Gaining momentum in the US: Markify hires a Business Development Director

To handle the growing interest for Markify in the US we have added a Business Development Director to our US operations. 

Her name is Sasha Farrah and she has a solid background in the trademark community:

   > Several years at IP service providers like Corsearch, Thomson Compumark, Dennemeyer and LexisNexis. - She knows what options you have and she can discuss them in detail. 

   > A trademark attorney herself. - She understands the legal aspects of the trademark profession.

   > Started as an examiner at the USPTO. - She knows how they work and what you can expect from them.  

Read her own story here:   https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6362310617717579776/

She would love to hear from you, to discuss how you with powerful and smarter trademark search tools can reduce costs, optimize your work flow and get new business. 

You can reach her at sasha@markify.com or at 310.922.9778.

INTA Barcelona: The Four Good Reasons to Visit the Markify Booth (D25)

There are at least four good reasons to visit the Markify booth (D25) at INTA in Barcelona the coming Sunday-Wednesday:

1. See our new trademark search product ProSearch in action. It is the first search platform that combines a clearance search with a deep opposition analysis.

2. Get the free trial to all our trademark search and watch products. We promise you will be surprised by the quality and that it will save you a lot of time and money. 

3. You can win something great just by dropping your card in the bowl! 

4. Meet part of the team and discuss your challenges and see if we cannot help you with them. 

If you cannot reach us in the booth, just send me an email at benoit@markify.com.

Full Common Law Coverage Now Included in the US Full Trademark Search Report from Markify

For the first time you can now get an automated, full common law search included in your US trademark clearance report. And still not pay more than $129 for the whole report. 

On demand from our US clients we have expanded our common law coverage with some of today's most important content. The US Full search report's common law part now includes six different sections:  

  • Web search - New
  • Image search - New
  • Social media search - New
  • Social name search - New
  • US company names
  • Domain names 

It is hard to imagine a relevant result that could not be found within these groups today. Ten years ago there were still a number of printed sources, like telephone books and magazines, with "trademark" names that did not show up anywhere else. But that is not the case anymore. 

So we think this makes the common law section for the US Full truly full/comprehensive. 

The trademark results section was already full, with both federal and state trademarks, all processed with the best similarity algorithm in the world

Same low price

And we decided to add these new sources without changing the price - $129 - which is by far the best price in the industry for a comparable comprehensive - full availability - US trademark clearance report. Other providers are charging more than $600 for such a report.   

In order to keep the search fast and not drive extra costs, our search is fully automated, with the below described settings for the US Full trademark search report: 

- - -

Web search - New

Scope of search: An automated, "intelligent" web search where known biases as region and personal search history have been eliminated. The search combines the trademark name with important keywords provided during the order. 

The top 30 results are included as links and short descriptions. Optional: You can add screen captures of the relevant pages where also the keywords have been highlighted.  

Note: The web/social media is so big that even the best keyword search may retrieve a million search results. This means that no search report, automated or human, can guarantee that there are no potential common law conflicts out there. All we can do is minimize the risk.    

Images - New
Scope of search: The same search settings as the Web search. The top 30 results are included.

Social media search - New 
Scope of search: A search of the use of the trademark name in the world's largest social networks: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest. The top 20 results from each social network are included. 

Social names - New 
Scope of search: A search if the trademark name is registered as a user name in any of 80 social networks.

US company names 
Scope of search: A search among more than 20 million secretary of state business records from all US states and Washington DC. Identical and very similar results.

Domain names 
Scope of search: Identical and very similar results from more than 1000 TLD's, covering both gTLD', ccTLD's and New gTLD's. See full list.

Federal trademarks (USPTO) 

Scope of search: The world's best similarity algorithm, finding more than 99% of potential conflicts. Official data updated daily from the USPTO .

US state trademarks 

Scope of search: A search among all the 50 US states' trademark records. (Same similarity algorithm as the federal search.)  

- - -

The average turn-around time: 5 min. And you can choose to include or exclude any of the above sections in your report. 

If you have not yet tried our full availability report, send me an email and I will set you up for a free trial. 

If this is not the best US full availability report, please tell me what is missing or what should be changed? The best suggestions will be rewarded. 

Top 100 trademark words 2012

Once again we have looked at all EU and USPTO trademark applications the last year - 2012 - and done a quick analysis of what words are used.

Raw lists of the popular 1000 trademark words can be found here: Top 1000 USPTO trademark words 2012, Top 1000 CTM trademark words 2012

The total number of different "words" are over 130.000. The distribution is as usual: 90 percent are used less than 5 times, like PINTEREST and JABRA, and the top 10 percent are used up to 2000 times, like ONE and LOVE.

Popular USPTO trademark words

What words were popular 2012 when it came to getting a US trademark registration?

A new word on the top list is CLOUD, wich was strong already in 2011 with 372 occurrences and this year made it to the top list when it showed up in 454 trademarks applications. Compare that with 2006, when CLOUD only showed up in 28 trademark applications.

Other trademark words moving up on the list are: WATER, FREE, STAR, BODY an NATIONAL.

Single letters are very popular in trademark filings, like T, N and E. A rising star here is the letter M, which appears in more than 700 trademark applications last year compared to 450 the year before.

Words moving down on the list are GREEN, REAL, USA and SOCIAL.

The top 100 USPTO trademark words 2012:


1 life 51 day
2 solutions 52 black
3 world 53 water
4 one 54 red
5 love 55 america
6 new 56 fresh
7 health 57 natural
8 be 58 our
9 american 59 bar
10 care 60 b
11 home 61 s
12 t 62 free
13 go 63 plus
14 n 64 music
15 good 65 city
16 power 66 do
17 all 67 more
18 up 68 out
19 center 69 x
20 live 70 usa
21 energy 71 star
22 smart 72 from
23 me 73 sports
24 co 74 way
25 green 75 social
26 no 76 art
27 big 77 kids
28 services 78 that
29 better 79 c
30 business 80 first
31 its 81 make
32 technology 82 mobile
33 get 83 living
34 international 84 not
35 pro 85 service
36 e 86 foundation
37 m 87 body
38 real 88 national
39 club 89 can
40 de 90 systems
41 time 91 healthy
42 best 92 great
43 network 93 people
44 blue 94 1
45 design 95 institute
46 management 96 house
47 just 97 cloud
48 food 98 where
49 system 99 little
50 global 100 association

Note that we have eliminated the most common "stop words" like  THE, IS, AT, YOU, AND etc, and some company attributes like INC, LLC, COMPANY and GROUP.

Popular EU trademark words

We have also done a similar analysis of the very popular EU trademark registration called CTM (from OHIM). A CTM (Community Trade Mark) covers 27 countries and many languages. Surprisingly there is not a large  difference between the EU trademark list and the US trademarks. English is the dominating language, at least in the  in the pan-European trademark registration CTM.

A couple of trademark words you find in the CTM top list that you don't find in the USPTO top list: ECO, HOTEL, LONDON, QUALITY, ROYAL, EASY, EUROPEAN and PARIS.

Trademark search that helps
entrepreneurs avoid conflict

Today Markify is launching the world’s first free search and watch for similar trademarks. Our vision is to make it easier for entrepreneurs and brand name creators to avoid conflict and protect their trademarks and domain names.

With Markify you can quickly and easily check any name to see if anybody is already operating under a similar trademark - both in the US (USPTO data) and in Europe (CTM data). So you can avoid them in your search for a new domain name or trademark. Avoid what the law calls "likelihood of confusion". Otherwise you might have to change your name later. A risk no business should take.

This first blog post cover the story on why and how we built this new kind of trademark search that is both fast, accurate and free.

The problem

Entrepreneurs and brand name creators know how hard it is to create a new, good name. The crowded domain name space has made it even more difficult. And when you have created a name and you think you can secure the domain name, there is still one big obstacle left:

Are there any similar trademarks out there, doing anything related to your business?

To answer that question you have to spend at least $500 on an availability search for similar trademarks, and that is for checking just one name, in one market. And it takes 48 hours to get the result, which is of course way to long in an intense name creating session.

So that was the problem: Trademark search has been slow, difficult and expensive.

The solution

After being involved in professional name processes for ten years I decided to try to change this.  I wanted to make trademark search easy, accurate, fast and free. So entrepreneurs and brand name creators  easily could check possible names for similar trademarks and domain name availability immediately.

I knew from the start that it was not going to be easy, that we would have to be a team with some very specific competencies.

As it happens, my father-in-law, Benny Brodda, is a professor emeritus in computational linguistics (Stockholm University), and he is a pioneer in the trademark search field. He built one of the first software programs for finding similar trademarks and sold his successful trademark search company in the 90’s. Benny has 30 years of experience and is of course a very valuable advisor.

The rest of us in the team are a mix of software engineers, linguists and trademark experts. We spend most of our time on two things: the algorithm work and creating a user experience that reduces the built in complexity.  And we all share a passion for business names - trademarks or domain names.

Together we have built a new trademark search that is easy, accurate, fast and free.

The core: Accurate name similarity

Every year there are many thousand examples of trademark applications that didn’t survive because they were too similar to a registered trademark. Here are some of them:

New application: Registered trademark:
MTOWN MOTOWN
NAVIXEN NAVIREL
DILIPS PHILIPS
FLEROX FLOREX
PEX-FLEX FLEXPEX
HABIXIN HALISYN
KAMEX CHAMEX
POWERED  BY PERVASIC PERVASIVE SOFTWARE

The entrepreneurs and brand name creators behind these and many thousand other applications didn’t just loose the registration fee. They all lost a lot of valuable time and some of them had to pull back a launch at great costs. Then they had to start a new name process - if they were still up to it . . .

But is it really that hard, to determine if two names are similar or not?

If you want to produce a very accurate search result, one that finds most potential “killers” (we call them that) without a lot of “noise”, then it is very hard. From the start we knew that if we were going to be useful to entrepreneurs, we couldn’t deliver search results with too much noise.

It took us in the team 1,5 year to build the core technology, the similarity algorithm. Endless hours spent on statistical tests and different tweaks. A long time but we think it paid off.

We think our search results are extremely accurate. We can today find the similar trademarks with much less noise than any other trademark search service we have seen. And we are constantly tuning and improving the similarity algorithm, so any feedback from you is very valuable to us.

Benoit Fallenius

Founder, CEO

Follow on twitter: benoitfallenius

The new tool for trademark professionals