• Who would have thought that Utah, of all the states, might just have the right idea to spread happiness across the US workforce and subsequently cause gigantic energy savings across the country.  What is the solution you might ask?  3 DAY WEEKENDS!
• About a year ago, Utah governor, John Huntman released the Working 4 Utah initiative.  The effort put 17,000 of the 24,000 executive branch employees on a 4 day a week, 10 hour per day schedule.
• The year has passed and the data is in, and it’s awesome.  Here are the just some of the many positive effects it is having on their society:

1. Energy in Utah has been cut by 13%, shrinking their carbon footprint by 6,000 metric tons.
2. Only 9 months into the program, Utah had saved $1.8 million from their budget.
3. A survey found 82% of the employees prefer the 4-day week schedule. It also showed “decreased health complaints, less stress and [taking] fewer sick days”.  Even customer complaints at the DMW are down.
4. Traffic has been dramatically decreased, plus with 10 hour work days, rush hour gets thinned out.
5. Commuting savings alone are expected to be in between $5 and $6 million per year.

• Sounds pretty amazing huh? I agree, and so do other places.  So far, El Paso, Texas and Melbourne Beach, Florida are launching their own programs.  Even a GM plant in Ohio is making the switch.
• Can you even imagine the savings of getting a state like New York, or California on a plan like this?  Well, let’s do it!
• THANK GOD IT’S THURSDAY!  (via GOOD)

• A Texas judge ruled this morning that Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, Word, in the United States because of patent infringement. Yes, you heard correct: Microsoft cannot sell Word, the judge ruled.
• Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML”.
• Seattle PI quotes “XML essentially is a programming language that allows users to customize the underlying format of their word-processing documents, for example, and makes them readable across different word-processing programs. The ability to read and write XML documents is an integral feature of Microsoft Word. In its complaint (PDF), i4i alleges Microsoft willingly violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) on a method for reading XML. The company, whose Web site advertises that users can ‘Create and edit XML content in Microsoft Word,’ helps clients work with XML”
• Along with Microsoft losing Word, Judge Davis also ordered Microsoft to pay i4i more than $290 million in damages. Microsoft said “We are disappointed by the court’s ruling,” Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict.” It is unknown in Microsoft will be able to get this ruling turned around.

• The seemingly endless drama surrounding Tesla Motors ccontinues today with some fresh breaking news.  Co-founder, Martin Eberhard, who was kicked out of the company back in November 2007, by now CEO Elon Musk, is sueing Musk and Tesla Motors for slander, libel, and breach of contract.
• Tesla spokesperson. Rachel Konrad had the following to say “This lawsuit is a fictionalized, inaccurate account of Tesla’s early years — it’s twisted and wrong, and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. Incidentally, Tesla will also be filing counterclaims and in the process present an accurate account of the company’s history.”
• Check out the 146 page filing yourself here.  This one may get nasty, stay tuned as the drama unfolds.

• For the past month, Craigslist has been in quite the heated debate with South Carolina over removing the ‘erotic services’ section of the site. Today, SC Attorney General issued a notice saying “As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”. The following is what Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster, had to fire back with. Good for him for standing up

An Apology Is In Order

Dear South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster,

Two days ago you accused craigslist, and me personally, of engaging in criminal acts, reiterating your previous threat to file unwarranted and unconstitutional charges against us that are clearly barred by federal law. As you put it, “We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”

These very serious allegations followed the dramatic changes we implemented last week, widely applauded by other Attorneys General, that go far beyond the policies and procedures you yourself personally endorsed just 6 months ago, as indicated by your signature on the Joint Statement.

So effective in fact, that our “adult services” and soon-to-be-retired “erotic services” sections combined, for all cities in South Carolina, currently feature a total of 40 ads, all of which comply with our terms of use. That’s 40 ads out of a total of 334,180 currently listed on our SC sites. The rest comprise a thriving marketplace for South Carolinians, offering jobs, housing, for sale items, local services, and just about everything else.

Many prominent companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media, not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more “adult services” ads than does craigslist, some of a very graphic nature. For a small sampling, look (careful NSFW) here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

Have you fully considered the implications of your accusations against craigslist? What’s a crime for craigslist is clearly a crime for any company. Are you really prepared to condemn the executives of each of the mainstream companies linked above, and all the others that feature such ads, as criminals? craigslist may not matter in your world view, despite our popularity among your constituents, but mightn’t you want an endorsement from any of the SC newspapers for your gubenatorial campaign, whose publishers you’ve just labeled as criminals? Do you really intend to launch a criminal investigation against the phone company? What about potential new jobs connected to big data center buildouts in SC by Internet companies? Are you *sure* you want prosecute all of their CEOs as criminals???

If you are threatening our founder Craig Newmark, a board member with no operational role at craigslist other than as a customer service representative, then you are expanding your list of “criminal suspects” to include thousands of employees at the above-named companies, or the companies’ boards of directors, or both.

Mr McMaster, I strongly recommend you reconsider and retract your remarks, and positively affirm that you have no intention of launching criminal investigations aimed at any of these upstanding companies, because in truth none of them are deserving of such treatment. Certainly when it comes to craiglist, by any objective standard your threats and accusations are unreasonable and unfair:

• threats of criminal prosecution are utterly unwarranted by the facts
• the charges threatened are unconstitutional and barred by federal law
• our adult ad screening regimen is stricter than the one you endorsed
• our adult services ads are fewer and tamer than other SC venues

We’re willing to accept our share of criticism, but wrongfully accusing  craigslist of criminal misconduct is simply beyond the pale. We would very much appreciate an apology at your very earliest convenience. As I’m sure would all of the other fine companies whose executives you’ve called out as criminals.

Sincerely Yours,

Jim Buckmaster
CEO, craigslist

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• Last night further hearings took place to decide the fate of Steve Jobs’ home. The Apple CEO has been trying to tear down his Woodside home for many years, a dilapidated mansion that many activists believe to be a historic landmark. Preservationists came from as far away as Florida and Virginia to make their case for saving the home (must be huge PC fans). The 17,000-square-foot house, built in 1925 for the prominent copper miner Daniel C. Jackling, is said to be economically infeasible to reconstruct (the activists want the home moved to a new location and have Jobs front the bill)
• Last night Jobs’ team showed how much plans to restore the home would cost, roughly $13.3 million, quoting The Court of Appeal, which suggested a  $5 million differential would be enough to show that the restoration was infeasible. A decision is to be delivered shortly. (Mercury)
  

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• A court in Belgium, today found Internet company Yahoo guilty of withholding personal account information linked to Yahoo e-mail addresses in a cyber-criminal investigation. Belgian authorities subpoenaed detailed account data for a number of e-mail addresses used by a gang of alleged internet cons The court told the company to cough up a €55,000 fine right away and an additional €10,000 for each day it keeps refusing to hand over the user data. (or $69,197 and $12,590, respectively)

Here is Yahoo’s statement:

We strongly disagree with the court’s ruling and plan to file an immediate appeal.

Yahoo! Inc., a U.S. corporation, does not have business operations in Belgium and does not maintain the customer information at issue in Belgium. The United States and Belgium have a formal international treaty which the prosecutor should have followed to properly seek information from a U.S. company.

Yahoo! is not withholding information from the Belgium government. We have a legal and policy basis for not disclosing information in this type of case until the recognized international legal process is followed. We have raised this issue with the U.S. Government.

This decision could have negative implications for all foreign companies by unduly expanding the application of a law that should not apply to a company organized outside of Belgium and without a presence in Belgium.

Thanks Robin @ TechCrunch.

• Microsoft today filed a lawsuit against in-car navigation company, TomTom,  alleging that the in-car navigation company’s devices violate eight of its patent. Three of the patent claims accuse TomTom’s implementation of the Linux kernel steps on Microsoft IP, and five others violate proprietary software. More specifically, five of the patents in dispute relate to in-car navigation technologies, while the other three involve file-management techniques. Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for IP, said that they could not reach a pragmatic business agreement and have no choice but to pursue legal action.
• Intellectual Property is a big business for the software giant, who has struck more than 500 patent licensing deals in the past five years. Microsoft houses one, if not the top research team for emerging technologies, most of which never see the light of day and sit in a large book of patents.

Trying to keep up on legal tech? Check out these recent cases.

Pandora Inches Closer To The Deadpool Over Royalty Fees

RIM Executives Caught In Options Scandal

Palm CEO: “We Aren’t Getting Sued By Apple”

Facebook Settlement Amount With ConnectU Leaked

• Last week I had a chance to catch up with Pandora CTO, Tom Conrad at ContentNext’s EconMusic conference in Los Angeles. Tom was in high hopes about the success of Pandora lately, quoting that with their iPhone app alone, they had reached 3.5 million downloads and are seeing some of the highest CPM rates in the industry for internet radio advertising. Their traffic is at an all time high, above 3 million unique visitors a month according to Compete. Like many internet companies at the moment, relying on ad dollars to survive in a down economy is difficult (see: TinyComb). But Pandora is faced with an even more difficult scenario; The Webcaster Settlement Act, which has the potential to put Pandora out of business by raising the per song stream price to $0.19 a song. Please sign the petition at the bottom of the page to help save them from going out of business by lowering online steaming prices.
• Web sites that stream music have been fighting with the recording industry for two years over the royalties that the sites must pay for each song they play. The record companies and internet radio stations had until this past Sunday to reach an agreement. FM/AM radio stations that simultaneously stream their broadcast over the internet came to an agreement, but standalone services like Pandora and Yahoo Music were left twiddling their thumbs without a deal. According to several people close to the negotiations, the two sides were close to striking a deal, but at the end of the day were unable to agree on some fine points.
• According to the NYT, “a copy of the proposed term sheet, big Web sites with significant advertising revenue would have paid the greater of 25 percent of their revenue or a per-song fee of 0.088 cents, increasing to 0.14 cents in 2015. Small Web sites with less than $1.25 million in revenue would have paid the greater of 7 percent of expenses or 10 percent of their first $250,000 in revenue and 12 percent of additional revenue up to $1.25 million. If a small Webcaster grows and brings in more than $1.25 million in revenue, the rates for big Webcasters would start to apply. That has rankled some small sites, which say it discourages them from growing”.
• No one knows what will happen next, but one of the options on the table is to take the case to Congress to ask for an extension on the current deal. If both sides can’t reach a deal, it would give MySpcae Music a significant jump in market share for internet radio. MM is in a unique situation since they launched as a joint venture with all 4 major labels on board, where advertisers are paying per stream. As long as their advertisers stick around, they are laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of the Webcasters struggle for air. Let’s hope for the best for Pandora, the greatest radio station ever.

Cool fact: Pandora’s music genome members still listen to every album before it is processed into the recommendation system. There are still no auto-algorithms trying to tell you what you like. Let’s save this company.

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• In a recessed economy where millions are out of work and executive compensation is under harsh scrutiny, the last thing you want to get yourself into is an options scandal. Well, the SEC dropped the ball on Ontario, Canada-based Research In Motion (RIMM) today, whose executives have been illegally backdating stock options since 1998. They will face immediate punishment. Here is what the filing says:

Chief Financial Officer Dennis Kavelman, former Vice President of Finance Angelo Loberto, and Co-Chief Executive Officers James Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis illegally granted undisclosed, in-the-money options to RIM executives and employees by backdating millions of stock options over an eight-year period from 1998 through 2006. As alleged in our complaint, RIM and its highest level executives engaged in widespread backdating of options which provided them and other employees with millions of dollars in undisclosed compensation. Companies and executives who attempt to conceal their fraudulent conduct from investors and regulators will be held accountable (Linda Chatman Thomsen, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement).

• In summary, the SEC alleges that the defendants made false and misleading disclosures about how RIM priced and accounted for options. In addition, according to the complaint, the backdating violated the terms of RIM’s stock option plan and a listing requirement of the Toronto Stock Exchange. The complaint also alleges that Kavelman and Loberto knowingly hid the backdating from regulators, RIM’s independent auditor and outside lawyer. Kavelman and Lobertowould pick low strike prices within reporting periods and in some instances avoided the lowest price so regulators would not detect the backdating. The allegations also detail that all four executives were aware of backdating issues and lied to shareholders at RIM’s July 2006 annual shareholder meeting
• Here is a breakdown of what each executive will have to pay in penalty. $500,000 for Kavelman; $425,000 for Loberto; $350,000 for Balsillie; and $150,000 for Lazaridis. The individual defendants also agreed to disgorge the in-the-money value of backdated options they had exercised ($132,914.60 for Kavelman, $47,950.56 for Loberto, $334,250 for Balsillie and $328,300 for Lazaridis) plus interest. Their disgorgement will be deemed satisfied by their previous payment of these amounts to RIM.

Other must read RIM articles:

Screenshots And Analysis Of Blackberry’s Storefront

Blackberry Curve 8900 Coming Early For Business Customers

Blackberry Bold To Lose Orange Contract

• Nevada gambling regulators have warned casinos in the state about a card-counting app found on jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches. The app is llegally helping players beat the house in blackjack. Card counting itself is not illegal under Nevada gambling laws, but it is considered a felony to use devices to help count cards.
• Nevada learned of the program from gambling regulators in California, where officials at an Indian casino found customers using it and tipped state authorities.
• I wonder if Kevin Spacey wrote that app?

• Palm CEO Ed Colligan today made an official statemet to squash the rumors of a lawsuit being brough on by Apple over IP infringement. To make it clear, there is no peding legal actions being brought on from Cupertino. Here is what he said: 

 The reason you do that is to have a defensive position.  It’s like two little porcupines going around, and you don’t want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything’s OK and you keep working together.  We’re very respectful about people’s intellectual property, we believe we’re huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it.  If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that.  But nothing’s happened to date, so we’re really just focused on getting the product out the doorPalm has 15 years worth of patents (over 1500 of them in total) and that in patent fights often go like this:

 

Trying to stay up on Palm? Check out these articles:

Update: Why Apple Will Not Pursue A Palm Lawsuit

Uh Oh. Sprint Dealys The New Palm Pro

Palm Pre Release Date Leaked

BestBuy Scores Exclusive Palm Pre Release

• The above video is from Luke Hutchinson, a mobile developer, who helped debunk the rumor today (via comments) on VentureBeat that Google took out the multi-touch capabilities on the G1 Android phone because Apple put pressure on them. Why is this important? Because whether or not this is true plays a huge part in whether or not the rumors of Apple suing Palm over their new multi-touch Pre is legitimate or not. Last week I broke down why the lawsuit would not happen between the two companies. This analysis by Luke gives us a little more insight into what actually happened with Apple and Google over multi-touch.

I’m the guy that implemented the multitouch solution shown in the video above. Forget the conspiracy theory. There isn’t a trace of implemented-then-removed multitouch code in the Android codebase, I have been through pretty much all of it that has anything to do with event processing, from the low-level kernel driver to the singleton class that receives events across the JNI bridge to the event processing pipeline. The kernel driver always supported multitouch because it is based off of generic synaptics code that already supported multitouch.

My conclusions after going through the code and scouring the web for reasons why it wasn’t implemented in 1.0, as well as conversations with Google employees and all sorts of interactions with the community since the multitouch release are the following:

(1) The G1 was simply never intended to be a multi-touch device. HTC didn’t spec it that way (their top leadership came out and said “it was designed to be a single-touch device”), Google didn’t ask for them to design an MT-capable device, it wasn’t on Google’s list of things to do for 1.0.

(2) Apple’s multitouch patent may not even cover the pinch gesture. So far they have not even approached me with a C&D, and I don’t expect they will. (And anyway, I never made a cent off of this, and I am doing no more development on multitouch now that the capability is out there in firmware images that you can flash on your own phone.)

(3) Google *is* interested in multitouch capabilities, it’s just nowhere near the top of their priority list. Anyone in the community could step forward today with a well-designed extension to the MotionEvent class that properly supports MT, and the Google guys and gals would vet it just like any other community submission, and it would stand as good a chance of making it into the codebase as anything else. (HOWEVER the Google Android engineers have been rushed off their feet for about the last two years straight, including lots of late nights and weekends, and the pace sped up if anything after 1.0, so they are so busy with their own internal priorities that the Android *platform* is only a community project in name at the moment, because the ones that can actually commit to the repository at the moment are mostly/all(?) Google engineers, and they’re just plain flat-out busy… time will tell if that changes, or if their community module ownership handout system works.)

(4) Google will deal with legal issues if and when they come up, but that hardly stops them doing something they think should be done. Take a look at Book Search and YouTube (I know, I used to work at Google on Book Search…)

(5) Apparently the driver for a resistive MT-capable/iPhone-like touchscreen was checked into the git kernel tree after the 1.0 release, so we now have (at least?) two MT-capable drivers in the tree. This is barely surprising given the huge number of Android devices of every form factor currently in the pipeline. You can bet somebody wants to market the devices even if it means licensing from / fighting with Apple.

(6) I could go on, but basically put away your tinfoil hats, people.

(7) One more thing: if you really want to know what happened with Android 1.0, read through the Android platform source. All of it. Or as much as you possibly can in the next year or so. You will quickly come to realize that the pulling-together of Android in the short period of time over which it was accomplished constitutes one of the greatest software engineering accomplishments of our time. The code is, for the most part, polished, clean, well-written, low on bugs and seamlessly integrated. I don’t know how on earth they managed to (a) write (/acquire ) that amount of code in such a short time, (b) so seamlessly integrate the efforts of what must have been a very large number of programmers, and (c) somehow also build a complete working lightweight linux distribution, an Eclipse IDE and debugger, an entirely new VM, and (working with HTC) an actual physical device that stands to be one of the best physical 1.0 releases of a complex device of all time.

Once you catch the vision of that, you will understand why MT conspiracies are ridiculous — why would MT or other bling even be an issue when you’re trying to accomplish so many far more difficult engineering tasks and meet a shipping deadline?

Trying to stay up on your mobile game? Check out these articles.

Update: Why Apple Will Not Pursue A Palm Lawsuit

Is The iPhone 2 Just A Low-End iPhone?

Amazon Can’t Sell The Storm, Lowers Price To $99

Trouble On The Motorola Homefront

• You’ve probably heard Apple may be suing Palm over the new Pre phone, but will they? Tim Cook started the conversation out the other day with “We like competition. As long as they don’t rip off our IP and if they do we’re going to go after anybody that does,” he said. If it there is one company that Cook was pointing a finger at, it is definitely Palm. Although it has yet to hit the hands of consumers, Apple is supposedly concerned about the multi-touch screen on the Palm Pre that can be controlled using a two-fingered pinch, just like the iPhone. Apple has applied for a patent to cover that multi-touch gesture technology in mobile devices, but it has yet to be granted. One thing for sure that was sure to set off Apple was that the engineer on the Palm Pre is an ex-Apple product engineer.
• Nonetheless, Apple will not win any case against Palm nor will they pursue it but damn does it look similar). Patent pending multi-touch gestures for different surfaces are a dime a dozen. To name a couple, there is HTC (and 5 other OEM’s) who is working with Android on their soon to release multi-touch phone. On wall surfaces and tabletops, Perceptive Pixel has patents pending for their signature gestures. Each surface uses the similar pinch move in some way or another to re-size certain areas, photos, browser windows, etc. Because it is reasonably necessary for a user to interact with the device in that manner to reach its full effectiveness (which has been proven with current and prior pending patent applications to Apple), Apple will do nothing more than flex their general counsel power to try and scare off anymore competitors trying to intrude on potential IP hijackings. It’s not like Apple hasn’t gotten a little overzealous with their treatment of others IP in the past . Cough cough, Visual Voicemail.

Update: There are bold claims coming out of VentureBeat today that they spoke with an Android developer who claimed Google did not integrate multi-touch on the G1 because Apple ‘asked them’ not to. MG Siegler, a VB writer, claimed that the G1 is capable of multi-touch gestures, but the code to enable it was taken out. This is not true. My article stands, Apple will not sue Palm over the Pre.

• It has been an up and down two years for the founders of ConnectU, who after many attempts to sue Mark Zuckerberg over stealing their code as a developer to start Facebook, finally settled. When the story finally broke that Facebook compensated the ConnectU founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the deal was supposed to stay tight lipped. It stayed quiet until this week when the firm who previously represented the brothers outed an internal document containing how profitable the settlement was. Legal firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges shows the settlement amount at $65 million in both a combination of cash and stock. (.pdf provided by law.com)

• Why disclose the amount now? Quinn published the report after they got into their own legal fued with the brothers, since the Facebook settlement was won after the brothers fired them. Tyler and Cameron found new evidence against Zuckerberg and decided to go with legal firm, Scott Mosko, a Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner. Quinn is seeking a $13 million pursuant off of a contingency fee agreement.




• As you probably know, Zuckerberg was hired to work on code for a dating Web site for Harvard students. They sued Facebook in 2004, accusing Zuckerberg of purposely delaying the project while using the information to start his own Web site. As soon as things took off, Zuck quit Harvard and moved to Palo Alto to grow the company.

• It has been an interesting couple years for Facebook, who has finally made nice with all former co-founders and contributors. Just last week Facebook added Eduardo Saverin to the company’s founder page, which seems to get a little longer each year after different lawsuits and threats. Saverin, who seemed to know more about the beginnings of Facebook than anyone, was planning to release a book unless he recieved due credit. Andrew Sorkin, the West Wing creator was on board to write the book. Too bad, that would have been a great read.

• Not news to anyone by now, Steve Jobs has left Apple on medical leave. I’m no longer an investor in Apple, but for those that are, the ethics behind his leave has become a heated debate. The questions being asked are: (1) We’re Apple shareholders being kept in the dark regarding the condition of Steve for too long? (2) And did the letter he issued last week disclose the seriousness of the issue at hand? To address the first question, yes, shareholders were kept in the dark for too long on even the ware abouts of Mr. Jobs. Until he issued the letter, the news space was buzzing  about his health and overall disappearance from public appearance (except for Yogurt) for 6 weeks. This on top of the fact that it has been since June 2008 that no one was able to receive any answers as to why he had lost so much weight. To answer the second question, no, the letter he issued did not express the seriousness of the issue, nor did it hint that he was on his way out. The letter promised that he would have no more to say about his health, implying that his condition was stable enough that it would not need to be addressed again. A hormone imbalance can be caused by a number of serious conditions, including pancreatic cancer, which Steve was originally diagnosed with in 2004. Because the letter didn’t hint at anything serious, Apple’s stock had gone up for the day because it alleviated shareholders or potential shareholders. Since what Jobs really meant is that he is too sick to run the company, after hours trading has already left Apple down 7%, and the stock is expected to drop as much as 15% tomorrow.
• What will happen now is a shareholder lawsuit from those who feel they were misled (and lost a lot of money too). The case will investigate who knew what, and for how long. They will also investigate the accuracy of the letter to the public as well as the deterioration of his health from when the letter was issued until he took medical leave. According to Clusterstock, ‘even if Jobs did not have full information about his poor condition, he may have violated his duties to shareholders. It’s not enough to simply avoid telling outright lies. Executives at public companies are held to a standard that requires them to avoid making materially misleading public statements if they lack an appropriate level of information’.
• Keep an eye out for an official statement from Apple defending themselves. Best of luck.