“We have big plans for the digital television business,” Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai said at a Canon exhibition in 2005. And with a new technology called surface-conduction electron-emitter display, and plans to use it to transform the lowly TV into a “multifunction information device,” Canon seemed well poised to execute them. At the time, anyway.
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Apple has finally realized that blocking open collaboration among iPhone developers may not be the best approach to iPhone application development. And so this morning it dropped the nondisclosure agreement with which it had hamstrung developers by prohibiting them from discussing iPhone programming and caused no end of consternation in the iPhone dev community.
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Founded nearly a decade ago on patents for printing active-matrix electronic display panels on thin, flexible plastic substrates, Plastic Logic spent the ensuing years developing a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look–but not the feel–of a magazine or newspaper. And this morning, the company uncrated it.
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Google’s facing another billion dollar lawsuit–and, whaddaya know, it’s not from Viacom. It’s from LimitNone, a small software developer that claims Google’s Email Uploader tool copies the look, feel, functionality and distribution model of its gMove application.
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Hard-drive maker Seagate Technology has finally settled on a strategy for competing with its solid-state drive rivals. It will enter the SSD market this year. And to prepare the market for its arrival, it’s suing an SSD pioneer for patent infringement.
Yesterday, Seagate (STX) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. (STEC), an early [...]
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Lest there be any doubt that DVR functionality was purposefully left out of Apple TV, consider this patent recently unearthed by AppleInsider. Filed in October of 2006, the patent describes not just a version of Apple TV capable of browsing and recording live TV programming, but a touch-based remote that could be preloaded with [...]
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Microsoft (MSFT) made a “significant” company announcement this morning, one thankfully unrelated to its bid for the much diminished Yahoo (YHOO) Inc.
But what is there for the software giant to talk about these days other than Yahoo, really? Why that old saw, software interoperability, of course. In a statement issued this morning, the software giant [...]
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As lawsuits go, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Klausner Technologies filed a $360 million patent-infringement suit against Apple Monday claiming iPhone’s Visual Voicemail, a signature feature of the device, violates a few Klausner patents (so much for those vaunted “200 iPhone patents”). This on the very day that IDG World Expo announced that Apple [...]
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Burst has added another notch to its patent-infringement settlement belt. The scrappy three-man company, which once beat a $60 million settlement out of Microsoft over charges that the software giant had stolen its streaming media technology, has managed to squeeze a few million out of Apple as well.
Bringing an end to an often contentious [...]
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If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s is to do the same to its tech-policy issues.
Obama made the now obligatory pilgrimage yesterday to Google headquarters, where he unveiled a high-tech agenda that might just as easily have been written by [...]
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