I'm writing my business plan, and amid my competitive analysis, I have come to find that a design company has a very similar product that is patent pending U.S. but originally filed in India.

The concept is for an IOT product that combines hardware and software as part of the solution, and I'm worried about what it could mean for my business plan.

I'm prototyping a superior design in both these categories, but due to the laws of physics, it would follow a similar architecture on the hardware side. Also, their patent application is annoyingly broad yet technically vague on the software/network/backend details.

A final interesting piece of this equation is that they used this design as more of a marketing play for their core design/consulting business, as they came up with it four years ago and were generating buzz through online blogs and awards. Still, they don't seem to have built the product or gone to market.

I can only hope that they have lost interest and abandoned the application, but I don't know how to check, and if not, what do I do?

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EDIT:

Thanks all for the great input. So long story short, the patent was abandoned. They failed to reply to some official correspondence.

Perhaps it was just optics to have filed it with the rest of the theatre they did around its design, or perhaps they decided it wasn't commercially viable.

First, I will finish this business plan as it helps to distill all of my ideas into something concrete, and I get more ideas and passion every time I put time into it, but I learned a lot about patents and intend to submit one as soon as it's time to wrap up MVP of some different concepts for the system.

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