Lighthouse IP Group Managing Director China Pablo Fernandez (center) takes oath in behalf of Lighthouse Software Cebu, Inc. as one of the newest members of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Lighthouse Software Cebu, Inc. inducted as new CCCI member

CEBU, PHILIPPINES—Lighthouse Software Cebu, Inc. (LSCI) is now an official member of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI).

Pablo Fernandez, Managing Director China and representing Lighthouse IP Group’s Cebu Office, was inducted during CCCI’s General Member Meeting last 29th February 2012 at Casino Español in Cebu City.

“The CCCI is one of the oldest chambers in the Philippines and being a member might open doors and contacts everywhere,” said Fernandez.

LSCI Finance and Human Resources Director Josephine Vergara and Marketing Coordinator Regina Aguilar also attended the induction ceremony.

With over 600 active members, CCCI is the largest business group in Cebu serving as an engine of business growth towards global competitiveness in the province.

Teresa Chan, CCCI Vice President for Membership Development, highlighted the importance of the chamber as a business organisation.

CCCI, she said, helps promote Cebu to the various business sectors and various markets in the Philippines as well as in other countries abroad.

Trade missions, national and international trade fairs and exhibitions, and partnerships with other chamber organisations around the world are among the many activities the chamber engages in order to provide all of its members automatic network for their businesses.

Chan added that membership to the chamber may also serve as a member company’s corporate social responsibility where it helps propel the local economy of the province.

“You can stand proud that you are a member of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where your membership enables one credible and recognised business organisation to advance the interest of the business community not only in Cebu but the whole country in general,” she concluded.

New Lighthouse office opened in the UK

Lighthouse IP Group officially opened a sales office in Cambridge.

Commercial and Content Director Jane List and Sales Director EMEA Will Hawkins will be based in the UK office.

The UK is one of the most important markets for the company. The office, however, will also lead the company’s sales operation in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

The office in the UK is the eighth office outside of its headquarters in The Netherlands adding to the roster of the company’s global offices namely in China, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Belarus, and the United States.

The UK office is also the first to open in 2012 for Lighthouse IP Group, which also plans to expand to Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and South Korea within this year.

New Release of Machine Translation Engine for Chinese into English

Lighthouse IP Group (LHIP), a leading supplier of intellectual property information, announced today a new version of its acclaimed English language Chinese patent database on to the market. Lighthouse IP Group has developed a proprietary Machine Translation (MT) tool especially designed for patent translation based upon the hybrid approach to MT. The hybrid approach to machine translation combines rule and statistical based translation methods for maximum advantage. Lighthouse IP Group has built upon a licensed machine translation engine to create specialist translation models based around IPC (International Patent Classification) domains and utilizing its extensive in house corpus of patent specific terminology and bi-lingual technical dictionaries for Chinese to English translations.

Technical dictionaries

Building technical dictionaries is a continuous task for anyone involved with patent translation activities. Patents often provide the very first written publication about any aspect of an invention, and so new terminology may be used by the inventor in the description and claims. This presents particular challenges for those developing machine translation tools for patents.

“The new LHIP MT production, introduced in January 2012, will allow us to make regular updates to the MT engine taking account of evolving terminology and improving the resulting translations for all our customers” explained Gert Frackenpohl, Director of Infrastructure. “The MT engine also provides a faster throughput, allowing us to produce the English version within seven days of publication of the original Chinese patent documents (Applications A, Granted patents B, and Utility Models, U). In the first week of January LHIP translated over 6,000 patent Applications, 3,000 Granted patents and 8,000 Utility models.

Competitive intelligence

The new translation model is based around linguistic rules and statistical translation models; and the resulting English MT will always contain the most appropriate English words within every section of the patent document – description, claims, and background (prior art). This is important for our customers who are relying on the weekly translation of documents in their domain to get a rapid understanding of the latest technological advances to inform their own R&D or competitive intelligence requirements.

For patentability and freedom to operate investigations the Lighthouse IP Group Chinese database provides the full text and legal status of patents and utility models published under the new Chinese Law since 1985.

Lighthouse IP Group supplies weekly bulk updates of Chinese patent applications, granted patents and utility models, with full legal status information to its customers. In addition to Chinese, Lighthouse IP Group also translates Russian and Japanese patents to English, using the most appropriate machine translation engines.

Lighthouse IP Group Executives. (From Left) Josephine Vergara, HR and Finance Director-Cebu Office; Christa Deinum, Senior Vice President for Operations; Willem Geert Lagemaat, Chief Executive Officer; Patrick Van Dun, Managing Director Philippines; and Marcus Van Ameringen Vice President-North America.

Lighthouse IP Group eyes bright prospects for the intellectual property industry

CEBU, PHILIPPINES—The global intellectual property (IP) industry can brace for a strong business ahead despite the slowdown in the world’s super economies.

According to Lighthouse IP Group chief executive officer Willem Geert Lagemaat, efforts to sustain profitability by companies based in these struggling economies will push a strong demand for IP protection.

“Companies are forced to look at decreasing posts in production to maintain profitability, which means they look at outsourcing as one of the ways of dealing with them. However, if you outsource, one of the challenges that come up is how do you secure or maintain your intellectual property. So companies would need to protect and what we see from that is that the protection need is growing,” said Lagemaat during a press conference held last week at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel here in the Philippines.

He further explained that outsourcing requires a secured transfer and management of knowledge that can only be effectively achieved through IP protection.

“How do you transfer knowledge and make sure that the people in a given country learn and understand how to make your product? How do you make sure that what is being made for you in these countries is not being copied by somebody else?” said Lagemaat pointing that the challenges companies face would call for more IP and IP-related services.

He revealed that the company, which provides IP information, data, and translation services, now enjoys a growing client-base in Asia’s emerging markets.

“There is a strong need for IP protection in these emerging markets. We see a number of growing customers in Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, and Korea. We also see South America becoming more and more interesting,” said Lagemaat.

He also cited the Philippines as a promising market that is so far composed of western companies.

“We prefer to grow our client-base with local Filipino-owned businesses but awareness in IP remains a challenge for us here in the Philippines,” said Lagemaat.

Lighthouse Software Cebu, Inc. (LHSCI) hosted the first-ever formal press conference in a bid to promote IP in the country. It was also attended by Lighthouse IP Group senior vice president for operations Christa Deinum; vice president for North America Marcus Van Ameringen; managing director for the Philippines Patrick Van Dun; and LHSCI finance and human resource director Josephine Vergara.

Vergara, in her welcome address, described the event as a one-step forward to promote Lighthouse IP Group in the Philippines.

Moreover, Lagemaat stressed that the company is ready to provide any form of assistance concerning IP to companies anywhere in the world.

“We can provide a number of services for clients to understand what’s happening in the market and help them succeed,” concluded Lagemaat.

For a new data project, Lighthouse IP Group will be recruiting 140 new staff members. These additional employees will need to learn quickly to be reliable for data entry. Excellent communication in English and a minimum of two-year college degree are vital. If you have it, this job is for you!

Lighthouse IP Group, was established in 2006 and is active in the Philippines since 2009. It is the 2nd largest office of the Lighthouse IP Group, which has offices in major countries of the world, including China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Belarus, Egypt, USA and the Netherlands.

The spacious and cozy office is encouraging to employees and has all the present-day facilities. Along with a friendly management and HR personnel- it aims to have the best working environment. We organize a number of small and large team building activities each year to form a team who stays together, works together, and achieves together for a common goal- to EXCEL.

Lighthouse IP Group in Cebu, Philippines creates Patent, Trademark and other IP- related content for global information providers. It also handles translations, and provides software and database solutions to businesses locally and globally.

Relating to the company’s requirement, the Lighthouse IP Group Philippines office can provide data enrichment, translation of IP data, e.g. patents, trademark documents and other technical information, e.g. medical, financial, scientific papers. The Lighthouse processes supply data enhancement by supplementing annotations, characterizing, restructuring and merging data from multiple sources to produce valuable content focused to our client’s demands. Lighthouse IP Group uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to enable the creation of structured and protected databases.

If you are interested in working for a dynamic, growing and global organization, please submit resume or feel free to come to the walk in interview. These interviews are held daily from 1:00 PM–4:00 PM until October 21st 2011.

Lighthouse Software Cebu Inc.

5th Floor iMEZ Bldg., Pueblo Verde MEZ II

Brgy Basak, Lapu-Lapu City

Tel: 505-4033 / 318-1989

Fire damages Lighthouse HQ

Saturday June 4th, the Lighthouse HQ in Holland was affected by a fire that lasted for about one hour. The fire started in the electrical switchboard on the ground floor, probably caused by short-circuiting. Due to the fact that it was weekend, no colleagues were present at that time and fortunately nobody got hurt. The damage to the building however is tremendous. The fire completely destroyed the electrical installation and areas such as reception, toilets and kitchen. As far as it can be overseen right now, the building will be closed for at least 3 to 4 months.

As part of our local business continuity plan, all Dutch employees are re-located to our administrative office in Rijnsburg. This office is in use since January this year and is also home of our server room. It is therefore that we can operate like “business as usual”.

We are truly relieved that nobody got hurt in this incident. Taking control of the situation in an effective and positive way makes us see once more that we, as Lighthouse, are more flexible that we ourselves sometimes realize.

The new address details are:

Lighthouse IP Group
De Roysloot 12 A
2231 NZ Rijnsburg
The Netherlands

T: +31 (0) 71 409 13 40
F: +31 (0) 71 409 13 49

On February 6^th 2010 Lighthouse Software Chengdu Ltd. Co opened the doors to its new office. The office is located in the prestigious Tianfu Software Park in Chengdu and counts over 2500 sqm. Over 400 dedicated Lighthouse employees moved into their new premises enjoying the luxury working environment and even better facilities.

In recent years, many global companies have sought to relocate to second tier cities in China to lower operation costs. Chengdu, the economic and financial hub of south-western China, has attracted 139 Fortune 500 companies thanks to the city’s developed infrastructure, large talent pool, and low operation cost.

Lighthouse continues its growth spurt by adding three new offices to its roster so far this year.  These new facilities are located in Minsk (Belarus), Bangkok (Thailand) and Hanoi (Vietnam) and they will function within Lighthouse Data Services Group.

The first focus of these offices is translating patent data content from the local patent offices. The future growth for these offices will be sourcing other materials from these countries, such as trademark data, scientific literature, financial information and legal information. The priority for these three offices is to establish their basic operation, develop their teams and infrastructure, and then broaden the data that they will process.

The setting up of these offices is not only in line with our planned strategic growth, but it also deepens the scope of service we can provide to global clients. It’s a great fit between our clients and Lighthouse; enabling both clients and prospective partners to gain greater benefit of our dynamic, cohesive and talented group of personnel.

At the same time we are opening these new offices, we are pleased to report that our Philippines office has also expanded in two areas: we have grown the annotation team and we have started processing data in Cebu sourced from other countries in the region.

The new offices are a fantastic reflection of the global expansion which our company has enjoyed over the past few years. Lighthouse is now reaping the rewards of its commitment to the market. That commitment together with the strength of the services we offer has enabled Lighthouse Data Services to be the fastest growing business unit within our group.

The new offices have undergone refurbishment in order that they conform with the Lighthouse corporate branding. We trust you will join us in welcoming our new colleagues to the Lighthouse Group. The Lighthouse Group will continue its growth strategy and we are currently looking at additional office locations within the Asia region. As these developments solidify we will announce within the next couple of months.

In the world of innovative and progressive industry, protecting your knowledge and IP is very important. Companies are protecting their knowledge and IP more and better than before. The chance you are infringing other IP has become more realistic. The consequences from infringing are far reaching, so it is essential to guard your organization against them. SCIPAT offers reliable, easy and efficient services and solutions that help you protect your organizations IP.

SCIPAT proudly introduces its Chinese patent information services.

With the increasing importance of Chinese intellectual property publications, on-time access to Chinese documents has become an important demand for all users of intellectual property information. To improve timely access to Chinese publications SCIPAT has developed two new services.

The first service is the 48 hour on demand human translation service of any Chinese patent, invention or utility publication. At fixed price, SCIPAT translates all frontpage information and all claims, and delivers the translation document by email or FTP. All translations are 100% human translations. For more details please follow the link below.

The second new service offers you IPC based alerting of all new Chinese publications, with bibliographic information in English, including title and abstract. Updating is done weekly, with a delay of 10 working days after publication. This service offers you continuous insight in all new Chinese documents, and allows rapid evaluation of relevant documents. On-demand translated claim sets can be ordered or translations of complete documents.

Lighthouse Software specializes in software development, solutions and processing. Lighthouse Software is our offshore outsourcing branch with production offices in Chengdu and Cebu offering you the highest quality for the best possible prices.

To learn more on Lighthouse Software please click here or fill in our contact form and we will contact you regarding our products and services.

During the coming months this website will be enhanced regularly and updated with the latest functionalities.