Visual Guide to finding prior patent art with Sumobrain

SumoBrain is one of the best search engines for finding previous patent prior art.
And it already has a great Search Tutorial.
Let's try an Advanced search by following the link at the near the top, below the the search box.
Advanced Search has a helpful syntax and formatting guide to assist in our search.
We'll search for 'touch screen camera focus' and restrict by the patent's publish date.
From the syntax guide we know how to restrict our search results by publish date: APD/MM/DD/YYYY->MM/DD/YYYY
Most importantly Advanced search allows us to include Japan's patent abstracts, US patents and applications, European Patent Office, and the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Being able to search Japan's abstracts, the EPO's, the WIPO, and US patents abstracts, the EPO makes SumoBrain one of the best free resources for finding prior patent art.
Let's check out one of the results, Image Pick-up Apparatus invented by Hirokazu Sato looks good.
Instead of charging for its services SumoBrain has advertising, but all the bibliographic, abstract, and more are here if you scroll down.
Sumobrain's abstract also includes the patent's claims.
You can download the entire patent directly from SumoBrain by following the link above the claims.
One of the coolest features of SumoBrain are it's list this patents citations and patents that reference it.  If it's on SumoBrain there will be a link to it.  Unlike Google Patents only has US patents and applications, SumoBrain will include a list of Foreign References as well.  If SumoBrain doesn't have them, Espacenet and PatentScope might. There's also a guide with examples of using SumoBrain's international citation list and searching for an EPO patent to download. Back to Patent-Ed's Visual Guides to finding prior art  >>

Gartner: #Smartphones boom, overall #mobile sales drop - Computerworld

Mobile phone sales floundered during the second quarter in the wake of the earthquake in #Japan. But smartphone sales continued to grow, as #Android extended its lead in the operating system race, according to market research company Gartner.

Overall sales of mobile devices to end users totaled 428.7 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a 16.5% increase compared to the same period in 2010, but a 4.4% decrease from the previous quarter, as the availability of components was affected by the earthquake in Japan.

UK companies to get patents faster in US and Japan

UK companies to get patents faster in US and Japan:

The UK, US and Japan have launched a pilot scheme that will make it quicker for companies that have been granted a patent in one country to get that patent awarded in the other two.