NEC's LTE Business Strategy: Synergy with RFID

Recently NEC announced the launching of NEC CASIO Mobile Communication which is a strategic alliance in mobile equipment business among NEC, Casio, and Hitachi.

As NEC is one of major LTE equipment providers for NTT DoCoMo’s LTE business which is going to launch its commercial LTE service in the mid of 2010 and Casio and Hitachi is one of major LTE equipment providers for KDDI’s LTE business which plans to launch its commercial LTE service at the end of 2011, the combined company has a high chance of leading the LTE equipments market.

In recent LTE IPR research by TechIPm, NEC was a ‘Dark Horse’ in LTE IPR for the LTE baseband modem products (http://techipm-innovationfrontline.blogspot.com/2009/09/lte-patent-landscape-for-ofdmmimo.html). In addition to the LTE innovation, NEC+Hitachi were one of innovation leaders in RFID based on TechIPm’s research for RFID patent landscape (http://techipm-innovationfrontline.blogspot.com/2009/04/rfid-innovation-frontline-2009-1q_30.html).

This rare case of being an innovation leader both in LTE and RFID will definitely benefit to NEC’s future business in an LTE based emerging market - RFID assisted intelligent mobile health care services.


©2009 TechIPm, LLC All Rights Reserved
http://www.techipm.com/

RFID Patent Landscape for Market Leader: Intermec vs. Motorola

Research for RFID patents issued by USPTO before January 1, 2009 shows that Motorola, merged with Symbol appeared to be a strong contender in RFID market leader competitions.

In case of top assignee analysis shows that Micron Technology including Micron Communications is a leader in the RFID technology innovations followed by Intermec, IBM and Motorola.

A patent portfolio analysis of Intermec and Motorola shows that Intermec and Motorola have very similar portfolios. Detailed comparison shows that Intermec has relative competitive advantage in tag antenna and tag packing and Motorola has relative competitive advantage in reader design and tracking application solution.


©2009 TechIPm, LLC All Rights Reserved
http://www.techipm.com/

RFID Patent IPR Research Report Sample Download

RFID Innovation Frontline is a research report on the technology innovations landscape for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID Innovation Frontline utilizes patent information to assess the state of the art for technology innovations in RFID.

RFID Innovation Frontline 2009 1Q analyzes the utility patents issued in the United States (US) before January 1, 2009. Since the patent information is changed over time, this report only reflects the technology innovations landscape up to the time the analysis is conducted.

RFID Innovation Frontline is based on the statistical and analytical methods for mining patent information.

Research for RFID Innovation Frontline is done by experts both in intellectual property (IP) and technology subject matter.

RFID Innovation Frontline can be used by customers for:
•Trend analysis for RFID technology/product/market forecasting
•Planning RFID technology/business strategy
•Competitive Intelligence for RFID industry
•IP strategy for RFID R&D
•Opportunity analysis for RFID technology licensing

Contents
1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction
2.1 What is RFID Innovation Frontline?
2.2 What’s in RFID Innovation Frontline?
2.3 Mining Process for RFID Innovation Frontline

3. IF Statistics
3.1 Number of Patents by Year
3.2 Number of Patents by Assignee
3.3 Number of Patents by Assignee’s Nationality
3.4 Number of Patents by UPC
3.5 Number of Patents by US Family
3.6 Number of Patents by International Family
3.7 Number of Patents by Forward Citation

4. IF Analytics
4.1 Customized Classifications Used in RFID Innovation Frontline
4.2 Cites per Patent
4.3 Patent Impact Index
4.4 Patent Family Size
4.5 PFS vs. CPP Matrix
4.6 Technology Development Snapshot for UHF Tag Antenna

5. IF Enterprise
5.1 Number of Patents by Assignees for Customized Classifications
5.2 Patent Portfolio by Assignee
5.3 Activity Index for Intermec’s RFID Patents
5.4 Citations Matrix for Intermec’s RFID Patents
5.5 Competitor Analysis: Intermec vs. Motorola

Sample Download Link: http://www.techipm.com/products.html


©2009 TechIPm, LLC All Rights Reserved
http://www.techipm.com/

Global RFID Competitive Advantage from Patent Mining

A chart for PFS vs. CPP matrix obtained from patent data for a specific technology may be used to show a competitive advantage landscape in a global market place.

Here PFS (Patent Family Size) is the number of international families (foreign patent applications) for a specific technology sub-class divided by the total number patents for all classes and CPP (Cites per patent) is a mean value of citations received by a specific technology sub-class from subsequent patents.

A class with high value of PFS means that this technology sub-class may have be competitive in market share of emerging global market compare to other technology sub-classes.

High CPP value is often associated with important innovations, which are key to future development in technology innovations.

Thus a specific technology sub-class located in the upper right corner of the matrix chart (high value both in PFS and CPP) may can have competitive advantage compare to other classes in developing a successful market globally.

Research for the US RFID patent issued before January 1, 2009 shows that tag antenna, tag architecture, and reader protocol are the RFID technology areas that have a competitive advantage with the further development of international IPR.


©2009 TechIPm, LLC All Rights Reserved
http://www.techipm.com/

Market Intelligence from Patent Information: RFID Case Study

Can we have a market intelligence for a specific technology field from patent information?
It is usually assume that the patent information only provide technology intelligence.
There are, however, no such restrictions in patent information. We can extract any business and technology intelligence from patent information depending on how we mine the patent information: nearly all patented inventions and innovations are, if not all, motivated initially by some business outcomes.

As a case study, we analyzed the RFID application patents.

As of Feb. 1, 2009, US issued patents analysis for RFID application market shows that the asset management market is the most active field of application technology innovations followed by security, retail, and healthcare etc.

©2009 TechIPm, LLC All Rights Reserved
http://www.techipm.com/