MDB Capital's PatentVest Confers Innovation Awards on 15 Technology Leaders

SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- MDB Capital, the IP Investment Bank, announced the winners of its Bright Lights Innovation Awards, conferred upon 15 companies during the first Bright Lights Conference at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, May 11 and 12.  The Innovation Awards recognize companies identified by MDB Capital's PatentVest database as possessing high CAGR of patent applications, patent novelty, quality, and impact, and other factors.

MDB Capital recognized Crossroads Systems, Hansen Medical, Uni-Pixel, and Applied Nanotech with its ASTRUM Award, which recognizes innovation leadership measured by highest patent application CAGR and number of filed applications, adjusted for application conversion rate.

Digimarc, Immersion, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, Satcon Technology and Comarco received the CLARUS Award for technology leadership, as they had the highest PatentVest Tech Scores and number of patent grants.

And "The Best of the Best," PROVECTUS Award winners had the highest combined PatentVest Tech Score, CAGR application rate and number of granted patents.  Electro Scientific Industries Inc., Microvision, ParkerVision, Solta Medical and Telecommunication Systems received this award.

Bright Lights attendees also selected, by ballot, five companies for a special MICO Award.  These presenting companies were recognized for their potentially disruptive or market changing intellectual property.  The winners were Health Discovery, Acacia Research, Uroplasty, Superconductor Technologies and Wave Systems.

MDB Capital's proprietary patent database and search solution, PatentVest renders patent and IP data for more than 4,000 U.S. public companies in an easily searchable, digestible format.  Among other metrics, PatentVest assigns a Tech Score to each company in the database.  The Tech Score measures the strength of a company's patents based on a quantitative analysis of citations relative to a peer group of patents.  MDB has shown how High Tech Scores are predictive of business performance with results of a study described here.

MDB Capital Group hosted its first Bright Lights Conference on May 11 - 12, 2010 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.  The first-ever investor conference to focus exclusively on companies with disruptive and market changing IP, the Bright Lights Conference showcased the IP stories of 40 small-cap companies ranked by PatentVest in the 90th percentile for technology leadership from more than 1,600 small-caps with U.S. patents granted. Information about the conference remains available here.

"While we set out to distinguish our PatentVest tool as a potentially game changing investment tool, we were proud to host so many other distinguished and innovative companies at our inaugural investor conference," said Christopher A. Marlett, Chairman and CEO of MDB Capital Group.  "All of the companies identified by PatentVest as eligible for conference participation possess market leading and potentially game-changing intellectual property that investors should be aware of.  The award winners stand out by several quantitative measures, and were honored to recognize their achievements.  By all accounts our first Bright Lights conference was a fantastic success and we look forward to doing it again."

For more information, please visit www.mdb.com and www.patentvest.com.

About MDB Capital Group

Based in Santa Monica, California, MDB Capital Group is an investment research and investment banking firm that focuses exclusively on companies that possess market changing, disruptive intellectual property.  MDB Capital built PatentVest to cover more than 4,000 public and private companies, unifying over 4 million U.S. patents granted and over 2 million U.S. patent applications on file.  Beyond a mere software solution, PatentVest is a fully integrated, easy-to-use online searching, analytic and reporting platform, powered by the world's most comprehensive patent database and a dedicated data center - the first and only one of its kind.

SOURCE MDB Capital