by Jason Wilk on February 25, 2009
- 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.
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by Jason Wilk on February 4, 2009
- According to BGR, this is an internal document from Sprint outlining all their product release dates for 2009. Just as we thought, the Pre will not be getting any delays from Apple patent pressure. The phone is set to jump onto shelves March. 15th. There hasn’t been a phone coming out of Sprint with this much Hype since….never. I’m expecting big lines for the new phone. Here is the memo below:
Device Name – Projected Warehouse EOL – Replacement (if available)
* Sierra Compass 597 USB – Early February – Sierra 598 USB
* Motorola ic602 – Early February
* LG 160 – Mid-February – Samsung M220
* LG Rumor (blue) – Mid February – LG 265 Rumor II (target in-stock 2/15)
* Motorola i325IS – Mid February – Motorola i365IS
* LG Rumor (green) – Mid March – LG 265 Rumor II (target in-stock 2/15)
* Franklin Wireless U680 USB – Early April
* Palm 800W – April – Palm Treo Pro (target in-stock 2/15)
* LG Rumor (black) – Mid April – LG 265 Rumor II (target in-stock 2/15)
* Motorola i615 – Mid April
* Samsung M520 Lumina – Mid April – LG LX370 (slider)
* RIM BlackBerry Pearl (red) – May
* LG LX400 – Late May
* Palm 755P (blue) – Late May – Palm Pre (target in-stock 3/15)
* Sanyo 6750 Eclipse (pink) – June
* Palm Centro (berry) – June
* Motorola Q9C – Mid June
* Sierra 597E – July – Sierra 2-in-1 Aircard
* Palm Centro (green) – July
* Palm Centro refresh (black) – July
* Motorola VE20 – July
* HTC Touch Diamond – July
* RIM BlackBerry 7100i – August – RIM BlackBerry 8350i
Other must read Sprint/Palm articles:
For Palm And Sprint, It’s All About Pricing
Palm Goes All In With The Pre
Telecom Oligapoly Over Text Message Pricing
The Mobile Platform War Heats Up
by Jason Wilk on February 3, 2009
- Above is an image of what the Apple tablet is going to look like. It has been widely rumored that Apple would move to an entirely touch screen notebook experience, and the confirmation of their patent today confirms those claims. What’s even more interesting is that in the last few months, Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, decided to join the board of a company called Axiotron that makes the award-winning ModBook. You guessed it, the ModBook is a custom MacBook that has been entirely repurposed to become a touch screen tablet. Currently they run at an extremelly high rate of $4,998. Funny enough, the latest edition (and best yet) will be availabe in May/June, right around the same time as the next Mac keynote. Coincidence or is the next Axiotron ModBook going to be coming out of Cupertino? Many think Wozniak joined their board to oversee the operation and technology behind creating a seamless tablet computer. I’d sday it’s more than coincidence and the next keynote will be seeing the debut of the next generation of mobile computing. Here is a clip from the patent claim by Gizmodo.
[0015]As a housing for a computer device, one embodiment of the invention includes: a front shell; a back shell coupled to said front shell to produce said housing, electrical components for the computer device being internal to said housing; and a foam stiffener provided internal to said housing to substantially fill unused space internal to said housing, thereby providing stiffness to said housing.
See other TinyComb Mac Rumors:
Video Conferencing Plans For The iPhone
Flash Coming To The iPhone: Says Adobe
iPhone 2 Rumors Get Some Hard Evidence
My Top 15 iPhone Apps Of 2008
iPhone Pro Photos
Say It Ain’t So. iPhone Nano Rumors Coming True
by Jason Wilk on February 2, 2009
- Well, it’s no mystery now, there is an iPhone 2 in the wild somewhere, and two people are walking around with it. Since Apple was recently granted the patent for everything the iPhone is capable of, many are curious if video conferencing and video recording will be included in the next phone. In several areas throughout the document as seen below, there are many mentions of using video. Everything else seen in the patent is already in use on the phone.
“The device supports a variety of applications, such as one or more of the following: a telephone application, a video conferencing application, an e-mail application, an instant messaging application, a blogging application, a photo management application, a digital camera application, a digital video camera application, a Web browsing application, a digital music player application, and/or a digital video player application.”
“In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital videoing, Web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing. Instructions for performing these functions may be included in a computer-readable storage medium or other computer program product configured for execution by one or more processors.”
“In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition. In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display. In some embodiments, the position of the optical sensor can be changed by the user (e.g., by rotating the lens and the sensor in the device housing) so that a single optical sensor may be used along with the touch screen display for both video conferencing and still and/or video image acquisition.”
by Jason Wilk on December 3, 2008
- EMG Technology, a Los Angeles based company, filed a patent lawsuit against Apple last week over “the way the iPhone navigates the Internet”. The lawsuit seemed frivolous at first and now there is more information coming out to support that it may indeed just be.
- Why is the lawsuit shady? Well, EMG Technology formed very recently and it seems to be solely on the purpose of filing this lawsuit. The patent was just issued to them last month by a court in the Eastern District of Texas and the company doesn’t do anything besides own this patent.
- Another fact that smells fishy is that one of the inventors named on the patent and who is one of the founding memebrs of EMG is Elliot Gottfurcht, a LA based real estate developer. Don’t you mean web developer? Hmmm.
- This would certainly be the first real estate developer to be added to the list of potential owners to the Apple technology. Others include IBM, Sony, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
- Lastly, the patent itself does not seem like it stands a chance in court, considering it is not specific to mobile browsers. Moreover, there are many way in which to develop a way to manipulate the way content is viewed, and the patent does not include enough specifics as to how exactly Apple copied what they patented.
- The claim says that the EMG patent describes the ability to manipulate, zoom, scroll, and view Web content on devices other than a laptop. The central concept revolves around a way to convert HTML Web pages into XML data that can then be displayed partially on different devices, including mobile phones. This is not something proprietary and is a joke that it was able to make it through the patent process. Nonetheless, just because the court made a mistake issuing it and EMG got lucky, doesn’t mean they will see a dime from it.
- Take a hike Gottfurcht
Photo (TechLuver)
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