The first quarter of 2013 was one of the best we’ve had yet at Patexia.

We hosted 13 different contests: 10 prior art searches and 3 commercial use searches.

It was our first quarter doing this kind of volume of contests and it went very well.

We’ve chosen winners for most of these contests and will be announcing/paying winners soon.

A big project this first quarter were our very first commercial use searches. These searches are designed to help universities better understand the value of their patents and reward them for their innovation, so they can finance further research.

The searches went really well, we’re looking forward to doing many more soon.

We also started the Patexia IP Matters web series, and hosted the first installment on the basics of patents and prior art. The goal of the series is to provide free IP education to our members and the first installment did just that.

The next installment of the web series is scheduled for April 11, and we’ve got a few more lined up after that already.

We also organized a few consulting projects this quarter, where clients have asked us to find them experts to serve as consultants on litigation cases. It’ll be interesting to see how this product develops over time.

A big shift this quarter was on building more valuable resources for our community and working on education. In addition to the web series already discussed, we updated the FAQ, produced a few how-to videos, and updated some of the other educational materials including introducing a tutorial contest.

We hope the new Patexia Leaderboard will be a place community members can show off how talented they are.

Another major project this quarter was clarifying the judging criterion for the community and improving the way we awarded prizes. We strive to be as transparent as possible, so we worked a lot on communicating how we judge the contests and pick winners.

We also wanted to distribute the prizes a little more evenly so that community members who made strong contributions were rewarded for their efforts even if they didn’t submit the winning submission. To this end we introduced a new prize sharing agreement to more evenly share the prizes, while still retaining a large lump sum prize for the winner.

We didn’t quite make our goal of having two contests per week every week (we averaged about one per week), but we’re looking forward to improving that this quarter.

It was a good three months, we came a long way. Hopefully the next three months are just as fun.