patent

When a year and a half is passed since the filing of a patent application, a publication bulletin is issued, and everyone can know the contents of the application. It was on January 16, 2020 that the first infection of the new coronavirus was confirmed in Japan. After that, the latter half of January and February 2020 was the beginning of the Corona disaster. A patent from just that time has recently been published. (As of September 16, 2021, patent applications with filing dates up to around March 6, 2020 have been published, with exceptions such as early publication.)

So, I checked to see if there were any patent applications that were the first to describe terms such as “Three Cs,” “Social Distance,” “refrain from going out,” “stay home,” and “unnecessary and nonurgent,” which have come to be used a lot in the Corona disaster, but I could not find any. Based on the tendency of utility model bulletins to be published within three or four months of filing, we can guess that corona-related terms began to be included in application specifications probably from applications filed around April 2020.

So, when I was looking at the search screen to see what applications had been filed around February 2020, I happened to see an application by GURUNAVI INC. for “information processing system, information processing method, and program”. GURUNAVI INC. is a company that operates the GURUNAVI website, which accepts restaurant reservations and delivery orders.

https://gurunavi.com/

GURUNAVI INC. has been consistently filing patent applications related to information processing for some time now; from 2017 to 2019, the company filed about 70 applications per year, an average of 5 to 6 per month. In contrast, I was curious to see that 12 applications were filed in the month from January 23 to February 21, 2020, which is double the average of the previous year. It may not be directly related to Corona, but was there any strategy behind it? I can only guess now, a year and a half later, that each company must have been thinking of various strategies in the early days of the Corona disaster. (Conan)

Today, I would like to introduce an invention related to September 5. What I will introduce this time is dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) devised by American electronical engineer and inventor Robert H. Dennard (1932.9.5 ~). Today, September 5th, is his 89th birthday.

DRAM is a type of semiconductor memory. It has the disadvantage of constantly consuming power for refreshing (memory retention operation) because information is lost when it is discharged, but it is widely used in computers’ main storage devices, digital televisions, and digital cameras, etc. due to its large capacity and low cost.
Currently, all the main storage devices of computers are DRAM. In recent years, DRAMs that specialize in low power consumption have also appeared.

The DRAM we use every day was conceived by Dennard in 1966 at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The following year of 1967, a patent application was filed, and it was registered in 1968 (US3387286A). Dennard also won the Kyoto Prize in 2013.

By the way, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center is a research division of IBM. In addition to Dennard, it is known that many prominent scientists such as Benoit Mandelbrot in mathematics and Leo Esaki in physics also worked there.

Related Link: Robert H. Dennard – Wikipedia

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An old friend of mine has been making accessories with UV resin.
UV resin is a special resin solution that hardens under UV light.
After pouring the UV resin solution into a mold of your choice, you can put your favorite small objects in the mold, or you can color the UV resin solution itself and then expose it to UV light to harden it into your original accessory.

Even though it is just a resin solution, if you look into it, you will find that different manufacturers have different technologies, such as ease of hardening, blending with inclusions, durability, etc. that Patents for manufacturing methods have been applied.
There are many kits available at general stores and stationery stores in town, and you may see them, but I feel that it is a very deep world where the sense of the creator is important because it is easy to make. (Swimmer)

Shortly after the beginning of the new semester, I found one of the teaching materials that my child brought back from school that said, “patented product”. On the front cover, it was labeled “Repeating Keisan Drill Raku Raku Note(Repeating Calculation Workbook Easy Note)”, and a nostalgic illustration of “3-chome Tama” on it.

I wondered what kind of content was in the patent on the notebook, so I looked it up on the familiar J-Plat Pat, and the summary said, “To provide exercise notebooks and problem practice materials that allow students to learn how to properly write and use notebooks by solving problems using problem workbooks.”

I looked through the contents of the workbook, and even in them, I could see the ingenuity that went into making it easy for children to learn and write. I was impressed that this was a great invention, and I was reminded again that there are various forms of invention. (Marigold)

Japanese Patent Registration Number: 5031612
Introduction page of Easy Note (Shingakusha Co. Ltd.) (Japanese)
https://www.sing.co.jp/shop/g/gdnote-kei/