The USPTO has, over the decades, had a bit of a spotty success rate at designing e-commerce systems. This blog article highlights two reasons to allow yourself some guarded optimism in this area — the fact that USPTO is doing real alpha-testing of its Patentcenter system, and that a small but very active core of USPTO customers are carrying out very aggressive alpha-testing of that system. Continue reading “You can thank your alpha-testers (and you can thank the USPTO)”
Setting up a tripwire for new filings in EFS-Web and Patentcenter
(Note: this tripwire feature is feature request FR7. The “last 30 ack receipts” feature is feature request FR4.)
(Update: Ideascale does not seem to work any more. For example this very suggestion by the person mentioned below is no longer to be seen in the Ideascale system.)
In this posting I will talk about three things — a feature that USPTO ought to implement in EFS-Web and in Patentcenter alpha — and a reminder of the existence of the Ideascale system which USPTO has set up for receiving suggestions — and a thanks to a member of the patent community who used Ideascale to offer up the feature that I am now going to write about.
The feature is, USPTO ought to set it up in EFS-Web and in Patentcenter so that it is possible to set up tripwires. By tripwire I mean a function so that in an automatic way, any new filing of a document by a filer would get communicated to some particular pre-established email address. Continue reading “Setting up a tripwire for new filings in EFS-Web and Patentcenter”