As technology builds on technology, an interesting proxy for seeing how different technological inventions relate to each other comes from looking at patents and their citations. The image above contains a visualization of all patents in USPTO patent classes 370, 375, 379 and 455 which have been cited more than 100 and have been granted between 1976 and 2006. So in essence that is the structure of the most central patents related to mobile phones. The coloring is arbitrary clustering of the patents, but what is interesting is that the green, blue, and brown clusters are in fact the 375, 455 and 379 classes respectively. The clusters at the bottom of the graph are essentially the patents from class 370.
Another interesting thing to do would be to create a time-lapse of the network's evolution over time as well as to dig deeper into the substance and see why the clusters exactly emerge. Also, using this data it will be interesting to see how exactly different companies fit into the picture.
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