Slashdot Mirror

bizwriter writes "Apple has spared no effort in trying to injure its arch mobile rival through the courts, like blocking Android vendors from important markets through patent and trademark infringement suits. Now it's developing an additional angle: an attempt to patent in-application purchases from third parties, as an application filed on April 26, 2010 and made public on Thursday made clear."

bizwriter writes "Apple has spared no effort in trying to injure its arch mobile rival through the courts, like blocking Android vendors from important markets through patent and trademark infringement suits. Now it's developing an additional angle: an attempt to patent in-application purchases from third parties, as an application filed on April 26, 2010 and made public on Thursday made clear."

bizwriter writes with a news piece in bnet about the continuing battle between Samsung and Apple. From the article: "In a stunning and painful decision for Samsung, Apple got a German court to issue a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab. According to patent analyst and blogger Florian Mueller, that means Samsung cannot ... sell its tablet in the entire European Union, except for the Netherlands."

bizwriter writes with an article in bnet. From the article "An amended S-1 filing for Zynga's eventual IPO offers details of its relationship to Facebook. There's plenty of interesting stuff there in the open, but some partially redacted sections hint at why Zynga is so dependent on Facebook as a channel to get to its market — and why Facebook doesn't deploy its own games." It appears that Zynga is allowed to get away with quite a bit thanks to all of the ad revenue they bring in for Facebook. Who has the upper hand in this relationship?

bizwriter writes "Zynga finally filed its IPO paperwork today, as it wants to raise $1 billion. And while the reports of how well it did were significantly overstated, this is a company that still makes significant revenue and profit. If you thought that LinkedIn's IPO was hyped and hyper, Zynga's going to put that all to shame."

bizwriter writes "Facebook has been on a roll of late, nailing a number of patent grants that will help it retain dominance in social networking by creating barriers for competitors. Yesterday came patent number 7,970,657, 'Giving gifts and displaying assets in a social network environment'. Although it doesn't directly prevent other social networks from enabling gift giving among users, a clever legal and technical maneuver makes it far more difficult."

bizwriter writes "Google announced that it will support authorship HTML tags, a way to associate Web content with the individuals who create it. Suddenly, search engines know when one person was responsible for a body of work, no matter where content appears on the Web. If Google incorporates this into page relevance and ranking, as it is considering, the result could change the balance of power between those who create and those who publish."

bizwriter writes "Google has moved beyond investing and using solar power and has started on serious R&D work in the field. Its first patent application in solar energy technology just became public, and the company is staffing a new R&D group 'to develop electricity from renewable energy sources at a cost less than coal' at 'utility scale.'"

bizwriter writes "Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

bizwriter writes "Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

bizwriter writes "Think privacy issues are a pain when they affect consumers? Get ready for the grandfather of all corporate computing headaches. Big privacy-law changes in India and China are about to turn data-processing outsourcing into a hurdle-leaping, paperwork-generating mess."

bizwriter writes "Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. But a change in terms, noting that Dropbox will give up data to law enforcement under a legal request, showed that the company's security claims couldn't be possible. It turns out that Dropbox claims in one place that encrypted data makes it impossible for employees to see into user files, but in another says that they're only 'prohibited' from doing so."

bizwriter writes "Most online backup is about keeping the latest and greatest version of what resides on a device, whether a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Three recent patent filings suggest that Apple has a super version of backup on its mind. Someone would be able to go into an application (like iTunes or the App Store), find what material was available at a previous time, and recover any or all of what once was there without having to use a separate recovery program."

bizwriter writes "Google has been interested in the mobile payment business, with rumored service tests coming soon. Now the rumors have some more tangible back-up in the form of a patent application that not only describes a versatile payment system, but one in which Google would obtain details of purchasing that are normally unavailable." Reader Batblue points out a related article about how the temptation of 'big data' is leading businesses to draw us closer to a surveillance society.

bizwriter writes "Bad enough that spammers are creating fake Facebook accounts that acquire connections with unsuspecting people, then inundate them with crap. Now, the US military wants software and services to manage upwards of 500 fake online personas designed to interact with social media, presumably including such sites as Facebook and Twitter."

An anonymous reader writes "When Novell finally sold itself, part of the deal included the sale of 882 patents to a consortium backed by Microsoft. Thanks to a tip from Florian Mueller, it turns out that Microsoft's partners are Apple, Oracle, and EMC, which raises questions about where these companies are heading and what it means for the rest of the industry."

An anonymous reader writes "Google has picked up another patent on a technology that you might think basic to the web: the highlight all button for searches in browsers. The patent will backdate to 1999 and presents an interesting problem for such software as the Firefox browser and FeedDemon RSS reader. And, in an interesting twist, Microsoft uses a similar mechanism in Windows Explorer. But Microsoft itself said that browser technology can't be separated from the operating system. Does that mean the company owes a royalty to Google for all those copies of Windows?"

bizwriter writes "Facebook just received a patent with broad claims that would seem to cover much of what Google (GOOG) Latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others try to do in letting users share their locations with others. Patent number 7,809,805, called 'Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members,' covers people manually entering a status, sending that and their location from a wireless device, and sharing both the status and location with others. Facebook's corporate value just took a big jump — and a number of other companies might have to either challenge the patent's validity or consider licensing deals."

An anonymous reader writes "For years the US Patent and Trademark Office has published data to show how well it and the patent system were running. Under new leadership, the USPTO has begun to publish a dashboard of information, including a new look at questions like how long does it really take to get a final answer on whether you will receive a patent or not? The pat answer was, on the average, about 3 years. But with the new figures, it's obvious that the real number, when you don't play games with how you define a patent application, is six years. The backlog of patents is almost 730K. And the Commerce Department under the Obama administration wants the average down to 20 months. How does this happen? Only if everyone closes their eyes and pretends. It's time to take drastic action, like ending software patents. As it is, by the time companies get a software patent, there's little value to them because, after six years, the industry has already moved on."

An anonymous reader writes "Complaints about copyright infringement on YouTube keep Google busy. If you have any doubts, just look at the Viacom copyright suit. But the problems aren't just about uploaded videos, but sometimes the music accompanying the videos. A patent application shows that Google has worked on a system to automatically identify infringing music by comparing a digital signature of a soundtrack to signatures of existing music. Users who upload videos could opt to completely remove the video, swap the soundtrack for something approved, or to mute the video. Of course, there doesn't seem to be a provision if you're using existing music with permission."

An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago, California decided to require high-risk parolees, such as gang members and sex offenders, to wear GPS monitoring devices. The idea was to relay location information to law enforcement to ensure that the convicts stay where they're supposed to. Unfortunately, the state often misses acting on those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending."

theodp writes "After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data, Google had to reverse itself, saying, 'it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks.' OK, mistakes happen. But, as Seinfeld might ask, then what's the deal with the pending Google patent that describes capturing wireless data packets by operating a device — which 'may be placed in a vehicle' — in a 'sniffer' or 'monitor' mode and analyzing them on a server? Guess belated kudos are owed to the savvy Slashdot commenter who speculated back in January that the patent-pending technology might be useful inside a Google Street View vehicle. Google faces inquiries into its Wi-Fi packet sniffing practices by German and US authorities."

bizwriter writes "If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans afoot at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will critically wound small companies. The agency's notorious 750,000 patent application backlog has long been the subject of heavy criticism. One of the key tools the USPTO wants to use is to raise fees so high as to directly reduce 40 percent of the backlog. That would mean setting filing and maintenance rates so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations, leaving large corporations even more in control of technology than they are now."

Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.

bizwriter writes "Apple has upset the e-book pricing cart by agreeing to a so-called agency model, where the publisher sets the price and the seller takes a cut. This goes contrary to the degree of control Amazon likes, so although it apparently gave in to Macmillan back in February, it turns out that Amazon continues twisting arms. The problem publishers face is that Apple has a most-favored-nation clause, so it gets the best deal that the publishers offer. If the publishers give in to Amazon, then they also have to provide the same terms to Apple."

bizwriter writes "The latest legal bugaboo facing manufacturers is the false patent marking suit. Using what has been until recently an obscure type of legal action, individuals and enterprising law firms have targeted large manufacturers with lawsuits that can easily run million of dollars — in a case involving a drink cup manufacturer, over $10 trillion — for incorrectly including patent numbers on products. Some companies named in such suits are 3M, Cisco, Pfizer, Monster Cable, and Merck. Even expired patent numbers can be actionable." Sounds like a perfect opportunity for some enlightened appeals court to inject some sense into the debate. What do you think the chances are? Note: if ever there were a page that cries out for the Readability bookmarklet, this is it.

bizwriter writes "A patent application by Google (GOOG), filed in August 2008 and made public last week, shows that the company is trying to automate the process of splitting printed magazines and newspapers into individual articles that it could then deliver separately. Although this could allow Google to convert stacks of periodicals into electronic archives, it potentially sends the company headlong into conflict with a famous Supreme Court ruling on media law."

Hugh Pickens writes "Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a foothold in the booming social networking business, seeking to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services. USA Today reports that the search giant is upgrading Gmail to add social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook, including photo and video sharing within the Gmail application, along with a new tool for status updates. According to reports, Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter. Google's decision to exploit the heavily-used Gmail service as the basis for its latest assault on the social networking business partly reflects the failure of Google's previous stand-alone efforts to enter the social networking sector. Its Orkut networking service, though launched before Facebook, has failed to gain a mass following in most parts of the world, despite success in Brazil, and its acquisition of Twitter rival Jaiku ended in failure after it scrapped development of the service." Update: 02/09 19:32 GMT by KD : It's been announced as Google Buzz; CNET has a detailed writeup.

bizwriter writes "This may seem like a joke, but it's not. The US Patent and Trademark Office will not accept patent filings faxed in if they arrive upside down. That's right, the home of innovation of the federal government is incapable of rotating an incoming fax file, whether electronically or on paper."

bizwriter writes "When it comes to knowing where wireless users are, the carriers have had a lock on the data. But a patent application shows that Google is trying to deduce the information based on packet headers and estimated transmission rates. This would let it walk right around carriers and become another source of location data to advertisers."

bizwriter writes "A recent patent application from Google describes a way to provide 'the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creation of interactive games.' Get into the description and you find it's about building games on top of video submissions, making it sound that Google plans to extend its YouTube site into an associated gaming site."

bizwriter writes "The high tech industry has been waiting for a Supreme Court decision in the Bilski case to decide fundamental questions, like when you can patent software. But there's a new test from the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (PDF) that just became precedential, meaning that it offers new grounds on which the US Patent and Trademark Office can deny patents on machines that use mathematical algorithms."

bizwriter writes "The high tech industry has been waiting for a Supreme Court decision in the Bilski case to decide fundamental questions, like when you can patent software. But there's a new test from the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (PDF) that just became precedential, meaning that it offers new grounds on which the US Patent and Trademark Office can deny patents on machines that use mathematical algorithms."

Hugh Pickens writes "David Weir writes on Bnet that the thousands of journalists being let go from newspapers, magazines, and television networks have increasingly been showing up on AOL's payroll — over 1,500 in the last eighteen months — a number AOL expects to double or even triple over the coming year. 'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media. 'You can syndicate it, distribute it as you scale. Furthermore, we are already the largest branded content company in the US, with an audience of 75 million domestic uniques. At our size, we can leverage the cost of our publishing and content management systems along with the talent and make the whole thing do-able on an advertising model.' Weir writes that AOL's turnaround started three years ago via the acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., and its set of branded verticals, including Engadget in technology, Autoblog covering the auto industry, and Joystiq covering gaming."

Michael_Curator writes "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'" User molex333 has already written a Slashdot app and shares his initial reactions here.

Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."

Michael_Curator writes "Executives at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.-owned papers (including current Tory spokesman Andy Coulson) allowed reporters to hack into phone conversations of celebrities and then paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover it up. How did famously technologically-challenged reporters manage the feat without BT catching on? Voicemail." The New York Times says a preliminary investigation's been ordered, but the BBC's coverage indicates that a large-scale inquiry is unlikely.

Michael_Curator writes to tell us that mobile phones now have a "reality overlay" app that combines a smartphone's camera, GPS, and compass to augment a user's view of a particular location with metadata. "It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each [commercial] partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers."

Michael_Curator writes "Gary Edwards, president of the now-defunct Open Document Foundation, helps sort out the challenges Google faces displacing Microsoft on the desktop, pitting the strengths of Microsoft's proprietary stack against the developer candy that HTML 5 represents."

An anonymous reader tips a story up on Bnet.com about the growing trend for governments and others to eschew newspapers and post notices of public record on their own Web sites. It's under discussion at local, state, and national government levels, including in the SEC and the states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so far. "If classified ads were a backbone of the newspaper business, then the very center of the spine was the public notice. Mandated by laws and courts, these often long recitations of detail were to give official notification, to any who were interested, of the legal intents and actions of both government entities and companies that found themselves under some appropriate regulation. But a growing number of state and local governments want to move public notices online to their own sites as a cost-cutting measure. Beyond newspaper economics, critics are concerned that the shift would allow government officials to effectively hide their activities from scrutiny."

An anonymous reader writes "BNET looked at some patents which suggest that Microsoft might be thinking about an integrated game console/set-top box. Quoting: 'Patent 20080167128 is for watching television on a game console, while patent 20080167127 covers switching a gaming console between various media, including television, video, music, and games, and even using the console as a set-top box. Clearly Microsoft has been interested in controlling the living room, and combining media, gaming, and set-top functions in a single device would make a great deal of sense.' There are also hints of mobile gaming that support the current round of rumors about a combination Xbox-Zune. "

An anonymous reader writes "Evidence has been growing that Apple is developing a new gaming console. Now, there are some possible details about how a combined media/game console might work, based on patent applications filed by Apple in late 2007 and early 2008. Here is some of what we can look for: having your personal music integrated into a title, a 'natural' gesture multitouch interface, and a single online store that sells games, media, and video."

An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers' products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick's post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company's products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: "So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."

bizwriter writes "Many large companies have been closely monitoring the Tafas v. Doll lawsuit over whether the US Patent and Trademark Office has the power to change the patent application process in significant ways, so as to restrict the scope of patents and the chances of getting one. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has finally spoken, with a split court ruling that the USPTO does have the necessary authority. The case stems from a court challenge to four new rules the USPTO put in place in 2007. A number of tech companies including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Apple, and Intel have supported the rule changes, which would strengthen their positions and make it more difficult for small companies to create, protect, and bring to market disruptive technology. These companies didn't have it all their way, as the appeals court said that one of the four rules conflicts with existing patent law and sent the other three back to a lower court for further review. If the decision is sustained by a full review of all 12 Federal Circuit appeals judges, it could be a blow to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, which depend on being able to obtain large numbers of patents. Expect further appeals on this one, and for the only beneficiaries in the short run to be the lawyers."

An anonymous reader writes "There is evidence that Apple's multi-touch patent application may have failed to list some prior art that showed gestures in multi-touch interfaces as early as the mid 1980s. Some of these examples even appear in the bibliography of Wayne Westerman's doctoral dissertation, and he's one of the inventors on the application's list. If true, that could leave them wide open for legal attack, should they try suing someone like Palm for patent infringement. Also, Apple may be infringing some key multi-touch patents owned by the University of Delaware — and co-developed by Westerman while getting his doctorate."

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new rumor that Google is developing its own router. The company won't comment on the story, but it's been in the hardware business for a while and expanded its presence with Android. If Larry Ellison can go halvsies with HP on a server, then Eric Schmidt should certainly be able to make Cisco nervous."

An anonymous reader writes "Major Internet companies say that they inform their customers about privacy issues through specially written policies. What they don't say is that more often than not consumers would need college undergraduate educations or higher to easily wade through the verbiage. BNET looked at 20-some-odd privacy policies from Internet companies that received letters from the House about privacy practices. The easiest to read policy came from Yahoo, at a roughly 12th grade level. Most difficult? Insight Communications, which at a level of over 20 years of eduction officially puts it onto IRS Code territory."