During the summer of 2007, I had the opportunity to catch up with Alexandre Abecassis, an international patent agent for Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP. I had initially met Alexandre while working, during my university days, at a research laboratory at ETS University. We went for lunch in July and I took the opportunity to update him about my company. After our discussion, we agreed that the process developed at Utopia Image was innovative and we had an opportunity to file for a patent. There were a couple of strategic reasons why we decided to file for a patent so early in the company’s existence. The first one was that once the innovation is disclosed publicly, we only have 12 months to file for the patent. We had disclosed our innovation to Videotron in September 2006. Therefore, if I wanted to file a patent I had to do it before September 2007. The second reason was that by filing a patent for our innovation, I would be able to enhance the credibility of Utopia Image in a short time frame. Due to these reasons, I decided to file our first patent in August 2007.

Looking back today, filling for the patent, was a significant step taken in our company’s evolution which still has a great impact today when negotiating with financial institutions and potential future customers. If everything goes as planned, we should receive the official patent in the near future. Alexandre Abecassis played and still plays a very strategic role for Utopia Image, not only as an extremely intelligent patent agent but also as someone who is able to challenge ideas in order to make them evolve into strategic applications. He has great business sense with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Anthony.