11-01 :: December 2010 / January 2011

nanotimes

Companies Facts

27

I

BM‘s (NYSE: IBM) inventors received a record 5,896 U.S. patents in 2010, marking the 18th

consecutive year it has topped the list of the world’s most inventive companies. IBM became the first company to be granted as many as 5,000 U.S. pa- tents in a single year. It took IBM‘s inventors more than 50 years to receive their first 5,000 patents after the company was established in 1911. IBM received patents for a range of inventions in 2010, such as

a method for gathering, analyzing, and processing patient information from multiple data sources to provide more effective diagnoses of medical condi- tions; a system for predicting traffic conditions based on information exchanged over short-range wireless communications; a technique that analyzes data from sensors in computer hard drives to enable faster emergency response in the event of earthquakes and other disasters; and a technology advancement