markify trademark registration service is launched. When we set out to build the world's best trademark registration service we made the following list of criteria:

  1. Easy and fast trademark application.
    • Start-ups and brand builders expect a web service to be easy and fast. Anything else is failure.
  2. Help from experienced trademark attorneys.
    • Sure, you can do a trademark registration without the help of a trademark attorney. But in most cases it's a bad choice because of:
      • the time it takes,
      • the small money you save and
      • the risks involved.
    • We have put together a small network of independent trademark experts in the US and in Europe. Some of them run their own trademark law firm. Some work for big IP focused law firms. They all have in common that they are passionate about trademarks.
  3. Focus on EU and US trademarks.
    • A CTM trademark registration from OHIM covers 27 EU countries in one application. With a government fee of only € 900 it is often the best deal for ambitious start-ups. CTM is also the fastest growing trademark registration in Europe.
    • A USPTO trademark registration protects your brand in the world's most important market, the US, and the government fee is only $325 per class.
  4. Leverage the Markify comprehensive search technology.
    • Every Markify trademark registration gives you a Comprehensive Search that finds 99% of all confusingly similar brands (CTM, USPTO, Domains and Common law).
    • You also get a Comprehensive Trademark and Domain Name Watch that will help you protect your new brand.
    • These two services are included and only available through Markify.
  5. Cheaper than any other trademark registration service.
    • Our attorneys could give us rock-bottom prices, since we are giving them a new client on a "silver platter". All client and trademark details are filled in and all fees are payed for.
    • The pricing goes from $199 (Core package) to $499 (Full package) + government fees for a USPTO trademark. And from € 299 (Core) to €499 (Full) + government fees for a CTM/OHIM trademark.
    • Another reason our pricing can be so low is that the Comprehensive Search is relevance ranked, which makes the job much easier and faster for the trademark attorney.

How do you think we can improve the trademark registration service? Send me an email at benoit followed by our domain name!

The world's first comprehensive trademark search API

Markify now releases the world's first comprehensive trademark search API. It's fast and free and it covers the US and the EU.

We have debated internally quite a bit about how much you can and should cannibalize on your own business. Not an easy discussion.

A lot of the big on-line companies have very restricted APIs. After reading this very good blog post about APIs, we decided to go the other way.

So what do you get from the Markify trademark search API?

  1. The world's most accurate trademark search, finding 99% of confusingly similar trademarks.
  2. Results in similarity order. No one else does this.
  3. Daily updated trademark data from the USPTO and from the large pan-European database OHIM/CTM
  4. Fast and free. Average response times are less than 0.9 seconds.

Who do we think should be interested?

  • Domain name registrars - Let your users do a fast trademark search to make sure they can use the domain name for their new business. We believe this will sell more domains to business oriented users. How? The level of trust and service will result in more buys than the occasional possible trademark conflict.
  • Law firms - Become more time and cost efficient towards your trademark search/clearance clients.
  • Legal and docketing software companies - You already have a great software and a client base. So now you can easily integrate the world's most accurate trademark search for USPTO and OHIM/CTM.
  • Developers - You have an idea of a mash-up or a new way to use the trademark search engine? We will love to hear about it.

You find instructions, rules and documentation for the trademark search API here

Don't hesitate to contact us and we'll try to help you the best we can. And we love feedback! Send me a mail at my first name followed by our domain name.

The new tool for trademark professionals