Monday miscellany

It is with sadness that the IPKat records the death of Peter Low. Peter, a European and UK patent attorney with Wilson, Gunn M'Caw till his retirement in 1997, has the unenviable record of having given tutorials for the UK patent attorney qualifying examinations for over twenty years, as well has setting up the Manchester CEIPI basic training course for the notorious European Qualifying Examination [for some measure of the intensity of feelings generated by the EQEs, you need only look at the readers' responses to Katposts here]. A popular lecturer around the world, he edited a guide to the PCT for students published by the University Robert Schuman Strasbourg, France, and served as an examiner for the Singapore Patent Agent Qualifying Examination.  He will be greatly missed both by those who benefited from his tuition and by those who appreciated his gentle humour.

Another source for your IP information needs ...  This Kat has just discovered the existence of IP Preferential, which describes itself as creating a central hub of all IP law and practice updates across the globe which provides relevant information for IP departments. It's totally free of charge for everyone and, with contributors from over 50 countries, it is enjoying something of a growth spurt.

... and another patent search and analytics service. This one's called PatSeer [which, if you don't articulate the letter "r" at the end of a word, sounds pretty close to Craic Computing's PATSY, full text US patent document display service] and it offers "the concept of sharing an interactive patent dashboard called Patent Dashlets™ amongst patent databases". As the developers explain, "such dashboards for instance allow corporate patent professionals to collaborate effectively with their external counsels or even with internal management stakeholders". You can read more about it here.

Someone has to ...

Launched only yesterday, the IPKat's latest limerick competition is already off to a roaring start with various promising limericks already received (plus a number of items of poetry which, for all their literary worth, aren't actually limericks).  The prize: complimentary registration for a fun IP conference which takes place in London on 29 October. Click here for further details.  Incidentally, there's another competition going on at the moment, giving you a chance to design a logo. So if you feel suitably imaginative, creative or are just in the mood for fun, you can find the details, kindly posted by fellow Kat Eleonora, just here.