Before AdMob accepted Google’s $750 million takeover offer, it was approached by Apple. This according to “people familiar with the matter,” who tell Bloomberg that Cupertino was also interested in the mobile advertising company. Odd to learn that Apple was considering such a move. After all, advertising isn’t exactly one of its core businesses.
Wow. Intel and AMD’s seemingly endless legal battles have finally ended. The two companies said early Thursday that they have reached a comprehensive agreement that resolves their many antitrust and patent disputes. Under its terms, Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion and agree to “abide by a set of business practice provisions” presumably crafted to temper its alleged anticompetitive practices.
If you can’t beat ’em, sue ’em. That seems to be the thinking at Nokia. Today, the Finnish cellphone giant, which has been struggling to develop a worthy competitor to the iPhone, filed suit against Apple, claiming the popular smart phone infringes upon a number of Nokia patents.
Three years after squeezing a settlement out of Microsoft for alleged infringements of its controversial patent on embedded Web applications, Eolas Technologies hopes to do the same to a bunch of other big tech outfits. This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple, Adobe and Google.
It’s not the $974.5 million TiVo had been looking for, but the $200 million in sanctions against EchoStar’s Dish Network the company has been awarded isn’t exactly petty cash, either. On Friday, a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Texas ordered the satellite broadcaster to cough up that sum for its continued infringement of TiVo’s “multimedia time warping system” patent.
Sued by Visto in 2006 for allegedly infringing its patents, Research in Motion denied having done so. It countersued, claiming the disputed patents, which relate to accessing and synchronization of information over a network, should not have been granted because they contain new inventions. RIM petitioned to have them invalidated. But in the end, the BlackBerry maker ended up licensing them anyway.
2009 is proving to be a year of dubious distinction for Microsoft in patent litigation. On Wednesday the company was ordered to pay $200 million to Toronto-based i4i for willfully infringing its patents.
What propitious timing. At a press conference in New York City later this morning, Amazon is expected to announce a new large-screen Kindle designed for reading periodicals and textbooks. And yesterday, on the eve of that announcement, came word that the company had been awarded a patent on the original Kindle design. The patent, #D591,741, is entitled “Electronic media reader” and it makes just a single claim.
With its speech synthesizers, brain current-operated controls and solar power source, the device described in Monec Holding’s patent–“electronic device, preferably an electronic book”–would seem to have little in common with Apple’s iPhone. Still, it is a “light-weight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” and “a power source.” And these days, that’s enough file suit over…
Turns out that when Apple COO Tim Cook said the company would use “whatever weapons we have at our disposal” to pursue anyone who “rips off” Apple’s iPhone intellectual property, he had a very specific weapon in mind: United States Patent #7,479,949. Awarded just days before Cook made that statement, the vast 358-page patent describes the touchscreen, graphical user interface and technologies that define the iPhone user experience, including at least one that may define an element of the Palm Pre’s as well.
CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that the company’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.
Macworld 2009 is still about a month away and already, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry is frantically turning the hand crank on the rumor mill. In a note to clients today, Chowdhry claims Apple will debut an entirely new device category next year.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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