( Sacramento) March 15, 2006 – Intellectual property management software company PatentCafe www.PatentCafe.com has released the first due diligence reports for patents being auctioned at The Ocean Tomo Spring Live Patent Auction being conducted in San Francisco on April 5 th and 6 th.

During the two-day auction, bids for the more than 400 patents could easily top $100 million. PatentCafe’s Patent Factor Index™ (PFI) patent evaluation reports use the company’s international patent database (one of the worlds’ largest patent databases), and Artificial Intelligence search technology, to help prospective bidders gauge the quality of patents being sold at that auction.

The recent Blackberry / NTP patent infringement case highlights the importance of owning high quality patents, or conversely, the risks associated with poor quality patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office can later invalidate. The risk of litigating a poor quality patent is that it could be invalidated – and along with losing patent validity, the patent owner also loses their entire patent investment. Bidders hoping to walk away from the San Francisco auction with patents ready to enforce against alleged infringers must evaluate the risk of invalidity – or they’ve spent foolishly.

PatentCafe’s PFI Reports provide an objective qualitative analysis of each patent based on proven statistical computer models. The reports rank critical aspects related to legal, commercial and technological strengths of a patent. Using Latent Semantic Analysis search technology – the artificial intelligence in PatentCafe’s patent search engine, the reports actually use the patent claims as the patent search query, find the closest 100 patents, then compute the qualitative analysis against this comparative patent pool.

Andy Gibbs, PatentCafe’s CEO advises: “unlike jewelry or automobiles, patents are difficult to inspect before an auction. Anyone expecting to bid $1/2 million or more on a patent must know the quality of that patent before hand, and set their maximum bid based on the best due diligence information available. The PFI Reports help uncover critical flaws – or undiscovered value – before the bidding starts”.

The more than 400 PFI reports on CD ROM contain almost 6,000 pages of patent quality due diligence available nowhere else. Each report contains about 15 pages of insightful data. Auction patent reports are grouped by the same Lot numbers that hopeful winners will be bidding on, and they can be reviewed and printed for closer analysis prior to the auction date.

The analytical data provided in each report looks at the risk of patent invalidity, risk of litigation, licensing potential and licensing value, technology strength, patent novelty, and many other components that contribute to overall patent value.

Gibbs adds: “Due diligence is a vital component of any patent acquisition. With the emotion and hype of an auction environment, it’s essential for bidders to complete aggressive due diligence on their targeted auction patents. PatentCafe’s PFI reports are just one of the many analysis tools that bidders should use before raising their auction paddle.”

Although the proposed USPTO rule changes and patent reform legislation propose methods to improve the quality of patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office, until foolproof methods of guaranteeing that only high quality patents are granted, “Buyers Beware” remain the patent acquisition watchwords.

Download a sample report: http://www.patentcafe.com/library/whitepapers/analytics_6397057.pdf