By: Ananya Bhattacharya
India is no country for filing patents. Riddled with problems, from lack of awareness to systemic flaws, the country is one of the least friendly when it comes to intellectual property (IP) rights. In 2016, just 45,000 patents (pdf) were filed in India—China registered over 1.1 million in the same year.
However, a three-year-old Bengaluru-based startup has now gone against the grain.
Budget hotel chain Treebo has filed for not one but four patents in India and the US for its quality management system.
“Since Treebo’s operations are spread across 70 Indian cities and different people have different expectations (of quality), providing a consistent, reliable experience can be a challenge,” Kadam Jeet Jain, Treebo co-founder and chief technology officer, told Quartz. “Even when we were in just four cities, we realised that relying on manpower to do quality control would be unsustainable in the future.”
So, the company developed Prowl, a software that helps Treebo ensure the quality of its service, and soon plans to monetise it.
Treebo’s patenting plans
Launched in 2015, Prowl lets Treebo’s on-ground auditors feed in their evaluations of hotels and curates customer reviews from various websites. It then uses machine learning to turn all this information into data points to help anticipate possible hiccups across the 400 hotel partners listed on Treebo.
Read More >> https://qz.com/1232227/treebo-hotels-wants-to-take-the-difficult-path-to-success-with-patents/
