TechInsights’ analysts have examined the Blackberry patent portfolio and partitioned it into a dozen application areas, as well as marked a subset of the patents as high value candidates for licensing potential.

Systems and Software patents with more than three years of remaining life were selected (8615 patents). Of those, the oldest remaining member of each patent family was chosen (5394 patents total) to represent the family. These patents were partitioned into 12 application areas. One of these application areas Wireless Network Access was further subdivided into 9 categories.

TechInsights’ methodology of partitioning by application area differs from publicly available taxonomies such as CPC, and may make further analysis better aligned with an organization’s business needs. In addition, the work that TechInsights has already completed in marking assets that are potentially valuable for licensing purposes, and the familiarity of our analysts with the claims of thousands of Blackberry patents, provides a considerable head start for further study of the portfolio.

Figure 1: The 12 different application areas of Blackberry’s patent families

Figure 2: Expanded view into Blackberry’s Wireless Networks Access patent application area