TM TKO is proud to announce a sweeping new round of innovations in its automated, in-depth clearance tool. These improvements focus on goods-and-services comparisons.
First, we have added an entirely new way of comparing key concepts between different types of products and services. Driven by leading-edge artificial intelligence, these comparisons better cut through the noise to highlight risks across classes.
Second, there is a dramatically improved classifier. In the enhanced goods and services selector tool, you will see class information and whether the description is in the USPTO’s Trademark ID Manual, helping you select the best and most accurate set of descriptions for your search.
You will see benefits from the new classifier in substantive search outcomes, too. Newly filed applications with incorrect classifications will take into account both the applicant-assigned class and the “correct” class from the classifier, upping scoring accuracy and search quality on even accidentally or intentionally misfiled applications. You will see similar benefits in the scoring of older registrations where the “correct” classification for the relevant goods or services has changed since the registration date.
How will these changes impact the appearance of your report? The most conceptually-related goods or services will score substantially higher than before in the table of most reports. You will also see these results visualized further to the right in your results scatterplot.
Finally, we are retiring the “retail” and “software” tabs in the goods-and-services selector for the Knockout tool. Now, a search for a mark for services like “retail shoe store services” will do an excellent job highlighting related products and services without the need for either the old retail tab or putting in multiple descriptions of goods or services. We have already updated existing searches and watches that used those tabs to appropriately take advantage of the new methodology; you won’t need to do anything.
We’re thrilled to have these improvements integrated into our system, and hope you find them as exciting as we do!
TM TKO has made a number of updates and improvements to to our user interface over recents weeks, and we thought a summary blog post was warranted to summarize all the changes!
Tracking improvements
Across all searches, we’ve added a “Docket Number” field. You can also find this in your History window, making it easy to keep track of — and get back to — prior projects.
Search tagging and commenting
In all searches, we have made a number of improvements to make it easier to tag and comment on results. The first column of your results now has more going on than it used to. The first row has a number and a pair of arrows; these let you move around in the report and control its functions. The second row has expanded tagging functionality and a new notes feature.
The number in the upper-left is now an active link. Click on it, and we’ll bounce you up to the scatterplot to see where this application or registration record is located.
The paired arrows in the upper right will compress the contents of that row to a single line, or expand it again. It’s useful for shortening up lengthy descriptions of goods and services.
The tagging star is not new, but some of its functionality is. When you click on the star, it won’t immediately turn blue like it used to. Instead, you’ll get a popup with several color options: red, yellow, green, blue, and clear. This will let you prioritize and re-sort results how you want them, both inside the platform and in exports. (More on the export side shortly.) All of your old searches with blue stars will still appear blue, but you can edit those to use the new colors.
After you pick a star, you can double-click to apply that same star color to any other rows. Pick a new color from the color selector, and double-clicking will apply that new color.
The little pencil-writing-on-paper icon in the lower right allows you to add and edit notes on a per-record basis. Click on one, and you’ll get an interstitial pop-up to add your comments: comments about the risk analysis, a link to the mark in use, or etc. In the platform, you can read the comment by clicking on the icon — you’ll see a darker icon for any rows that have user comments.
Where the comments show up in exports varies a bit. For Word and PDF exports, they show up in a row immediately below the commented-upon record. Some comments can be pretty long, and this makes sure your insights won’t be squashed into a tiny little column. For CSV exports, they’ll be the furthest-right column, but on the same row.
Search report spacing and review
The small “paired arrows” in the bottom right show up in several places in the interface. They do the same thing: give you a “compressed” view of results. If you click on it on a single line, it’ll shorten that up to just the core details. You might use it to, say, skim over a 44(e) registration with a list of goods that goes on and on and on and on. Here’s what a shortened row looks like:
If you click the two-arrow icon on the top of a search or a section of a search, it’ll single-line all records. It’s just like the per-row expander, but applied to the whole section of the report. If you click the four-arrow expander icon, for either the whole report or just a section, the rows will expand to the full width of your window with no whitespace buffer.
Search export
The export buttons have moved from specific sections to a unified export button at the top right of the page, as shown below.
When you click on an export type, you’ll get a much more detailed set of options than before. You now have more optionality about both what results to include by section (all, only tagged, or none) and about the order they will appear (sorting by relevance or tags). If you sort by tags, you’ll get results in order, with red first then yellow, green, blue, and clear (untagged). This should allow you to get your charts ordered exactly how you want them with less effort.
At the bottom, you’ll see some extra checkboxes — you can choose whether to include static images of the scatterplot and bar graphs (previously available in PDF and now available in Word, too), and whether to include item-specific notes.
Bulk Search
Users with heavy clearance needs have requested a way to enter bulk searches. For example, clothing brands may need to clear hundreds of names for a new seasons’ catalog, or pharma brands may need to get a long list of candidate names to submit for regulatory approval. We have just added a feature to facilitate these clearances.
The new Bulk Order page under Knockout is where you can take advantage of this new convenience. It’s simple to order multiple searches for different marks using the same goods, whether word marks or designs, and you can even input names via spreadsheet. Bulk searches are no less thorough than a normal search, and you can go into each search report individually. To facilitate quick review, bulk orders also have a convenient preview page that summarizes all the results. It provides you a quick risk assessment (using the red/yellow/green stars; these are user-editable so you can customize the assessment) and a short preview of the top handful of results. It’s a huge time saver! To reflect the additional computational impact of turning around large numbers of results quickly, bulk orders have a $5 fee per marked searched.
Thanks!
Your feedback and suggestions are really important to TM TKO — they help inform how and when we make updates to our services. We hope that you will enjoy these upgrades, and keep the suggestions coming!
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