Technology

Facebook: Move Fast and Patent Things

BY Christina Zhang

Published August 7, 2018

Patents are the new gold for the tech industry, thus an invisible battlefield among the tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook,and Google. However, patents are usually in the shadow and neglected by the public because few people have the interest and time to go over all the patent files full of jargons and sci-fi-type-of-vocabularies. I believe that patents can say a lot about a company, especially its shifting business priorities over time.

I got my data from two sources, justia.com and Google Patents, and built a dataset of 3059 Facebook Patents filed from 2001 to 2018. All the year/date are file dates, instead of grant date. I approached this dataset with two analysis:

  • Text analysis on Facebook patents'title and abstracts, breaking down by year. I used tf-idf to filter out top 20 keywords and keyphrases(noun phrases) for each year.
  • Classification analysis. I scraped the classifications of those patents from Google Patent and did a catatory breakdown.

Number of Patents

Patent quantity surged along with aggresive acquisition and rapid growth

number_of_patents

NOTE: Although Facebook bought over 1000 patents from AOL and IBM in 2012, the quantity are spread out over the years since these patents have differnet file dates.
DATA SOURCE: Google Patents

Keyphrase Analysis of Patent Titles and Abstracts

Based on a tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) analysis, I got to see the top 10 keyphrase in Facebook's patents by each year.

Facebook Timeline and Keyphrase Analysis

keyphrase

DATA SOURCE: Google Patents

Patent Classifications Breakdown

Facebook patents are classified differently under different system. Based on the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system, each patent has a classification combination of letters and number, each with different meaning. The first uppercase letter is the main catagory, and the letter number combinations after is the sub catagory, which getting more detailed with the addition of another letter or number combination. The classification analysis conducted in this project is focused on main class and the first sub-catagory (the second most general classification). Among all 3059 patents filed/owned by Facebook in this dataset, there are 1624 Physics and 1192 Electricity patents.

Main Classifications

Physics and Electricity patents dominate, but there's more.

main_class

DATA SOURCE: Google Patents

electrity
Physics
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Facebook's Hidden Gems in R&D

A sneak peak into Facebook patent sub catagories shows big ambition of Facebook disrupting different industries. Besides filing large number of patents in electric communications techniques and computing/calculating, which are the building blocks of its main social media platform, it tries to get its hand dirty in many other unexpected industries. From power generation, musical instruments, to signalling and optics.

Here's what Facebook is doing in the name of musical instruments:

  • Detecting distorted audio signals based on audio fingerprinting
  • Generating a reference audio fingerprint for an audio signal associated with an event
  • Machine learning dialect identification
  • Speech translation with back-channeling cues
  • Managing silence in audio signal identification

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