As of this morning, my patent application (as the sole inventor) has been officially submitted with the United States Patents and Trademarks Office! I’m super excited that this was all done before I end my work term here at Business Objects. As some of you may know, this idea was originally thought of a few months back, but all the work that needed to go into drafting up the legal documents and claims seemed to take forever!

I went through some very interesting processes by the end of all this. This idea was originally pitched in almost an elevator pitch like presentation, automagic powerpoint style. Then it was supplemented by a fairly thorough document proving the feasibility of such technology, the overview implementation architecture, an entire business case, and a few personas that would benefit significantly from such technology!

Then I began drawing up the details that are associated with the technology with some semi-cool diagrams. I actually had fun drawing the diagrams, and most of them did end up going into the final patent application! Also, at the end the patent specialist recommended that it would be good to also include some pretty fantastic yet simple GUI to cover the technology from end-to-end (there was only a single really rough sketch at that time), but we had only about a day to spare. About an hour and half later (yup!), I came up with several prototypes for the GUI using PowerPoint prototyping methods. Since the prototype was done in PowerPoint, it was very easy for the prototypes to be down-converted for the patent application.

Now I will just be part of the long waiting game to hope that the patent application goes through despite the US PTO’s back log of 900,000 applications! Well, it’ll be easier to wait for my plaque to come in September; at least that has an expected date.