USPTO director David Kappos is calling the project "Trademarks Next Generation," and said the office wants to take advantage of virtualization and cloud technologies to provide "full end-to-end electronic processing for Trademarks."

"We'd like to provide trademark applicants and trademark owners the ability to manage applications and registrations on-line, as well as an automated 'watch' service to notify requestors of status changes in applications and registrations, just to name a few functions," this week.

Part of what the agency wants to do is improve its internal operations. It has long been criticized for patent delays in processing, and high turnover of its patent examiners.

Kappos' blog post follows Federal CIO Vivek Kundra's comments earlier this month about the patent office. He cited it as an example of an agency using outdated systems and can take years to process a patent.

"One reason is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system," .