The first quarter of our eleventh year in business is over, and it was a remarkable 3-month period: intense, busy, and very successful. The surge in quality inquiries that started in January has carried on, and has brought us excellent business. And a few days ago we finally received funding for a project feasibility study for our REDWING ocular patent database, to be conducted by a major research institute. It took the state-run fund nine weeks instead of three to approve it, but in the end we got all what we had asked for. For U.S. ocular pharmacology and drug delivery patents, our coverage has been pushed back to 1950. Its pretty incredible how much information – not published elsewhere is easily accessible form – is to be found in documents from these early years. One of our posters at the World Ophthalmology Congress in June will address an aspect of this phenomenon.
Our new website has been enthusiastically received, and our new presence on Twitter has been astoundingly successful as well. It is not as if we had attracted hundreds of followers during the three months since we entered the “ Twitterverse,” but we are not interested in that anyway. We find it much more important that the huge majority of the 23 current followers are quality entities. They include news media from the life sciences such as Pharmafocus (InPharm) and Jack Ingram’s PharmaNewsDaily electronic service; medical networking platform such as iMedExchange in Seattle, Oncology Tube in Atlanta, and Symposier in Mexico City; SMI Health, the large physician-owned point-of-care marketing company; pharmatching.com, a German matchmaker for pharma companies and CROs; Rated Patent Exchange, a reputed venue for exchanging intellectual property assets based in Munich; and even GE Healthcare was interested enough to click the “follow” button for hmpharmacon onTwitter. We note that this quality audience is growing constantly, without any active prompting from our side, and this is particularly encouraging. Stay tuned!