According to the USPTO website,
Senior officials of the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be chatting with inventors online and answering their questions this Thursday, February 28th, from 2 to 3 PM (EST). Inventors will be able to join the forum at 1:30, however.
wsd-ais-03.uspto.gov/DigiChat/index.html
New inventors often face great challenges when facing the patent system for the first time. There are many pitfalls. The USPTO officials plan to utilize the chat in part to inform inventors of some of the risks of working with invention development companies. (Another great resource for information on the risks is available at InventorEd.org:
www.inventored.org/caution
Previous live chat sessions have been recorded and can be found on the USPTO website at the following links provided by the staff:
www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/iip/transcripts.htm
The USPTO encourages you to look through these transcripts to see if your questions have already been answered. From past experience they do not usually manage to answer all the questions asked during the session. However they typically answer most of the outstanding questions after the session and post the answers as part of the eventual transcripts.
Some of us at PatentReference.com will be joining the chat session as it occurs later this afternoon (EST). If you are unable to attend the chat for any reason or otherwise wish for us to relay your questions (where possible) to the United States Patent Office, please feel free to add your questions to the comments section of this blog entry, or email us via the PatentReference feedback form:
www.patentreference.com/feedback.aspx